It was not all that long ago that tens of millions of people would tune in to see the Oscars.
It was a show that celebrated the most acclaimed art form in the West.
The stage and the audience were filled with “movie stars.”
People known worldwide for their beauty and their talent.
The films that were nominated were the centerpieces of a shared culture. Everyone went to see them. Or, if they hadn’t, they knew the lines.
Here’s looking at you, kid
You can’t handle the truth!
I’ll have what she’s having
May the Force be with you
You talkin’ to me?
The Oscars were the culmination of a full year of shared cultural experiences, of movies we watched with dozens if not hundreds of other people all packed together in the same theater, laughing and gasping as a single unit.
And now that is all gone.
This year’s Oscars was not a complete disaster ratings-wise. Viewership was down 9% from 2025, though social interactions were way up and the show, as host Disney pointed out, is the leading live event that wasn’t the Super Bowl this year.
Which, given the competition, is not a whole lot of anything.
Worse still, the general vibe in the media (since vibes are all we really have to go on these days) was that no one really cared, that the show felt like a paean to a classic art form that was no longer relevant in our current Feudal Media landscape.
Lute players of the world unite!
Why It Matters
There are a number of reasons movies have become less relevant, but they all tie back to the collapse of the monoculture and the rise of Feudal Media.
So let’s start with the factor most directly attributable to that collapse:
A Shift In Aspirations—In the past, most movies seemed to have a common goal: tell a story that conveys a universal truth and speaks to as broad an audience as possible. It was a lesson that stretched across a wide range of genres, encompassing everything from Star Wars to Marty to The Crying Game.
But today’s movies, to paraphrase my friend Simon Pulman (follow him on LinkedIn if you are not doing so already) feel like they are made to win Oscar nominations. So they are not looking to speak any sort of universal truth, but rather the sort of truth that makes the educated, affluent, Californians who make up the bulk of Oscar voters feel good about themselves.
Or they are created in a lab to reach the audience of “people who like blockbuster franchises because the familiar is easy.” Meaning films that are perfectly workmanlike… and perfectly forgettable.
Empty calories for global audiences.
A Shift In Culture—We are, as you may have noticed, living in an era where the West has never felt more divided, the different camps less in tune with each other than ever before. I have spoken many times about how this plays out, how the loss of a universal source of truth leaves us all adrift in our own little bubbles, seeing the world through our own unique prisms.
For the movies—or for any popular entertainment for that matter—this means we are constantly seeking to put things in boxes, to look for microaggressions and Trojan horses in everything Hollywood puts out.
So that 35 years ago, The Crying Game was seen as a movie about two lonely people struggling to connect despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
Whereas today it would likely be seen as woke Hollywood liberals trying to push the “trans agenda” and an assault on traditional values.
This is the world that we live in and it is no wonder that films that conform to certain ideological bubbles are the ones that get made and that people with alternate world views have given up on trying to break in.
A Shift In Venue—the advent of streaming brought about a key shift in the way movies were distributed. In addition to showing them as theatrical releases, films were also distributed as purchases and rentals on streaming platforms and YouTube. This was given a huge boost by the pandemic, when people would not go to theaters, and also by the boom in very large screen TVs, which made watching at home a far more pleasant experience.
Unfortunately that shift did not bode well for theaters.
People stopped going, and in the aftermath of the pandemic a number of theaters shut down. Smaller non-multiplex theaters of the sort likely to screen an indie film seemed to bear the brunt of this.
And when they did go to the theater, people brought their at-home behavior with them. Talking, using their phones, eating noisily and otherwise making the experience unpleasant for everyone around them.
The other thing that home viewing did was disrupt the overall movie experience, the sense that you were inside what the writer John Gardner called a “vivid and continuous dream” and would emerge, blinking, into daylight 200-some-odd minutes later.
Movies watched over three or four days in hour-long chunks don’t have the same impact.
Or the same potential to become cultural touchpoints.
Netflix’s Indie Error—This is sort of a coda to the “Change In Venue” point, but worth noting. Back in the day, indie films by the likes of Whit Stillman, Jim Jarmusch and the like would be screened at indie theaters and, if the critics and audience seemed to like them well enough, they’d get picked up by bigger theaters where they could reach a bigger audience. Not a blockbuster-sized audience, but enough that they were not laboring in obscurity.
But then Netflix decided to buck up its movie library, and spent a goodly sum of money buying up indie films.
The filmmakers were thrilled at first—Netflix was paying them way more than they’d make on the film festival circuit. But then, to their dismay, Netflix did next to nothing to promote the films, which seemingly disappeared into a black hole, never to be seen again.
While that alone did not cause the demise of a certain type of more broad-focused indie filmmaker, it certainly did not help, and it made the economics of that section of the industry much tougher, as there was much less chance of a filmmaker breaking out, of a major studio taking a flyer on them.
The End of Movie Stars—There is a section in my Feudal Media presentation about how the death of the monoculture meant the end of mega-hits, mega-brands and, of course, mega-stars.
Meaning your grandmother may never have listened to Madonna, but there’s a good chance she knew who she was.
The rise of Feudal Media means there are lots of stars who are famous in their own little bubbles, but relatively unknown outside of them. So it’s hard to build movies around them, hard to get audiences excited. Younger audiences in particular, who are far more familiar with the likes of Logan Paul and Amelia Demoldenberg than with Brad Pitt or Jane Fonda.
Though given who actually votes for the Oscars, it is no surprise that a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the last of the old time movie stars, actually won.
What You Need To Do About It
Movies had a good run—almost 100 years. But things change and the film industry must adjust to its new status, at least for now.
There is an opportunity to try and create more universal stories, though it won’t be easy due to both the polarization of our society and to the fragmentation of media that makes it difficult to promote anything to a mass audience.
Not to mention the economics of indie filmmaking.
Meaning that if a movie does go mainstream, it will be because of a Barbie-style marketing campaign that takes full advantage of virality and word of mouth.
Just don’t hold your breath waiting for one.
If you are YouTube, the soon to be host of the Oscars, there is actually quite the silver lining for you.
Social hits for this year’s Oscars were way up.
And this is no surprise. As I said to the aforementioned Pulman, “Why tune in to a generally tedious three hour broadcast when you can just watch any highlights online the next morning?”
And since YouTube is where most of those highlight clips will live, it’s a chance to pull victory from the jaws of defeat.
If you are a sports league, or just have content rights to one, then this is a good lesson for you too. Zoomers are also far less inclined to sit still for an entire three hour game than previous generations and so the battle here too will be over clips.
If you are the Oscars themselves, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, then realize that while the current format is not going to die off any time in the next few years, you can help make it more relevant by bringing in influencers and others to create the sort of short-form content that is going to do well on social.
Lean into it. Because a 180-second video can help promote a 180-minute show and reach the sorts of much younger audiences you’ll need to stay relevant in the years ahead.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.