The Roundtable: After the Oscars, Is Cinema in Crisis?
Editor's Note: Welcome to our monthly roundtable discussion. Each month, our five student editors will come together to debate a major issue shaping our world. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Saerom Kim: The Academy Awards were this month, and it was a night of glamour and celebration for the movie industry. But it also feels like the Oscars are happening at a time when the very idea of "the movies" is in crisis. The pandemic accelerated the shift to streaming, and the box office is increasingly dominated by a handful of massive superhero franchises. So I want to start with a big question: do the Oscars still matter as a cultural event?
Anthony Min: From a business perspective, their relevance is definitely waning. The television ratings for the ceremony have been in a steady decline for years. An Oscar win used to guarantee a significant box office bump for a film, but that effect has diminished in the streaming era. For the big studios, the Oscars are becoming less of a financial driver and more of a legacy PR event. The real money is in the big, franchise-able intellectual property (IP), the very kind of films that the Academy usually overlooks in favor of smaller, "prestige" dramas.
Minwoo Jung: I think the Oscars' declining relevance is a symptom of a broader trend: the fragmentation of global culture. For decades, Hollywood was the undisputed center of global popular culture. The Oscars were a global event because everyone had seen the same movies. Today, that's no longer the case. A huge hit in the United States might not make a dent in the box office in Korea or India, where local film industries are stronger than ever. The idea of a single, global "movie of the year" feels like an outdated concept from a more unipolar world.
Yonghyuk Choi: It's the "long tail" effect that we see in all media now. The audience has splintered. In the past, there were only a few channels, so everyone watched the same thing. Now, with a thousand streaming services, everyone is watching something different. In sports, you see this with the decline of the "monoculture" events. The Olympics and the World Cup are still huge, but they don't capture 100% of the public's attention the way they used to. The Oscars are facing the same challenge.
Saerom Kim: But don't they still have a role to play in elevating films that would otherwise be ignored? I probably would not have heard of, or sought out, some of the smaller international films that were nominated this year if it weren't for the Oscars. It still serves as a powerful curatorial function, a way of telling the audience, "Hey, this is a piece of art that is worth your time." In a world of infinite content, that kind of curatorship feels more valuable than ever.
Yehee Jung: I agree with that. There's a signaling value to the awards. But I also think the kind of movies that get celebrated often reflects a very specific, and often limited, worldview. The Academy has made efforts to become more diverse and international, which is a positive step. But it's still an industry talking to itself, celebrating its own idea of what constitutes a "great" film. I wonder if it has the ability to truly reflect the diversity of global cinematic storytelling.
Anthony Min: Ultimately, the crisis of the Oscars is a reflection of the crisis of the movie theater itself. The business model of the theater is under assault from the convenience of streaming and the quality of home entertainment systems. The films that can still reliably get people out of their homes are the massive, special-effects-driven spectacles. That's a very different kind of movie from the character-driven dramas that the Academy has historically loved to reward. The cultural institution and the business model are pulling in opposite directions.
Final Thoughts
Yonghyuk Choi: The Oscars feel like a legacy team playing in an old stadium, while the rest of the league has moved on to a faster, more global game.
Anthony Min: From a business perspective, the Oscars are a brand in decline, a once-powerful asset that is losing its market share in the attention economy.
Saerom Kim: In a fragmented world, they still serve as one of the last, best signposts we have for discovering films of real artistic merit.
Yehee Jung: The Academy's ongoing struggle to diversify its membership and its nominees is a necessary, if painful, process of trying to make a legacy institution relevant to a 21st-century world.
Minwoo Jung: The declining global relevance of the Oscars is another small symptom of the end of the era of American cultural hegemony.
What do you think? Do the Oscars still matter to you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
