From Dubai, where satellite dishes still beam Hollywood's annual self-congratulation into millions of homes across the Gulf, the Oscars retain a peculiar global mystique. But as viewership figures slide year after year, a legitimate question is worth asking: has the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lost the plot?
The argument is not especially new, but it sharpens every February. The films that win best picture are frequently not the films that anyone outside a certain stratum of Los Angeles dinner parties actually watched. The performances that earn nominations are too often indistinguishable from the performances that did not. And the ceremony itself, running close to four hours, has become less an event than an endurance test.
What audiences seem to want, and what the Academy refuses to provide, is a measure of honest self-awareness. The kind that acknowledges cinema is not only art. It is also spectacle, escapism, and occasionally glorious nonsense. The films that generate the most genuine affection are frequently the ones that would never survive an awards committee: the action sequel that cost $300 million and earned every cent of it, the romantic comedy that made people cry on aeroplanes, the horror film that audiences watched through splayed fingers.
There is a reasonable counter-argument here, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded with a specific mandate: to advance the arts and sciences of motion pictures. If that means celebrating films that challenge, disturb, and elevate rather than simply entertain, then the current model is arguably working as intended. The prestige bias is not a bug. For many in the industry, it is the feature.
Popular taste, after all, is not always a reliable guide to quality. Box office receipts reward familiarity and franchise recognition. Left to pure audience preference, awards nights might simply become a competition between superhero sequels, which is arguably where streaming algorithms are already taking us anyway. The Oscars, on this view, provide a necessary counterweight.
And yet the counterweight has tipped too far. When the gap between what wins and what people watch grows wide enough, the awards lose their power to shape culture rather than merely reflect the preferences of a narrow professional guild. The ratings decline has been documented extensively, with Australian broadcasters and international networks alike reporting shrinking audiences for a ceremony that once commanded the attention of half the planet.
The Sydney Morning Herald has made the playful case that what the Oscars truly need is a set of alternative categories: awards for the performances Hollywood is too dignified to officially recognise. Best villain audiences secretly rooted for. Most entertaining misfire. The film most people actually watched on a Friday night versus the one they told colleagues they watched on Saturday morning. The joke lands because it contains a real observation. Ceremony and authentic cultural life have drifted apart.
For Australian audiences specifically, the Oscars matter in ways that go beyond mere entertainment consumption. The Australian screen industry operates in the shadow of Hollywood's global dominance, and the signals that awards send about what stories are worth telling shape funding decisions, distribution deals, and the careers of local filmmakers. When the Screen Australia-supported sector looks at what wins international recognition, it is reading a market signal as much as an artistic one.
The deeper tension is one the film industry shares with many cultural institutions: the conflict between gatekeeping and democratisation. Experts, practitioners, and critics have genuine knowledge that mass audiences sometimes lack. Awarding a film that 200 people saw in an art-house cinema in Melbourne rather than the blockbuster that 20 million Australians streamed does reflect a considered aesthetic judgement, not mere snobbery. But institutions that consistently prioritise insider consensus over broad engagement tend to calcify, and the Academy is showing the classic symptoms.
A pragmatic middle path exists. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has experimented with audience-selected categories alongside its traditional awards, acknowledging that popular enthusiasm and critical merit are not mutually exclusive values. The Oscars could do likewise without abandoning their core purpose. Recognising what audiences actually love, alongside what experts judge to be excellent, would not dilute the awards. It might restore them.
The real issue is not cowardice, exactly. It is institutional inertia of the kind that afflicts any organisation that has been successful long enough to mistake its current habits for eternal truths. Rich and celebrated people gathering to honour other rich and celebrated people is a format with natural limits. A little self-deprecation, a little honest acknowledgement of what cinema actually is in the lives of ordinary people, might be the most sophisticated thing the Academy could do.