Column | Damage control at the Oscars?

In January, the producers of the forthcoming Oscars award ceremony (on March 15) dropped a bombshell. They announced that this year, only two of the nominated songs in the Best Original Song category will be performed live — the global hit ‘Golden’ from KPop Demon Hunters and ‘I Lied to You’ from that incredible interval-block scene in Sinners.

The logic given was that of all the nominated songs, these two played the most significant roles in their respective films. The producers needed to save time too, “to create a fast-paced, entertaining and cohesive show.”

Soon, these conversations about time-saving will be rendered moot because starting 2029, the Oscars ceremony will no longer be televised, but live-streamed on YouTube.

Reputation on the line

Hollywood has suffered a lot of bad PR in the 2020s, and on several disparate fronts, too. The nosediving quality of the average big-budget release, the reputational hit due to the 2023 writer’s strike, the shocking 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after being shot with an on-set gun by actor-producer Alec Baldwin.

On the awards front, too, things didn’t look too good, what with the Oscars giving Best Picture to an outmoded, tone-deaf, visibly terrible film like The Green Book in 2019, and the Golden Globes getting embroiled in two separate racism scandals (discrimination against Asian-Americans and African-Americans).

The Golden Globes went on hiatus in 2022 and returned with an all-new voting body, with diversity requirements built in. The Oscars had already stipulated, back in 2024, that every eligible film in each category must meet the Academy’s “representation and inclusion standards”. Basically, the film must meet two of four stated standards pertaining to representation, creative leadership, industry access, and audience development.

Most of the changes in the awards ceremonies for the Oscars and the Golden Globes, therefore, can be read in this light, i.e. damage control. But one could argue that the Oscars were invented for damage control — back in the 1920s, it was MGM founder Louis B. Mayer who formed the Academy to retain big-studio control over Hollywood talent. It was always intended to be a kind of “controlled union” that thwarts actual unionisation efforts.

What’s in store

First, expect no major surprises when it comes to the major awards categories this season. The Oscars (like the Golden Globes) are trying to rehabilitate their image and be seen as a reliable marker of quality again. Hot favourite and universally acclaimed Sinners has been nominated for 16 awards and is likely to scoop up Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Timothée Chalamet is likely to win Best Actor for his performance in Marty Supreme, while Jessie Buckley is a lock for Best Actress for Hamnet.

Second, the Academy has stipulated that in order to vote in a category, members have to prove that they watched every film in that category on the Academy’s viewing portal. In some quarters this has been dubbed the “Brutalist Rule” after The New York Times reported last year that several Academy voters had not seen The Brutalist before voting on it, citing its 215-minute runtime.

Now, far be it from me to criticise an organisation explicitly invented to union-bust, but shouldn’t this have been a requirement much, much earlier? Why did it take a bunch of newspaper Op-Eds to ensure that the Academy’s sage voters actually watched the films they were supposed to assess?

According to last year’s Forbes article, Oscars viewership figures have been steadily declining in the 21^st century. In the early 2000s, the total viewership “hovered in the 40 million viewer range” with the 1998 peak viewership being 57.5 million (this was the Titanic year). In 2020, however, this number was a mere 23.6 million and 19.69 million in 2025. So, the Academy can put their best foot forward, to ensure all the popular, crowd-pleasing nominees win, and it still may not affect the bottom line much.

Robert Aramayo’s recent BAFTA win over the likes of Timothée Chalamet and Leonardo DiCaprio will certainly affect the Oscars prediction market. It remains to be seen whether the Academy follows suit and throws us a curve ball or two, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.