Academy head cops to evolving movie industry, Oscars
Entertainment Weekly interviewed Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, following the news of the dismally low ratings for Sunday's Oscars. He acknowledges that a majority of the traditional viewers simply didn't tune in at all this year, and instead of casting blame to elements of the show or the writers strike, he concedes that, in the movie industry of the future, the Oscars may naturally be a smaller affair.
"Some of these movies are just too difficult for a mass audience, frankly," Davis says. "And if we have moved into an era where there's this dichotomy between big popular studio movies and smaller pictures for more specialized audiences, we may just have to get used to smaller audiences [for the Oscar telecast.] This could be a one-year blip but it doesn't look like one. It looks like something that has been developing over the past few years. It's as if the National Book Awards had to make a choice between giving awards to very serious fiction or to the most popular bestsellers. We've come to that point where there are two kinds of movies, and we're focusing on the ones which, almost by definition, aren't going to be blockbusters."
