The Academy Awards, Hollywood celebrities, and alleged comedian Jimmy Kimmel spent four hours lecturing Americans about some cause du jour, jabbing President Donald Trump, and making hypocrites of themselves.
It was part for the course.
And Americans are tuning out. But should ABC, the Academy, and sponsors care? Remember, Kimmel told everyone that Hollywood doesn’t make movies to make money.
The 90th Oscars telecast plummeted 19 percent from last year to 26.5 million. This is an all-time low.
More from The Hollywood Reporter:
The night was not as political as many recent award shows, with showings of partisanship few and far between. The fallout and response to the exposure of sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment industry was an obvious throughline, and honorees like best actress winner Frances McDormand made stands for inclusivity and representation in the industry. And host Jimmy Kimmel seems to have earned praise for another solid performance during his second consecutive year onstage.
But the writing was largely on the wall for lows, either way. All three marquee events of the U.S. TV calendar thus far — the Golden Globe Awards, the Grammys and the Super Bowl — were off significantly from 2017.
At three hours and 50 minutes, Sunday’s Oscars may have only passed last year’s runtime by one minute, but it managed to rank as the longest telecast in over a decade. Not since 2007 has an Academy Awards ceremony lasted that long.
And it wasn’t exactly a night of box-office sloucher nominees. Though top winner The Shape of Water ($57 million domestic to date) hasn’t exactly been a runaway hit, it certainly outpaced 2017’s winner Moonlight ($28 million) and actually ranks as the top-grossing best picture winner in five years. And Dunkirk, the only other film to nab more than two wins on Sunday, took $188 million at the domestic box office — just a little more than Get Out, which was nominated in multiple categories and saw a writing win for scribe-director Jordan Peele.
It’s interesting that the Golden Globes, the Grammys, and the Super Bowl recorded low ratings. All three have become extremely political and even weird (check out Mark Dice’s coverage of the Grammys here).
It’s about time that America stopped consuming the garbage emanating from Hollywood.
It’s like the joke from “Annie Hall”: “That’s because they don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into a television show.”
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