Seth Rogen Suggests That People Don’t Really Want To Watch The Oscars Anymore
Every year after the Academy Awards air on television, we hear about how nobody really watched the Oscars, and that if you had to rank it in the Sunday night ratings, it only nabbed a few more viewers than a rerun of Beachfront Bargain Hunt. Essentially, ratings haven’t been as good for Mr. Oscar over the past few years. Some of those bad ratings have coincided with the pandemic, or the three years in a row that the Oscars went without a host. Seth Rogen has an idea why the ratings keep going down: perhaps people just can’t be bothered to give a shit about the Oscars anymore.
Oscar viewers have dropped pretty dramatically since the 2000 Oscar ceremony, which saw about 46 million viewers. That’s the highest they’ve been in 22 years. The numbers started to slowly dip, then they took a bit of a nosedive around 2015 when there were 36.6 million viewers. 2018 saw 26.5 million viewers, 2019 gained about 3 million more than that, but then 2020 brought in only 23.6 million viewers. And last year’s ceremony got a dismal 9.85 million watchers. Seth Rogen is not a statistician or a Neilsen TV ratings heir, so he can only speculate on why those numbers keep dropping. According to Seth, the movie business is the only industry that really cares who wins what award, and everyone else could be apathetic to that fact. via Insider:
“I don’t get why movie people care so much if other people care what awards we give ourselves,” Rogen told Insider during an interview with Paul Rudd about their Super Bowl commercial for Lay’s potato chips.
“To me, maybe people just don’t care. I don’t care who wins the automobile awards. No other industry expects everyone to care about what awards they shower upon themselves. Maybe people just don’t care. Maybe they did for a while and they stopped caring. And why should they?”
Seth’s argument isn’t an air-tight one, of course. There are some people who really do care which movies win awards. Then again, you have to count on those people to have seen the movies nominated, and that’s not always going to be the case. Plus, the ceremony is usually about four hours long, and even people who like the Oscars have a hard time committing that much of their lives to such a drawn-out, dragged-out insufferable-at-times showbiz industry circle jerk that sometimes pays off in the form of Glenn Close getting nasty with her bad self.
But this is the first time Seth Rogen has dragged awards shows. Only a few months ago, Seth Rogen appeared at the Primetime Emmy Awards as a presenter and asked why the hell they were even having the Emmys. Now he’s asking who even watches the Oscars. I know Seth said that he doesn’t care who wins the automobile awards, but with the way his industry bridge-burning is going, those auto awards might be the only show where he’s welcome as a presenter. Maybe even a host? To be honest, Seth might actually have a better time at the car show.
Pic: INSTAR