Film Critic Suggests Nominating Superhero Flicks to 'Save the Oscars' from Ratings Death

Warner Todd HustonJanuary 2, 2022

Longtime movie critic Owen Gleiberman is afraid that the woke Oscars Awards telecast is doomed to extinction unless the Academy starts recognizing wildly popular movies, including Marvel/Disney’s assembly-line superhero flicks.

In his Dec. 31 column in Variety, the film critic assured his peers that he “hated” the box-office gargantuan Spider-Man: No Way Home, but unless movies like it start showing up in the Oscars nominations, TV audiences will continue to abandon the telecast by the millions like they have been over the last decade.

“Yes, I hated Spider-Man: No Way Home. It’s a movie that I’m a total annoying curmudgeonly naysayer about. So even though my antipathy isn’t the topic of this column, why hide it? Go ahead, throw tomatoes at me. But understand that I’m actually on your side,” Gleiberman wrote to kick off his column.

Gleiberman went on to explain why he finds the film so bad, but that really wasn’t the point of his article. Finally warming to his theme, the critic wrote, “In the past, the members of the Motion Picture Academy have considered superhero movies to be entertainment, not art, and the Oscars are supposed to be about art.”

Stills from “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” (Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios)

Art or not, though, Gleiberman goes on to say that nominating the latest Spider-Man flick may save the Oscars from ratings oblivion.

“Now, though, there’s a larger reason to nominate Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Gleiberman explained. “The Oscars are on life support, or at least they’re heading there. They need mainstream cred; going forward, it’s nothing less than the oxygen that’s going to allow them to survive.”

Gleiberman fears that the Academy has gotten way too elitist with its nominations.

Whenever this argument gets made, it’s presented in strictly utilitarian, box-office-begets-ratings terms. If you want an Academy Awards telecast that wins more eyeballs than it loses, you’re going to have to nominate some of the movies that win eyeballs. I don’t disagree with that argument, and in a sense it’s the one I’m making. But this isn’t simply about numbers. It’s about a perception that drives the numbers. Sure, if “No Way Home” gets nominated, a swath of its vast fan base might tune into the Oscars that wouldn’t have otherwise. But what I’m really talking about is the essential idea that movies are, and always have been, a populist art form. If that dimension of cinema isn’t respected, something has gone wrong.

Gleiberman also notes that one of the main reasons people tuned in to see the awards show in the past was because they wanted to see their favorite stars in real-life setings, and in days of yore, seeing the stars was not an every-day occurrence for people. But today, with the ready availability of media in any manner of format (TV, Cable, Internet, phones), seeing your favorite stars in interviews, news clips, at events, or even on vacation, is not so rare.

Academy Awards crew member cleans an Oscar statue design on the red carpet at Union Station, one of the locations for Sunday’s 93rd Academy Awards. (Chris Pizzello/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

The critic is worried that nominating a constant stream of uber intellectual films and ignoring the films that actually earn millions of fans, not to mention millions of dollars, is driving the Oscars into extinction.

“I’m not saying don’t nominate those [too-smart-for-school] films. I’m saying that if those are the only films nominated, it’s going to be another year of the Oscars’ slow-motion implosion,” Gleiberman warned.

Gleiberman wrapped up his piece warning of ratings-depressing elitism:

This year, would it really be such an unspeakable vulgarity for the Oscar slate to include “Spider-Man: No Way Home”? Not as a token mainstream gesture but because it’s a film that honestly meant something to the larger public. Why has this become such an insane idea? What’s actually insane is leaving a movie like that one out of the mix. If the Oscars want a future, it would be a shrewd strategy for them to not inflict the death of a thousand cuts on themselves by using the dagger of elitism.

As if to underscore Gleiberman’s point, Variety recently noted that in 2021, the Academy Awards didn’t even break into the top 100 most-watched shows!

With a mere 10.4 million viewers, the Oscars lost to shows including, Yellowstone, and NCIS reruns, the FBI, The Equalizer, 60 Minutes, and the Law & Order series of shows. Even Oprah beat the Oscars. Her Oprah With Meghan and Harry earned more viewers than the Oscars, as did the concert show Adele One Night Only.

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The increasingly woke Oscars telecast has been declining by the millions for the better part of a decade. But last year it fell off a whopping 60 percent over the previous year. In 2020 the Oscars earned an audience of 23.6 million — then an all-time low for the awards show. But last year, it clocked in at an astonishingly low 10.4 million viewers.

While it might seem likely that this year’s Oscars show could reel in a few more viewers than last year’s debacle, Gleiberman is correct that the Oscars is still on a downward trend and if it doesn’t do something to staunch the bleeding, it will fade into quickly obscurity.

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