In the age of streaming, how much does an Oscar still mean?

The Oscars' place as both taste- and hit-maker has likely never been more threatened than the past few years. 

The award show's ratings have been in almost unbelievable decline in the past decade, falling by nearly half from 43 million viewers in 2014 to 23 million in 2020. Then, the very next year, they dropped again by more than half — to 10.4 million. 

And while viewership ticked up last year (at least partially due to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, one of the most unhinged moments in Oscars history) its audience of 16 million still counted as the Academy Awards' second-lowest figure ever. 

It's all part of an accelerating trend both the awards themselves and the industry they serve are scrambling to reverse.

"We're trying to find out what is it that will bring people to the ceremony and watch the ceremony," said Clayton Davis, senior awards editor for the industry magazine Variety. 

Because, Davis says, film fans appear to care less about what rarefied Oscar voters deem worth seeing, how movies can find big audiences is less clear than ever.

As movie-watching has shifted from theatres to at-home streaming, the big question has been whether films that succeed in the former are all that matter to the Oscars — and, if so, what effect that will have on the industry. 

That question became more difficult to answer during the pandemic, when theatre closures coincided with already-declining ticket sales to push the in-person film experience to the brink. According to Brandon Katz, an entertainment industry strategist at Parrot Analytics, that, paired with the explosive growth of Netflix, convinced investors and distributors alike that streaming was the sole future for movies.

Because of that, the once-immutable theatrical window — how long films were kept in theatres, away from home viewing — shrank dramatically. 

From 2016 to roughly before the pandemic, Netflix enjoyed "unfettered growth" and rivers of money from Wall Street, Katz said. 

The other distributors — traditional giants such as Paramount and Warner Bros. — wanted to be treated the same way; and quickly focused more on developing their own streaming platforms and less on pure theatrical releases, he said. 

Warner Bros dropped all its movies simultaneously in theatres and online during the early days of the pandemic, while Disney's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Free Guy dropped from the usually three-month window to 45 days, in what CEO Bob Chapek described as the pandemic's "recovery" phase — further diminishing the supremacy of theatres and the box office.

You can see that shift among this year's best picture nominees. In Canada, five of the 10 contenders are currently available on subscription-based streaming, with four others on streaming pay-per-view. 

Production designer and Oscar-winner Paul Austerberry (The Shape of Water) says growing streaming accessibility has affected which movies got nominated this year.