Why I'm Glad I Didn't Watch The Oscars

I haven’t watched a full Oscars telecast in years, but it didn’t used to be that way.

When I was younger in college, my friends and I would actually have Oscar parties with black ties and our own ballots, and we tried watching every Best Picture nominee in a given year so we could form as best an opinion as possible on who would win.

It was fun back then, before Disney and ABC decided to try and rope the general audience into watching the show. That’s when they started bringing in comedians to roast the actors directly and do lowest-common denominator sketches designed to get a rise out of them for the benefit of the working class people who have never watched, nor have any interest in watching a 4-hour broadcast of Hollywood celebrating its own achievements with a pile of mostly drama films released specifically in the past 4 months.

Before all that, The Oscars were about celebrating the art and the artists. Now, it’s purely about ratings and trying to get people’s attention.

Sure, ratings have always been a part of the equation or else it wouldn’t be on TV, but it was subjectively more dignified when Billy Crystal, who is also an actor, would rib his colleagues in good fun and lightheartedness, instead of Chris Rock making jokes about a black woman’s battle with Alopecia.

No he shouldn’t have been slapped, but he asked for it and Disney and ABC capitalized on the attention tenfold, right up to their publicity stunt of “hiring a crisis team” to manage any unexpected situations at this year’s show, which of course wasn’t needed.

The Oscars aren’t fun to watch anymore, at least not for me, but again I’m not an actor or creative that has made an entire career in Hollywood or is looking to do so, so the emotional investment isn’t the same for me. That being said, one look at social media tells you just how many people still treat the Academy Awards as though they are the ones up for a gold statue, or how important it is that their favorite creative wins so that it proves them right about an argument they’ve had with a friend, or more likely some troll that called them “objectively bad” at some point.

To that end, I will give the Oscar apologists credit: You are the ones that tell me all I need to know about what happened at the show, while fully reminding me why it was a good idea not to watch it in the first place.

First off, the good: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once(EEAAO) dominated. 7 wins, including Best Picture, Best Director, Michelle Yeoh for Best Actress, and Ke Huy Quan for Best Supporting Actor. The representation of an Asian film winning that big is great to see, and it’s a fantastic accomplishment for all involved, and you can tell how important it is to all of them. Nothing that I or anyone else says can take that away from them and I am overjoyed that it happened, because representation MATTERS.

Now for the bad, which is pretty much everything else.

Stephanie Hsu should have won Best Supporting Actress for EEAAO over Jamie Lee Curtis IF it wasn’t going to be Angela Bassett for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. As someone that has seen and enjoyed both films, Bassett and Hsu were both on another level, and this feels like Curtis, who I did enjoy in the movie and whose career I have appreciated, was given a retroactive Oscar so she could have her first win after decades in Hollywood. It’s not the first time that’s happened.

And then I have to remind myself of the unnamed Oscar voter that said this to an Entertainment Weekly writer, regarding Viola Davis and The Woman King, and I have to wonder if other racial motivations prompted Curtis’ win over two actresses of color:

I don’t want to think that Jamie Lee Curtis won her first Oscar because academy “wokeness” favored EEAAO and they felt like one more Oscar for a brown person was overboard, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking it on some level.

To be fair, or maybe less fair, the deck was already stacked against Bassett because her performance came from a comic book movie, a Marvel movie no less, which has been decried by numerous Hollywood creatives in addition to Martin Scorsese in recent years. One wonders how differently her nomination would have been perceived had the adapted material not featured brightly colored images and thought bubbles.

Then I look at the statistic being heralded by many about how Michelle Yeoh is just the second actress of color in 95 years to win Best Actress, the other being Halle Berry 20 years ago for Monster’s Ball.

I remember watching the year that she won and gave her tearful acceptance speech. That same night, Denzel Washington won Best Actor for Training Day, and Sidney Poitier was given a lifetime achievement Oscar.

The next day, I was told by an individual that The Oscars looked more like the NAACP Image Awards that year, and not in a good way from their perspective. That led to a pretty heated conversation which ended in my receiving an apology.

So you’re telling me that since then, not a single brown actress has been deserving of Best Actress until now? That’s the subjective opinion of the Academy that you want me to willingly watch and accept on screen?

No thank you.

I’ve detailed before many times what the Academy’s real issue is with diversity, and it’s not the Oscars. It’s the Academy membership itself. Representation is not equal among the voting members and the people who are crafting the work up for appraisal, so of course it’s not going to be equal when the nominations and winners are announced, and that’s even before getting to the unnamed actors that think black women should sit down and shut up about representation, because “wokeness” is already a big enough problem in Hollywood, they believe.

Nah, I’m not going to watch any of that. Not willingly. I’m also not going to watch Disney and ABC use the show to egregiously promote their own films ahead of the other studios because they own the broadcast, which don’t get me wrong, is a great business practice and marketing move, but not quite equitable for a celebration of the entire academy’s best and brightest.

I haven’t watched all of the Best Picture nominees at the time of writing this, but let’s say I had, and I really, really, REALLY LOVED The Fabelmans, or Tar, or All Quiet on the Western Front. How are those fans feeling today? Probably a lot like Angela Bassett looked when Jamie Lee Curtis’ name was announced for Best Supporting Actress.

I don’t need that stress in my life. I have more than enough elsewhere to take care of.

Let me make this clear, though: If YOU are someone that watches the Oscars with reckless abandon and excitement every year, and if you are excited today for all of the EEAAO winners, or if you are outraged today over Angela Bassett, Stephanie Hsu or your favorite movie from this year not winning or even being nominated, that is entirely your business and I’m hardly looking down on you for it. I am NOT a better person than you or anyone else for not watching The Oscars and I would never claim such.

All that said, I’m personally and subjectively a lot happier today knowing that once again, the Academy did as I expected it to and followed the script it always has with presentation, nominations, and winners, and I spared myself 4 hours of getting too emotional over the end result of it.

That of course, is the beauty of #ItsAllSubjective.

Until next year…