[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Let's talk about the The Oscars, but let me say again, you'll hear more about the Will Smith, Chris Rock, the joke and the slap in the next hour on all of it but we want to focus more on the movies, that is, did anyone out there even see most or all of the 10 Best Picture nominees? If so, what's your relationship with the movies right now? Maybe you didn't engage with most of the movies this year and have been less engaged with the Academy Awards in general over the past few years. Ratings have severely declined in the pandemic. This came up on the show a few weeks ago, when we were talking about TV ratings in general and what they say in our culture, about our culture.

A few years ago, The Oscars were the number two rated show of the entire year for many years. They were number two, Super Bowl was number one, Oscars were number two. Last year, it wasn't even in the top 100 shows. Did you used to love The Oscars and now you don't? What happened in terms of the ceremony itself? I watched the whole thing last night. I actually thought it was very entertaining.

Again, the drama aside, it was a very entertaining evening, and especially as someone who did not see most of the films, seeing a lot of clips, hear some of the discussion about the films and what they represented, picking out some that I may want to see now. What about for you? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. What about going to the movies? The experience of going and sitting in a movie theater? I know that was affected by the pandemic, so do you feel like that has changed permanently for you? Were you really, really happy to get back into a movie theater if you have decided that it's safe, and you really, really missed it?

We did see the first Best Picture winner last night, CODA, which was from a live streaming service, not a traditional movie house and I don't think has really played on the big screen. Talk about if the movies mean to you, talk about what if anything, the movies as movies, as that experience, going to the movies, means to you anymore, and the Oscars too. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. With us for this is Bilge Ebiri, film critic for New York Magazine and the Vulture website. Bilge, welcome to WNYC.

Bilge Ebiri: Good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a ratings report yet? Do you happen to know? I mentioned how it dropped out of the top 100 shows last year and I haven't seen yet for today, have you?

Bilge Ebiri: I have not seen one. The full ratings report, I think, usually drops a couple of days later. Last year's show was an anomaly. Awards shows in general have declined in viewership and last year they all declined really, really dramatically. I imagine this year's ratings will be better than last year's, although the decline of live TV experiences that are not sports events, that's a a secular thing that doesn't really have anything to do with whether The Oscars show itself is any good or not. I think those have been declining for years.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. I thought the show was much better last night than it was, despite their valiant efforts when they didn't have a live audience. What'd you think?

Bilge Ebiri: I can't say I was a big fan of the show. One of the things that they did this year, which I thought was really, really just a terrible decision and a lot of people in the academy were upset about it as well, is they relegated eight of the categories, mostly technical and shorts categories, off the broadcast. Those awards were actually being given before the show, while the red carpet was going on and ABC didn't broadcast it. You only heard about those from reporters who were in the audience tweeting out about them and things like that and then they took clips of those awards, and interspersed them throughout the show.

They did this to make things move faster but what I thought happened was it just created this weird disjointed thing because the biggest thing about any Oscar award is the suspense. It's weird. They took all the suspense out of it because a lot of people watching already knew who had won those categories. They just made these little clip reels and they cut to people in the audience who weren't actually people who were in the audience while these people were giving their speeches. It was just a very strange, strange experience.

Brian Lehrer: I was wondering about those cutaways and whether they were fake. You wrote on Twitter last night, "The reason you don't try to fix The Oscars is because this show is what happens when you try to fix The Oscars." Were you primarily referring to what you just said?

Bilge Ebiri: Yes. They've made a number of decisions over the past few months, I think, a lot of them driven by actually not The Oscars producers or the academy, but, as I gather, a lot of them were driven by ABC. They wanted those eight categories off, they wanted things faster, they wanted to show shorter, all these things. By the way, the show didn't wind up being any shorter, I don't think. You got these weird little tributes. You got the tribute to The Godfather, you got the tribute to White Men Can't Jump, you got the tribute to Pulp Fiction, you got the tribute to Juno but they didn't really feel like tributes. They felt weirdly rushed and kind of slipshod.

If you saw the clip reel they put together for The Godfather, it was very short, just a few [unintelligible 00:06:31] and it wasn't even the Godfather, it was the whole trilogy. Most of the clips seem to be from Godfather III, which is the one movie that a lot of people don't like. Then the music was like they had a beat on it. The Godfather has possibly the most iconic score in American cinema. Play the song, play the music.

Brian Lehrer: That's weird.

Bilge Ebiri: It was weird. Obviously, in the past, The Oscars used to do these tributes and they would take their time with them, they would have someone present it, they would show a real clip reel that gave you a real sense of the film, and they didn't have time for that. They just blew through these and I thought it was just really unpleasant to watch. That was what I meant by fixing The Oscars. I meant the changes they've done to try and fix the show, which I think just made for a less entertaining show.

Brian Lehrer: One other thing before we take some calls. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote last week that, "One of the reasons award shows ratings are declining, movie award shows in particular, is because movies themselves are not conjuring that movie magic because people aren't going to theaters to see them. It's not just the pandemic." He says, "People prefer streaming and serial television. Movies just don't hold the same place in our hearts. Try as the theater chains might with a big first class seating and even food service in a few selected theaters." What do you think about that?

Bilge Ebiri: I think it's possible to overstate some of these things. Obviously, the pandemic hit movie theaters very hard and they're not fully back up yet. Movie theater attendance has been declining since the 1940s, steadily. Every few years, there's some new technology, whether it's television, or the internet, or whatever, or VHS, that puts a little dent in the number of people or the percentage of people who go to the movies on a regular basis.

As someone who does still go to theaters, you do see a lot of movies actually that do well if they actually do play theaters, and take time before they go on streaming. The Batman is a perfectly good example, Spider Man: No Way Home. Obviously, those are big superhero movies [unintelligible 00:09:07]

Brian Lehrer: Does it have to be those movies? That's one of the things.

