{"id":1180589,"date":"2022-01-02T14:49:20","date_gmt":"2022-01-02T19:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1180589"},"modified":"2022-01-02T14:49:22","modified_gmt":"2022-01-02T19:49:22","slug":"film-critic-suggests-nominating-superhero-flicks-to-save-the-oscars-from-ratings-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/film-critic-suggests-nominating-superhero-flicks-to-save-the-oscars-from-ratings-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Film Critic Suggests Nominating Superhero Flicks to &#039;Save the Oscars&#039; from Ratings Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Ffilm-critic-suggests-nominating-superhero-flicks-to-save-the-oscars-from-ratings-death%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1180589&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p class=\"subheading\">Longtime movie critic Owen Gleiberman is afraid that the woke Oscars Awards telecast is doomed to extinction unless the Academy starts recognizing wildly popular movies, including Marvel\/Disney\u2019s assembly-line superhero flicks.<\/p>\n<p>In his Dec. 31 <a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2021\/film\/columns\/spider-man-no-way-home-oscars-analysis-best-picture-1235145184\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">column<\/a> in <i>Variety<\/i>, the film critic assured his peers that he \u201chated\u201d the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.breitbart.com\/entertainment\/2021\/12\/19\/spider-man-no-way-home-nets-3rd-best-opening-of-all-time-with-253m\/\">box-office<\/a> gargantuan&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.breitbart.com\/entertainment\/2021\/12\/17\/spider-man-no-way-home-review-a-woke-free-blast-of-fan-service-and-fun\/\"><i>Spider-Man: No Way Home<\/i><\/a>, but unless movies like it start showing up in the Oscars nominations, TV audiences will continue to abandon the telecast by the millions like they have been over the last decade.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"D-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"gmxrevmore\" class=\"H\"><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cYes, I hated <i>Spider-Man: No Way Home<\/i>. It\u2019s a movie that I\u2019m a total annoying curmudgeonly naysayer about. So even though my antipathy isn\u2019t the topic of this column, why hide it? Go ahead, throw tomatoes at me. But understand that I\u2019m actually on your side,\u201d Gleiberman wrote to kick off his column.<\/p>\n<p>Gleiberman went on to explain why he finds the film so bad, but that really wasn\u2019t the point of his article. Finally warming to his theme, the critic wrote, \u201cIn the past, the members of the Motion Picture Academy have considered superhero movies to be entertainment, not art, and the Oscars are supposed to be about art.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_19173426\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/spidermannowayhomeBO1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-19173426 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/spidermannowayhomeBO1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Stills from \u201cSpider-Man: No Way Home.\u201d (Sony Pictures\/Marvel Studios)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Art or not, though, Gleiberman goes on to say that nominating the latest Spider-Man flick may save the Oscars from ratings oblivion.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B2\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cNow, though, there\u2019s a larger reason to nominate <i>Spider-Man: No Way Home<\/i>,\u201d Gleiberman explained. \u201cThe Oscars are on life support, or at least they\u2019re heading there. They need mainstream cred; going forward, it\u2019s nothing less than the oxygen that\u2019s going to allow them to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gleiberman fears that the Academy has gotten way too elitist with its nominations.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Whenever this argument gets made, it\u2019s presented in strictly utilitarian, box-office-begets-ratings terms. If you want an Academy Awards telecast that wins more eyeballs than it loses, you\u2019re going to have to nominate some of the movies that win eyeballs. I don\u2019t disagree with that argument, and in a sense it\u2019s the one I\u2019m making. But this isn\u2019t simply about numbers. It\u2019s about a perception that drives the numbers. Sure, if \u201cNo Way Home\u201d gets nominated, a swath of its vast fan base might tune into the Oscars that wouldn\u2019t have otherwise. But what I\u2019m really talking about is the essential idea that movies are, and always have been, a populist art form. If that dimension of cinema isn\u2019t respected, something has gone wrong.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Gleiberman also notes that one of the main reasons people tuned in to see the awards show in the past was because they wanted to see their favorite stars in real-life setings, and in days of yore, seeing the stars was not an every-day occurrence for people. But today, with the ready availability of media in any manner of format (TV, Cable, Internet, phones), seeing your favorite stars in interviews, news clips, at events, or even on vacation, is not so rare.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_16378088\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/93rdoscars.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-16378088\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/93rdoscars.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Academy Awards crew member cleans an Oscar statue design on the red carpet at Union Station, one of the locations for Sunday\u2019s 93rd Academy Awards. (Chris Pizzello\/Pool\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>The critic is worried that nominating a constant stream of uber intellectual films and ignoring the films that actually earn millions of fans, not to mention millions of dollars, is driving the Oscars into extinction.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m not saying don\u2019t nominate those [too-smart-for-school] films. I\u2019m saying that if those are the only films nominated, it\u2019s going to be another year of the Oscars\u2019 slow-motion implosion,\u201d Gleiberman warned.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B3\" class=\"a8d adSo\"><\/figure>\n<p>Gleiberman wrapped up his piece warning of ratings-depressing elitism:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This year, would it really be such an unspeakable vulgarity for the Oscar slate to include \u201cSpider-Man: No Way Home\u201d? Not as a token mainstream gesture but because it\u2019s a film that honestly meant something to the larger public. Why has this become such an insane idea? What\u2019s actually insane is leaving a movie like that one out of the mix. If the Oscars want a future, it would be a shrewd strategy for them to not inflict the death of a thousand cuts on themselves by using the dagger of elitism.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As if to underscore Gleiberman\u2019s point, <i>Variety<\/i> recently noted that in 2021, the Academy Awards didn\u2019t even break into the top 100 most-watched shows!<\/p>\n<p>With a mere 10.4 million viewers, the Oscars <a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2021\/tv\/news\/top-rated-shows-2021-ncis-yellowstone-squid-game-1235143671\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lost<\/a> to shows including, <i>Yellowstone<\/i>, and <i>NCIS<\/i> reruns, the <i>FBI, The Equalizer, 60 Minutes<\/i>, and the <i>Law &amp; Order<\/i> series of shows. Even Oprah beat the Oscars. Her <i>Oprah With Meghan and Harry<\/i> earned more viewers than the Oscars, as did the concert show <i>Adele One Night Only<\/i>.<\/p>\n[embedded content]\n<p>The increasingly woke Oscars telecast has been declining by the millions for the better part of a decade. But last year it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/2022\/01\/oscars-2021-telecast-years-top-100-most-watched-tv-1234688338\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fell off<\/a> a whopping 60 percent over the previous year. In 2020 the Oscars earned an audience of 23.6 million \u2014 then an all-time low for the awards show. But last year, it clocked in at an astonishingly low 10.4 million viewers.<\/p>\n<p>While it might seem likely that this year\u2019s Oscars show could reel in a few more viewers than last year\u2019s debacle, Gleiberman is correct that the Oscars is still on a downward trend and if it doesn\u2019t do something to staunch the bleeding, it will fade into quickly obscurity.<\/p>\n<p><i>Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Warner.Todd.Huston\">facebook.com\/Warner.Todd.Huston<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Longtime movie critic Owen Gleiberman is afraid that the woke Oscars Awards telecast is doomed to extinction unless the Academy starts recognizing wildly popular movies, including Marvel\/Disney\u2019s assembly-line superhero flicks. &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1180589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}