The Oscars Are Adding a Category for Movies People Have Actually Seen

The Oscars are a strange phenomenon in that everyone seems to care about them for about a week or so every year and no one thinks about them at all the rest of the year. Seriously, can you name the last five best picture winners without looking them up? How about just the last one? It was The Shape of Water, if you were wondering.

Part of the problem is that no one really watched the movies that are nominated and win all of these Oscars, mainly because a good 90% of nominated films are released in December and are about either the Holocaust or the experiences of a trans lesbian in Apartheid South Africa. A lot of them aren’t even good, they just make the old white people in the Academy feel like voting for them makes a good, progressive person even though they’ve secretly voted Republican in every presidential election since Reagan was in office. If you don’t believe me, Crash won in 2004 despite the general consensus that it deserved an Oscar even less than Marissa Tomei.

In a move to drum up interest in the awards show, which has been experiencing falling ratings for a while now, the Academy announced that they’re adding a category for “popular film,” but did not explain what exactly that would entail. Presumably it means giving a statue to Black Panther to keep hordes of Marvel fans from calling members of the Academy racist for pointing out that the film completely fell apart in the third act. It’s the film equivalent of George Foreman trying to fight Muhammad Ali; it starts off strong but by the end it’s just exhausting and about to collapse under its own weight. It just had no chance of actually winning Best Picture.

Giving an award to a movie people have actually seen is an interesting strategy, but the awards show’s other problem is that not many people want to watch the show, which runs roughly 16 hours at this point, so they’re cutting it down to a slim, tight three hours. These guys realize they’re competing with Netflix, right? Do you know how many episodes of Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman or Chef and My Fridge I can watch in three hours? I could even watch Nanette if I hated myself a little more.

While cutting the broadcast time down a bit might make the ceremony a little more watchable, most people would probably get the same amount of enjoyment out of just seeing a list of winners online. David Hyde Pierce isn’t going to take his penis out like in that episode of Family Guy, and if he does, someone will post it on the internet. Probably us. I mean, almost definitely us.

I’ve got a few ideas to make the Oscar telecast watchable, and you can have them for free, Academy members. For starters, those long, boring montages you have every ten minutes? Replace them with montages of the year’s best nude scenes. In fact, give an award for the best nude scene. This will fix both your show and movies in general, because instead of Holocaust dramas, December releases will all have rimjobs. It’s win-win.

Best Director and Best Picture usually go to the same film; it’s honestly weird if they don’t. In order to make things more unpredictable, have all the directors of the films nominated for Best Picture compete in a dog sled race across Saskatchewan and then give the award to Quentin Tarantino you out of touch hacks.

If those don’t work, just try playing reruns of Frasier with a chyron on the bottom announcing the winners. That’s going to better for everyone, and probably a lot more appealing to literally everyone who would potentially watch an Oscar telecast anyway.