Studios to AMPAS: Fix your shit quick, or else.

Last night I made an off-the-cuff remarks about how I wouldn’t mind if the Oscars just went full retard this year, and handed out some truly gag-inducing awards to match their batch of gasp-inducing nominations. I’d much rather be a worthy nominee who goes down in Oscar history as having been robbed, instead of being forever maligned and ridiculed with fickle fanboy backlash. Londoner mistakenly thought I was trying to put a hex on the ceremony, or trying to turn readers off:

Ryan, please. You’re on an Oscar site. Don’t encourage people to hate the Oscars! That’s biting the hand that feeds you, or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, or some other phrase like that…

First of all, re: “the hand that feeds you” — if only. But aside from that illusion, all I’m asking is that the Academy feel some consequences of their screwball attitude that an industry needn’t care what anyone else thinks, feels or wants.

Apparently The New York Times today is hearing the same sort of rumbling, only they call it “grumblings”:

Insiders read the snub more as a rejection by the academy, once comfortably regarded as an adjunct of the industry that created it, of what the inner circle does best: Build complex, monumental films that move millions.

To keep the mood here from curdling wouldn‚Äôt have taken much of a bow toward the audience. …But the academy gave no points for popularity. And the company folks noticed.

Some executives, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their relationships with those who vote for prizes, have said in the last few weeks that they do not expect their studios to make any movie in the foreseeable future as a specific Oscar bet.

This is a sea change, gang. This is what we’ve been talking about here for weeks: relevance, Oscar-bait and switch tactics, bang for the marketing buck. This is very possibly the year that the Academy gets its comeuppance, and we can at least be proud that we tried to warn them for weeks.

And here’s why:

As little as a year ago, the prestige that came with an Oscar contender could seem worth at least a small financial loss to studios that could always make up for it with their summer hits.

In tougher times, not so…

If companies like Paramount, Universal and the now-smaller DreamWorks also step back, the academy — protective of an enterprise that brings it more than $70 million a year — will almost certainly start looking for adjustments to a system that still needs big stars and the big studios that pay them.

The last significant structural change to the Oscars occurred in 2004, when they were moved up a month, to late February from late March. The shift was meant to lighten the expense and fatigue factor of a movie awards season that was then consuming nearly half the year. The next step could well be Oscars in January. That idea has been popping up in conversation here lately.

For more on these “structural changes you should click to the New York Times and read this important article top to bottom.

But I’ll go a step further and suggest that structural changes are not gonna be any more effective than rearranging dick-heads on the Titanic. The Academy, the critics, the guilds, the entire system needs to begin to see that art and and commerce are not mutually exclusive and start to show some respect to the films that prove the converse: they’re mutually dependent.

Enjoy the party tonight, AMPAS. And please do something surprising, so the rest of us can too.