Why you hate the Oscars and the Emmys
Because they're boring and low-class
I was surprised to learn that the Emmys were on last night. Actually I bet a lot of people were surprised. Nobody watches the Emmys anymore. It is rather hard to fathom but there was a time when awards shows like this pulled down rather huge numbers; the Emmys in the 90s may have averaged around 20 million viewers per year for a solid stretch of years, while the Academy Awards used to record well above 40 million viewers per year around the same time, with some years cracking the 50 million barrier. Last year the Emmys just about broke seven million viewers; this year’s paltry 16 million Oscar viewers were actually an increase from last year, which is just pathetic on a number of levels.
A great deal of conservative commentary on this sad phenomenon focuses on how woke ideology has ruined the award show genre for many viewers (even non-conservative ones). I think this is probably true to some extent but that it doesn’t describe the whole phenomenon.
It is true that most normal people do not want to watch a joyless, clench-jawed three-hour dirge of intersectional feminist womansplaining during an award show, but I think there are a few other factors at play here, namely:
Movies and TV years ago were in general much better, more carefully made and/or more culturally unifying. This is just common knowledge. I understand that people bristle over these sorts of claims, and they’ll say things like, “Every generation always says movies (or music, or TV) were better when they were growing up. Your parents said the same thing about the pop culture you now claim was better.” This is true but it’s also beside the point. The relevant question is: Is pop culture, broadly construed, better or worse today than, say, 30 years ago?
It seems pretty obvious that the answer is “worse,” that we’re in a state of weird pop cultural decline, and that many people are recognizing that. Take movies, for instance. Our current pop culture moment is one of near-permanent backwards-looking dreck. Nine of the top 10 movies of 2021 by domestic box office take were either shitty cookie-cutter superhero movies, or reboots, or sequels of some kind. That list is largely representative of the state of modern cinema: It’s just an absolute trash lineup of lame over-utilized CGI, recycled plot points, cheap gimcrack nostalgia, bad acting, and an endless recycling of worn-out, blown-out franchises. Then consider the movies that swept the Oscars during its most-watched year in 1998: Titanic, Good Will Hunting, Men in Black, As Good as It Gets, L.A. Confidential; runners-up included Face/Off, Air Force One, Amistad. It’s not like any of these movies was necessarily the greatest ever made, but they were all really good, and taken together it was just a powerhouse lineup of films (and talent) checking off every movie box on the list: Drama, romance, comedy, noir, action, history, tragedy. Of course people are going to tune in to see the rundown of the latter. Who cares about the former? Not 50 million people, that’s for sure.
Of course, in some ways TV has the opposite problem: the era of “prestige television” has brought about a revolution in carefully made high-quality shows, miniserieses, anthologies, limited specials, etc. The problem is not that these things are bad per se; it’s that, for all their relative popularity, they are pretty much specialist products for limited audiences. In the heyday of the Emmys you could expect to see shows that were, again, both really good and/or broadly appealing on a mass cultural level: Broadcast network sitcoms, police procedural dramas, medical dramas, sketch comedies. The big winners at this year’s Emmys, on the other hand, included “Ted Lasso,” “The White Lotus,” “Succession,” “Euphoria.” Many of us have never heard of any of these, and most of us don’t care about any of it. Hell, I’d never even heard of Lizzo’s fat girl dancing show, and I run a conservative Substack where I’m contractually obligated to write about that kind of dreck. The point being, people don’t tune in to watch award ceremonies for TV shows they’ve never seen and/or don’t care about. Duh.Celebrities years ago were more mysterious, alluring, and interesting. Now they’re not. Part of the reason you watched awards shows back in the day was to see all of your favorite actors and actresses gathered in to one room. It all seemed rarefied, fascinating, exciting. They were a separate class of human, elevated, talented, rarely seen and always mesmerizing.
Now we are suffused with celebrities all the time, everywhere. Social media and celebrity news outlets have democratized celebrity to the point that we can see they are just as dumb as us; they have the same stupid opinions as we do, they make the same idiotic mistakes, their lives have the same contours as ours in many ways. We now know of their tawdry, sordid affairs before their jilted lovers do. Most of them have appeared in a trash, garbage comic book movie or a stupid Star Wars streaming series at some time or another. The movie star aesthetic of the past, one that endured from sometime during the Golden Age of Cinema to around 2000 or so—a mien of dark rooms and bright stars, of glittering exclusivity and graceful popular eminence—is gone, maybe forever. Nobody wants to watch these people anymore.Celebrities were classier back in the day. This is closely related to the lattermost factor. In addition to being more captivating and seductive, movie stars years ago just had more class about them; they carried themselves better, they dressed better both on and off the stage, they comported themselves better in most cases. People love class at every level; they like it when people are graceful, careful, well-dressed and well-made-up. True classiness sets people at ease, and people enjoy being set at ease. Classiness is not at all limited to any income level—poor people can be and often are as classy as rich people if not more so—but people like the trappings of rich classiness in a particular way.
All of that has kind of disappated. Ellen’s legendary “Oscar selfie” in 2013 broke the Internet or whatever, but it was also remarkably pedestrian and depressing. So was the Jennifer Lawrence “trip” that year; it was so obviously contrived to sort of play up her gawky-gal outsider image, and there’s nothing more classless than faking something like that for attention. In 2016 Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway actually mis-identified the Best Picture winner and had to retract the original win a couple of minutes later—a nadir of classlessness which crashed so hard that it reportedly registered on the Richter scale. At this year’s Oscars, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock across the face, on stage, on live television, over a joke; that kind of trashiness is usually reserved for Saturday night speakeasies in Ventura County, not the stage at the Oscars. (The Emmys are no better, mind you. From Helen Mirren referencing her “ass and tits” to the Academy’s awarding Andrew Cuomo an Emmy for his coronavirus crap to Katherine Heigl openly swearing on-air, there’s been a dearth of class over there for years.)
It’s not just at awards ceremonies, mind you. Here’s one of the great vanguards of celebrity classlessness, Brie Larson, last week:
How long will Brie Larson play Captain Marvel? "I don't know. Does anyone want me to do it again?" bit.ly/3RF6LG7True classiness. A woman of supreme elegance and elevation. She’s practically Grace Kelly. Someone find a prince to marry this woman and give her a regency pronto!
Maybe this whole depressing trend will be reversed and people will actually start to like awards ceremonies again. Of course, Hollywood would once more have to start making relevant, interesting, meaningful, high-quality movies, and our celebrity class would have to move toward something resembling respectability once more. I’m kind of hedging my bets that this isn’t likely to happen for a while. If anyone wants to start placing tickets on who’ll get slapped at next year’s Oscars, hit me up.
