I watched the Oscars on my computer this week, specifically on a torrented mp4 file playing at 2x speed occupying one of six monitors at 10 percent volume. The other five monitors of my panopticon contained a thoughtfully arranged collage of browser games, a Family Guy collage, a Call of Duty Twitch stream, a Discord tab, a TikTok Feed, and an active game of Counterstrike 2 which is what I was mainly focused on. This is where the Oscars have landed, as just one small element of a grand personal entertainment plex where their meaning and matter are subjugated to a fraction of my available attention.
My in-game teammates asked me why I would conceivably watch such a thing when I explained what I was doing, specifically responding “Ew, why would you ever watch that?” At least three generations now share the same lack of interest in the spectacle of the Academy Awards.
The Academy Awards are a pale ghost of their original form, an epitaph to the cinema industry upheld exclusively by the nostalgic programmed habit of older generations who remembered a time when they were supposed to care.
Awards ceremonies like the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Grammys, and the Emmys occupy a crumbling pillar of institutional media. Their little golden statues are footsoldiers under the banner of centralization, a coalescence of unified attention. The dates of their broadcasts once occupied the status of a pseudoholiday, akin to the Superbowl or Election Day, an evening which precedes common discussion at the office water cooler for the following day.
The expanded autonomy generated from consuming content on demand has destroyed any pretense for unified culture. Unbound from the monoliths of distribution, the layman has gained ease of entry to a level of entertainment and information never before made available to even the unencumbered aristocracy which once historically held possession over the luxury of media access.
The omnivorous gluttony of simultaneous media consumption is, in part, an act of logistic necessity. The onslaught of accessible choice creates an imposition on time, forcing the consumer to condense, consolidate, and curate the content they choose to comprehend. This, in turn, violates the sacred structure of legacy entertainment media which has roughly maintained a benchmark of form and time instilled by industry standards, audience familiarity, and sheer habit.
With each iteration of format progression, the instilled structure of media experiences further Balkanization. Albums, once experienced coherently through the intractable nature of vinyl records, suddenly found their best songs plucked like fruits and thrown onto mixtapes and CDs, eventually transformed into wandering pilgrims roaming the algorithms to possibly be turned into playlists. The film, once an intimate tryst with the silver screen, suddenly became an escort to be rented for an evening amidst the red light district of VHS stores.
Today, the movie has weathered worse indiscretions. An artform initially built around the premise of projecting frames onto a 25 foot screen has now been contorted into portions of the handheld phone, mere stamp sized windows to be dragged around like chirping background pets as an accoutrement to virtual desk clutter of chat messages, app games, and scroll feeds. Auteur directors, both the legitimate and the pretentiously self-fashioned, have decried this state of affairs as a death blow to the art of cinema, yet this complete disposability is rather a return to a default than a true degradation. The place cinema has occupied as high-art is a far cry from its less illustrious beginnings.
Orson Welles illuminates this once-common attitude during a recorded interview with a colleague captured in My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles: "In my real moviegoing days, which were the thirties, you didn’t stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. Like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began. We used to go after we went to the theater … we’d leave when we’d realize, ‘This is where we came in.’ Everybody said that. I loved movies for that reason. They didn’t cost that much, so if you didn’t like one, it was, ‘Let’s do something else. Go to another movie.’"
The statement reveals an older attitude towards film, a sentiment of a medium recently evolved from coin fed nickelodeons and newsreel montages. Cinema’s premise as a lucid recreation of the theater play was thrust into standard by the collective will of ambitious filmmakers, actors, and producers all pursuing an evolving spectacle, an endeavor mimicking the economic growth of the movie industry’s birth nation. The medium clawed its way into a form of dignified status from its origins as a primitive novelty, a crystallization of the pauper’s puppet show onto an archive of posterity rather than a moment of liminality.
Auteurs would help further this evolution process, reinforcing the sanctity of a complete viewing experience and instilling a code of conduct enforced by the collaboration of theaters. Cardboard cutouts of Alfred Hitchcock would be erected inside movie theaters to ensure timely promptness in order not to spoil Psycho’s iconic twist.
Big budget productions such as Lawrence of Arabia or Gone With The Wind would atypically enforce designated entry timeslots for tickets and advanced seating arrangements, making a change to movie-goers' consumption habits. Perhaps the most iconic of such premieres would be Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a specialized 70mm viewing experience relegated to the Cinerama Dome curved screen theaters on a roadshow prestige release akin to a Broadway play, an experience to dress up for and treat as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
By the mid-1970s, this attitude would relax once again with a resurgence of grindhouse double-features, drive-in theaters, and low budget shock schlock to pair cultural degeneration with the proliferation of consumer grade television sets in every household. Violence, sex, and provocation in media heralded the sexual liberation movement and racial discourse of the era, reflected respectively by the attempted normalization of casual pornography and the production of blaxploitation films.
Throughout the ebb and flow of cinema’s cultural status across the past century, filmmakers and actors would uphold these debut experiences as the highest platform of status for their artform. Anyone who works in any aspect of filmmaking tends to have at least some fondness for the “ideal viewing experience.”
Such lofty ideals are made apparent through the spectacle of awards ceremonies. Bright eyed movie stars dress up for red carpet photos, once a grand promise of transforming mortal into god delivered to Gilded Age celebrities now churned into a conveyor belt of accommodation for an ever growing retinue of increasingly discarded industry plants.
Directors, composers, and cinematographers likewise aspire to reach the same levels of grandeur and status, a yearning to stand upon the same stage as those auteurs who inspired them to pursue their careers and give speeches immortalizing themselves before the applause of highly esteemed peers.
