Photo: Associated Press
even moving their lips properly due to the astonishing level of cosmetic surgery that had rendered the one-time-hotter-than-hot Bonnie and Clyde almost unrecognizable – literally gave the prize to the wrong movie, La La Land . It was left to that film’s generous producer, Jordan Horowitz, to reveal from the card they had handed him that in fact his picture had lost and Moonlight had actually won instead. You might watch the Indy 500 in hopes of seeing a car crash and explode, but you don’t want to see it happen on Oscars night. The Oscars had a brief moment of ectopic life in 2019 when ratings rose again, in part because the wildly popular Marvel movie Black Panther had become the first superhero flick to get a Best Picture nod. It didn’t win, but audiences were jazzed by the phenomenon. Why wouldn’t they have been? They had seen the movie, at least. The previous year’s winner was a bizarre jape about a mute woman’s affair with a half-man-half- fish called The Shape of Water . And before that was Moonlight , about a gay Black man whose life was redeemed as a boy by a saintly drug dealer, which had grossed a grand total of $1.5 million at the box office before Oscars night.
The Oscars have been dying for more than a decade. In 2010, 41.6 million people watched. In 2021, that number was 9.8 million. COVID KILLED THE SILVER SCREEN The pandemic year was so catastrophic for the motion-picture business, with the nation’s 44,000 screens mostly dark for months at a time, that sensible observers like the peerless entertainment journalist Richard Rushfield suggested canceling the Oscars show and replacing it with a star-studded telethon to raise money for COVID relief. Not only would that have made sense as a matter of simple logic, since almost literally no one had seen any of the movies the Academy eventually nominated, it would also have allowed Hollywood to use its cultural power for a positive end while restoring the show’s role as an ad for the wonders of the movie business. Instead, Black actress Regina King began the show by saying she was glad the George Floyd verdict had gone the way it did or she would have had to be marching instead of introducing the broadcast. She added: “I
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