[Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? -- Mark 8:18. BTW, the projected 41 million US audience mentioned below did not materialize. Nielsen reports 38.8 million Americans viewed the Oscars, down 8% from last year.]
March 5, 2006
Hollywood's Crowd Control Problem
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Tonight, an expected 41 million Americans will tune into the 78th annual Academy Awards to watch a spectacle largely honoring films they have not seen and may never get around to watching. Much has been made, in particular, about the smallness of most of the nominees for best picture, which usually refers to their modest budgets and absence of stars, but also rightly suggests an economy of ambition and scale. ...
You don't have to have followed all the reports of a box-office slump last year to know that Hollywood is in trouble. You just have to walk into the lobby of a multiplex and look at the posters to know that America's big screens are awash in the fast and the furious, the cheap and the stupid. To judge by how executives at major studios often talk about their business, in their discussions about closing windows, new platforms and emergent technologies, the movies themselves barely count. What counts is when you can watch a film on your cellphone, not if there is something worth losing your eyesight over. In the age of the incredible shrinking movie, content equals quantity, not quality. ...
These days big studio movies do not, as a rule, excite the intellect or stir the soul: that's what specialty titles like "Brokeback Mountain" are for. In the last few decades, the American movie industry has become increasingly split between high-concept spectacles engineered to attract as many viewers as possible (think flypaper) and niche products pitched to specific audiences. In this climate, films released through a studio specialty unit, like "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," are just one niche among many, like horror or teen flicks. Their principal value doesn't come from ticket sales, but from the prestige and awards they confer on a parent company. In Hollywood, as a friend recently quipped, "Quality is now a genre." ...
The crisis now facing Hollywood isn't unique to the movies; the atomization of the culture makes it hard to know what people want, particularly when they belong to a multi-everything society like ours. Still, something will be lost if Hollywood continues to downsize its ambitions and fails to make movies that connect with the mass audience, to make movies that speak to us as a unified whole rather than as a mass of self-interested egos, that give us a sense of collective identity and social cohesion. A nation of iPod-people, each staring at his or her individually downloaded film on the delivery system of his or her choice, seems a poor substitute for the oceanic feeling that comes with watching a film with a crowd, finding communion in the dark.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/movies/redcarpet/05darg.html>
Carl