When was the last time you had a real conversation with someone about the results of an award show? Did a particular nominee strike you as interesting? Were you rooting for a specific show to win? If you’re like most of America, you weren’t.
The fall of award shows has been prophesied about for years. Late night hosts and cynics have poked fun at this gradual decline time and time again. Despite the desperation behind the scenes to preserve the event’s popularity, not much has changed. In an age of social media and instant information, almost no one would choose to watch a drawn out show made up of celebrities patting themselves on the back and bad stand-up when they could just find out who won later online.
Just recently, the Emmys, what many would assume to be one of the more important shows, saw a 27% decrease in viewership when compared to 2022, says the Los Angeles Times. A trend that has been seen every year for a decade.
As a young person myself, I would never be caught spending my time watching these shows. I’m not an outlier. There is nothing an award show can offer that is interesting and engaging enough to watch, except for one thing that no planner or presenter could conjure up themselves. Drama.
In contrast to the questions posed at the beginning of this article, if you asked someone “Do you remember when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars?,” I would bet that many would say yes. So while no one could name who won Best Picture that year, anyone who knew anything about the Oscars that year could tell you how wild that slap was.
This isn’t just speculation. The ratings don’t lie: viewership of the 2023 show increased by two million after that incident— a 12.5 percent spike says Daily Mail. Compared to the shows’ plans to increase viewership, these few accidental examples of controversy are the only ones that have reaped actual results.
Social media thrived on controversy then, and it still does now. When the Golden Globes aired this year, comedian Jo Koy chose jokes in poor taste, and the world that had previously looked away immediately turned back around. The comic opened by talking about the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon that thrived this summer. He discussed the genius behind Oppenheimer and its foundation as a novel and then immediately called Barbie a movie “based on a doll with big boobies”— completely downplaying the success of a movie with widely well received messages about feminism.
Immediately, social media flinched at what was said. Barbie is a beloved movie by many online, and it was extremely easy to hate on Jo Koy’s act and analyze every aspect of the controversy. Many praised Ryan Gosling for reacting with sympathy with the film’s creators and director Greta Gerwig, and for mocking Jo Koy for his humor.
At least online, it felt like any TikTok about the Golden Globes was about this comment, and there was no shortage of TikToks either.
The ethics of his jokes are not the main story here though, after Jo Koy’s segment viewership of the Globes increased by 50% compared to last year’s according to Forbes. A staggering change that again, like the Oscars, was on account of a major conflict that blew up online.
It’s become evident that the cliches ‘bad news sells’ and ‘all publicity is good publicity’ are especially true in the case of award shows like these. In a constantly evolving world of short length media, award shows will either have to grow to be subservient to these accidental controversies or finally change their format. A disaster can only be interesting so many times before it loses its charm.