Bilge Ebiri: Drive My Car and Licorice Pizza, two the best picture nominees, they played theaters for weeks and they're still in theaters, and they played to sold-out audiences. They didn't expand in that way that would mean that they were going to make $100 million, or whatever, but they did very well for independent releases. I guess Licorice Pizza is technically not an independent release, but for indie type films platform releases, they did very well. It's not impossible. I do think people are being more selective in their movie going. That's understandable, but I do also believe that it's a chicken and egg situation.

Hollywood has been making fewer movies for grownups, fewer medium budget dramas and comedies and things like that. That has been going on for 10 to 15 years, maybe even longer. Because it's easier in some ways to green light a giant superhero movie. Even if it doesn't make money, you can say, "Well, it was a no brainer to try and make this movie."

Whereas something that's a little riskier if it doesn't make money, you could lose your job. Then what happened was, of course, a lot of the people that made those types of movies actually then migrated to television, where they had a little more freedom where these kinds of stories were being told. Suddenly you got the golden age of TV or peak-television as we called it. A lot that was driven by, basically, filmmakers, independent filmmakers, medium budget filmmakers who couldn't-

Brian Lehrer: Transitioned over.

Bilge Ebiri: -get their work made in Hollywood so they moved to television.

Brian Lehrer: I was just going to take a phone call. Anna in Vermont. You're on WNYC. Hi, Anna.

Anna: Hi. Well, this is not what I called about, but I'll just say both things. I have not been to the movies in the last two years because of the pandemic. It's just not complicated. That is why I have not been in a movie theater.

Brian Lehrer: That's true for a lot of people really, but a lot of people are also going back. Anna, you wanted to say something about how you couldn't even watch The Oscars.

Anna: Yes. I wanted to see The Oscars. I tried last year and I tried again this year. This is a terrible decision of ABC's. If you want to stream, the only way you can do it is by creating a complicated login that makes you have to go and look up your provider, your wi-fi provider and so on, and then pay. It's a mystery that you have a smaller audience when you're making people pay to watch The Oscars?

Brian Lehrer: Right, you don't have cable I take it.

Anna: I don't have cable. It's not on my Roku TV. It's a whole separate thing.

Brian Lehrer: That's a whole thing. I don't know if this is in your beat, Bilge. With the various streaming services for television, for cord cutters, what they sometimes don't provide is the some of the local channels. Yet ABC, if you want to get Channel Seven in New York or wherever your ABC affiliate is in your place, you can put on an antenna. You don't need cable or streaming.

Bilge Ebiri: It is something that The Oscars will probably have to figure out, but at the same time why are ratings important to them? Well, the ratings are important to them because those numbers are what drive the amount of money they're paid for the show. That is directly related to the advertising they can get from the show. The live TV broadcast is important because they need to make sure people can see those ads. That's a complicated thing that, again these have less to do with The Oscars and more to do with the problems of live TV events in general.

Brian Lehrer: Just for the record, we're getting a number of callers saying a similar thing. I couldn't watch The Oscars this year because I don't have cable. Although many of the streaming services do carry ABC. How about, let's see, Leo in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. You want to talk about Drive My Car. Hi, Leo.

Leo: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. Been dying to say a long time, first time for years.

Brian Lehrer: Glad you got on.

Leo: I had a really amazing experience watching Drive My Car this weekend, which is a beautiful film and there's a lot of these gorgeous, compelling, quiet moments that happen throughout the film. It really just felt like it was moving to realize all the people that were around me and just hearing their breaths and that it was a shared experience, especially after how much time we had to be isolated in the pandemic. Those are my thoughts.

Brian Lehrer: Good, Leo. Thank you. Thank you very much. Go ahead. You wanted to add something about the film in particular? No, maybe not. Leo, thanks for making a first call. Make a second call. Can I ask you about, about CODA? It was the first streaming service movie to win Best Picture. I think very few people had money on CODA when it was first nominated, but in the past month it began sweeping awards and became more of a favorite to win. Did you have your money on CODA from the start? Again, about it being a streaming service film, I know it played at Sundance and places like that, but did it show around the country in movie theaters?

Bilge Ebiri: It did open theatrically. I don't know how many theaters showed in, but they did give it a theatrical run, even if it was just so that it could qualify for the Oscars. I do think that almost no matter what one, it was going to be something that was on a streaming service. It was ironic that after years of years and years of trying to win an Oscar, Netflix lost out to an Apple TV movie. That was always going to be a huge shift, whether it happened this year or in previous years. That was going to happen at some point, because that's just where most of the films are these days.

I had CODA pegged early on as a film that could get a nomination, at a time when a lot of people didn't seem to think it could. I'm not a betting man. If I had, I probably would've still picked Power of The Dog if only because I also wanted Power of The Dog to win. CODA is a really nice film. You mentioned Sundance, it's actually the first best picture winner to have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Brian Lehrer: To have premiered on Sundance.

Bilge Ebiri: Its actually a really big deal.

Brian Lehrer: I thought the audience last night was very into Power of The Dog. Every time it got mentioned, the audience seemed to react. But we have 20 seconds left. What were you starting to say?

[music]

Bilge Ebiri: I was just going to say that's actually a really big deal for a Sundance film to win the Best Picture Oscar. Every year after Sundance, there's so many Oscar related takes. Finally, a film from there also Summer of Soul, the documentary winner. CODA and Summer of Soul were the opening night films of the Sundance Film Festival last year.

Brian Lehrer: Bilge Ebiri, film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture. Thank you so much.

Bilge Ebiri Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Callers and tweeters. Thank you, Allison. I'm sure we'll talk about the joke and the slap in her Oscar segment.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.