Oscars so dead: Here’s how the Academy could revive critical awards shows

The Academy is sweating bullets. The 2021 Oscars will air Sunday after a string of ratings failures from other award shows. The Golden Globes in February were watched by a dismal 6.9 million people, down from 18.4 million in 2020. Last month’s Grammys were dealt a similar blow: 7.89 million viewers — less than half of what they were last year. 

The Oscars, too, will inevitably fall short of its 23.6 million audience in 2020, which already represented a steep drop in viewership. When the ratings are released Monday morning, it will be a disaster. An existential crisis for the movies. Adieu, Oscar. Don’t light the funeral pyres just yet! Some of the fallout is simply due to pandemic screen fatigue, and even film buffs don’t seem to care much about this year’s crop of nominated films — otherwise streaming services would certainly be boasting about their numbers. Still, you can’t help but feel like we’ve reached the end of an era, when all of America would sit down on Sunday night and watch a sunglasses-clad Jack Nicholson laugh from the Dolby Theatre’s front row.