One can see a residue of institutional glamor layered across the euphoric smug expressions of nominees and award winners. Award ceremonies have more or less always been regarded as an experience of self-gratification, an industry patting itself on the back for the gracious sacrifice of existing. The public was treated to this, expected to adore it, to be grateful to witness it, to set aside their own time to watch it. In recent years, these ceremonies have been derided for taking up too much of the viewer's time. A musical number in this year’s awards stipulated to the excessive length of the show itself.
Centralized legacy media has worn out its soft powers, having taken for granted its influence through sheer monopolization of communication channels and exclusive unique value proposition through institutional resources. As the act of creating content becomes democratized by digital software, universal access to portable cameras, and free distribution on the internet, the gearworks of Hollywood lose their potency.
In turn, the industry finds itself increasingly desperate to hold onto its status. The Oscars’ relative five-year highpoint in viewership seems like a swan song to a post-COVID plummet, failing to resurge beyond the decreasing trend of the past ten years.
Is it any surprise that people don’t care anymore? The Academy Awards and its inferior distillations all represent a facade of consensus, finally being ripped away to reveal interior machinations to even the most obtuse members of the public. The celebrity has lost the privilege of esteem, steadily returning the performer back to a status of denigration, ancient Roman actors to be spit on and looked down upon by their public constituents.
Such a downfall embodies the wider cultural castigation of the “theater kid” archetype, one which has been blamed as the disembodied culprit of government theater, media manipulation, and mutual shame tyranny which has defined the past decade’s era of cancel culture. A paper tiger’s inevitable softened decay when faced with the raindrops of an oncoming storm.
Those young few, unfortunate enough to have cast their dice in favor of lofty gilded dreams, clasp onto the flaccid pageantry of Awards Ceremonies. It’s unfathomable that anyone watches Conan O’Brien do leg kicks and spin around amidst chorus lines while belting out showtunes feeling anything remotely akin to entertainment. Watching hamfisted mid-award skits and hackneyed song and dance routines in 2025 when you have literally any form of entertainment available instantly on-demand for free feels like being fed an aspirin after you’ve been mainlining heroin for a decade. Even on 2x speed, the thing felt hackneyed, outdated and irrelevant, as did the cinematic offerings the celebrities were there to praise.
Yet, there are still those who grasp onto the idea that the Oscars matter, both those who have grown up with this notion, upheld through the course of their lives, and those who have a sliver of hope in the dream of getting paid fortunes for a job that makes them beloved, admired, and famous. They do not care that the Academy Awards fails at all three premises it purports: The platforming of The Celebrity, the objective grading of films, and the delivery of relevant entertainment.
To the aspiring theater kid, the Oscars are a promise of a dream, a world where you can feel greatness for simply following the prescriptive narratives established by an institutional power. They all know it’s not real. The awards themselves are chosen across arbitrary social politics and optics considerations. I haven’t even mentioned which movies were nominated, I haven’t even seen any of them. Did you care? Does it matter whether this year’s Holocaust survivor beat the trans drug dealer biopic, or if the brown people struggle movie will get the gold-plated bronze statue instead of the rape victim sad movie?
For record, Anora won best picture. I honestly have no idea what the movie is about, something to do with sex workers and a Russian oligarch is the bad guy or whatever. Sean Baker, the director who happened to also win Best Director, gave a speech after his personal award in which he begged America to watch more movies, go to more theaters, encourage children to watch movies, work in film, pay for cinema by any means possible.
He said to go to the movies, go to the theater, emphasizing that "watching a film in the theater with an audience is an experience. We can laugh together, cry together, scream and fight together, perhaps sit in devastated silence together. And in a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever. It's a communal experience you simply don't get at home, and right now, the theater going experience is under threat."
Watching this pleading through a deliberately torrented video buried under so many other windows of prioritized distraction felt like holding a handgun to someone’s head and idly listening to them justify their own existence in the hopes of staying an itchy trigger finger.
The only feeling I had while watching the Academy Awards was during the 2024 In Memoriam sequence. For some reason, they chose to play Mozart’s Lacrimosa during a montage of actors, filmmakers, and industry greats who died during the previous year, with a speech hurriedly cobbled together to highlight Gene Hackman’s passing (may he rest in peace).
The song was an odd choice. Despite Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626 being a liturgic for the dead, the choice of Lacrimosa specifically has long held connotation as the “evil villain elaborates” theme worn into cliche. Its absurd delivery, when listened to sped up, pulled me away for a moment to look at its montage of smiling faces and the correspondent films they either acted in or took some credit for helping create.
I watched these movies fly by, wistfully applying some interpretation to the morose pairing of Mozart’s Lacrimosa, the exact measure which Amadeus himself died composing. It seemed more so a funerary for the film industry itself rather than just those who passed this year.
Of course this is a grim cynicism, all media holds onto at least some semblance of an existence through the works and obsessions of enthusiasts. I will still watch new movies, the experience of the theater amplifies even dull mediocrities to highlight an otherwise uneventful week. I will someday show my child a few of the greatest films I’ve seen. I don’t feel this is the death of film, merely the reconstitution of a bloated industry which must now learn to truly compete with something other than itself.
Michael Dragovic is Chief of Staff at Remilia Corporation and goes by Scorched Earth Policy on Twitter (@scearpo). When he's not working, you can find him hovering above the Pacific Ocean as a 750-mile wide metal cube rotating and oscillating at Mach 5.
