Tag Archives: Oscars

Dating the monoculture back to award shows in 2014?

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Peak monoculture might have been in 2014:

Photo by Jonathan Goncalves on Pexels.com

At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. DeGeneres’ Twitter account posted it immediately afterward, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time.

The selfie was an instantly viral moment in a telecast that drew the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people. The photo (for which Cooper used a phone made by Samsung, a major Oscars sponsor) became a dayslong news cycle unto itself…

It wasn’t just the Oscars that were big that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets were arguably at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in almost 21 million. The Emmy Awards in August 2014 had 15.59 million viewers on NBC — down about 12 percent from 2013 but still a very healthy audience. Five other music awards shows that year brought in at least 10 million viewers…

If awards shows are a proxy for what people — both the folks who make the things nominated for awards and the public that consumes them — are dialed in on at any given time, then our collective attention has steadily waned over time. None of the big awards telecasts has approached its 2014 audience numbers in the 12 years since. The Oscar broadcast is still usually the biggest non-sports primetime show of the year on a broadcast network, but that now means 18 million or so viewers rather than 40 million-plus. The Grammys (14.41 million viewers in 2026) and other awards shows have similarly fallen off.

As the article notes, it might be hard to isolate one point where a common collective experience in the United States dissolved. I’ve heard people date it to going beyond three major TV networks to the rise of premium cable TV shows (think The Sopranos) to the rise of the Internet in the 1990s to streaming services to the advent of 24/7 cable news. Usually this line of discussion refers to the number of media outlets people can access but it is also related to the number of narratives or stories people have.

Another way to think about it: prior to the rise of mass broadcast media in the twentieth century (radio and TV), how collective were people’s experiences within and across countries? News traveled more slowly. People heard about important events but it might be days or weeks later.

The accompanying piece to this article would be considering what we have lost if large numbers of people are no longer watching the same Oscars or going to the same movies. How much does this contribute to fragmentation, polarization, individualism? Or how has it helped contribute to freedom and creativity?

And it might be worth remembering that such fragmentation might not necessarily last. The trend toward personally curated experiences might continue – but it could also go back the other direction. The streaming services could all collapse back into each other. The audio streaming platforms could consolidate. The Internet and social media might retract in scope. The multiculture or pluriculture might be an artifact of the early 21st century.

More movies have Oscar appeal than can be nominated so many don’t get the Oscar money boost

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A forthcoming study in a premier sociology journal looks at the formula for Oscar nominees and how it affects the money they make:

So is it a good idea for movie makers to pursue Oscar nominations? Rossman and Schilke’s research suggests that it probably is not. Rossman and Schilke use data from the Internet Movie Database to identify the themes of a very large set of movies. They then look to see how well each movie’s themes match the themes of Oscar nominees in the five years before the movie was released, to figure out how well the movie matches the “Oscar formula,” while also accounting for other factors (e.g. the studio that released the movie) which could affect the movie’s Oscar chances. This allows them to figure out the ‘Oscar appeal’ of each movie in their dataset. On Rossman and Schilke’s measure, movies like The Hottie and the Nottie have very low Oscar appeal, while movies like Out of Africa have high appeal.

The problem is that there are lots of movies with Oscar appeal, but far fewer movies that get nominated. Because the Oscar nominee list imposes a sharp cutoff (movies either get nominated or they don’t), movies that just failed to make the Oscar nomination cut are likely to do far worse than movies that just about got on the list, even if the two are of more or less equal quality. The financial losses of the failures counterbalance the success of the nominees.

As Rossman and Schilke conclude:

..net of achieving Oscar nominations, Oscar appeal has a negative effect on financial returns. In essence, there are two types of high Oscar appeal movies—those that do not receive nominations (and tend to lose money) and those that do receive nominations (and tend to make money)—but taken together these two types of movies are no more nor less profitable than movies with low Oscar appeal.

This seems to fit other evidence that it is very difficult to predict which mass culture products will be successful – whether movies, music, or books – and the more successful ones can make enough to offset the losses from producing all the rest.

Quick Review: The King’s Speech

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The upcoming Oscars seem to be a battle between two films: The Social Network (see my earlier review here and sagescape’s here) and The King’s Speech. I just had a chance to see the second film and have some thoughts about this Best Picture contender.

1. Since this is a historical drama, I expected this film to be somewhat bland and formulaic. It was neither.

2. There is a little bit of a storyline about the gap between British royalty and the common people. In the film, this gap is between King George VI and his speech therapist, an untrained but effective practitioner. The question arises: how can someone rule a country (and empire) if either side has little idea of how the other lives? We could probably ask similar questions today about many of the people at the top of our social hierarchy.

3. The film had more humor, albeit fairly dry, than I was expecting. I don’t know that I would think of Colin Firth as a comic actor but he has some good lines spoken by a struggling character.

4. The context of the film is engaging as Europe inches toward World War II. Even if the timeline in the movie doesn’t quite match the historical record, the struggles of King George VI are heightened by the gathering storm.

5. The peak of the film is a speech by King George VI. Even though it is an important speech delivered at a key historical moment, I appreciated that the musical score and the editing was understated and intimate. Too often, I think films use music and editing as a crutch to cover up less-than-exciting climaxes. Good plots don’t need to be oversold.

6. I thought The Social Network was interesting but not great. In comparison, The King’s Speech is weightier, has better acting, and doesn’t have to rely on edgy dialogue or a current storyline. My vote for the Best Picture (between these two and the other nominees I’ve seen including True Grit, Toy Story 3, and Inception): The King’s Speech.

(Critics also like this film: RottenTomatoes.com says the film is 94% fresh with 188 positive reviews out of 199 total reviews.)