When Do The Streaming-Friendly Oscars Become A Streamed Event?

Well, that was some kind of Oscar ceremony, with a billion takes on the Slap Heard ‘Round The Internet, progress on a more inclusive event, and, look at this… much higher ratings. In fact, Nielsen said viewership of this year’s Oscarcast on ABC was up 56% compared to last year’s all-time low.

More substantively, Sunday night’s telecast was the first Streaming Oscars, where Apple TV Plus movie CODA won Best Picture, and projects from Hulu, Disney Plus, Netflix, and HBO Max also won notable Oscars, including director, documentary feature, animated feature, screenplay, cinematography, and visual effects.

The plethora of prizes suggests the formerly fusty Motion Picture Academy has generally moved past its streaming antipathy, if not specifically against Netflix itself, whose 10 nominated movies ended up with only one win. But overall, it’s worth noting that even Netflix critic Steven Spielberg probably had far more people watch his brilliant West Side Story remake on Disney Plus than in theaters, where it stiffed with just $75 million in worldwide grosses.

So, streaming services and their streaming-mostly or streaming-only projects likely will continue to be a huge part of the Oscars going forward. Now comes the bigger question: when does the Oscar telecast itself become a streaming-mostly event?

Pondering the streaming future of the Oscars telecast is just one instance of a much bigger conversation about how soon Old Reliable parts of the broadcast/basic-cable bundle move mostly online. As those stalwarts decamp to digital, cord-cutting likely will accelerate into free fall in coming years.

Already, we’re seeing foundational parts of the broadcast program guide shifting online. Amazon Prime Video already ponied up billions of dollars for Thursday Night Football from the NFL, and is reportedly in the lead to scoop up the league’s Sunday Ticket package. Apple TV Plus begins Friday Night Baseball next week.

Local news is now all over the Internet, too, through aggregators such as Newsy and STIRR. And for national and international news, CNN Plus launched this week, a big step away from the cable bundle by one of its most iconic brands.

Awards shows have been another reliable ratings driver since the Oscar ceremony first debuted on NBC way back in 1953, almost a quarter century after they started. In fact, some awards shows in subsequent decades seemed created more as ad-dollar extraction devices than legitimate opportunities to recognize good creative work.

But how much longer can even the Oscars stay on broadcast outlets? Yes, ratings were up huge compared to last year’s strangled, pandemic-cursed and glamour-free event, when a tiny fraction of Academy membership was allowed to attend an outdoor event held at a train station.

Even with a 56% improvement over last year, however, 2022 was still the second-worst ratings in Oscar’s history, and by a lot. In fact, 2020’s ceremony, held weeks before the pandemic shut everything down, was the previous worst-ever year for ratings, and it still attracted nearly a third more viewers — 23.6 million — than this year.

Yes, Disney used Sunday night’s platform to promote virtually everything it does that’s related to video. And yes, the show still featured plenty of ads from luxury brands such as Rolex. That’s great news for the bottom lines of both ABC and the Academy, which funds operations and programs in film preservation and education from show profits.

Finally, yes, there were halting steps toward a more online-oriented show this year.

Hulu streamed the red carpet proceedings for an hour and a half, before sending viewers to watch the ceremony itself on its local broadcast outlet. The much-loved, yet consistently criticized, In Memoriam segment had several welcome improvements this year, not least an on-air link to still more memorials to industry notables who’d died in the past year.

This year already featured new Twitter polls for Fan Favorite movies and Cheer Worthy Moments. No suprise, though, that a batch of hard-core fans hijacked the online polls, making Netflix’s Army of the Dead the top movie, and a scene featuring The Flash in a Zack Snyder Justice League movie the most “cheer-worthy” moment.

But how about we take the Online Oscars further still, starting with more polls (and perhaps a little more election integrity in the voting) to give viewers more of a sense of involvement?

Really want to get viewers engaged? How about online gambling? Add prop bets in each category over who’ll win, which streaming service or studio will claim the most statues, even the length of acceptance speeches (remember, no playing off speakers when you don’t have to worry about show length).

Going online would give fans the chance to remix the show for their own purposes. Don’t care for all the music stuff? Zap it. Or go the other direction, and add still more music material, including behind-the-scenes interviews featuring each song’s artists, scenes and writers.

Sunday’s telecast already added a second song from Feature Animation winner Encanto that wasn’t one of the five Best Song nominees, because We Don’t Talk About Bruno had become a far bigger hit on TikTok. The telecast added Megan Thee Stallion to Bruno’s performance, but fans likely would have enjoyed both more and longer performances of that and other musical contenders (especially James Bond’s winning No Time To Die theme by Billie Eilish and brother/co-writer/producer Finneas).

Speaking of behind the scenes, what about more video from backstage during the production, and in the press room, where winners talk about winning and, sometimes, get asked ridiculous non-questions from swooning foreign quasi-journalists.

Or maybe you’d like to explore the 60th anniversary of the James Bond franchise (especially now that Amazon has swallowed up MGM and United Artists) or 50 years of The Godfather trilogy. Both received cursory moments in the spotlight during the telecast, but it would have been lovely to hear more from Francis Ford Coppola, for instance, about the crucial role legendary Paramount Studios chairman Robert Evans played in getting the first Godfather made. No doubt, Paramount Plus, with its upcoming series about just that, The Offer, would happily have sponsored it all.

Want to dive into the sci-tech awards, to understand exactly what all those achievements actually do? Or maybe, here’s a thought, you wanted to see live all of the pre-taped presentations to winners of lifetime achievement awards, or the eight categories that were given out an hour before the live telecast?

You could be there. In fact, the Academy would no longer need to worry about trimming time for a broadcast-length show (which still ran over by 36 minutes). And with show length no longer an issue, the Academy could even add more categories, like for stunt performers, which many in the Academy have long sought.

Whenever the Academy finally fully embraces its streaming future, it will have lots of intriguing options for a far more interesting and ambitious show. Sunday night’s broadcast did, in many ways, demonstrate the electric possibilities of a live event, and that wasn’t just because of Will Smith’s disorienting on-stage assault of Chris Rock.

Emotional and thoughtful acceptance speeches by Season of Soul director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Jessica Chastain, Troy Kotsur, and Smith himself all showed why live can be powerful. The question will be how to preserve that as even awards shows finally make the leap into the future.