The State of the Race: How the Oscars Can Avoid the Mistakes of the Emmys

Watching the Emmys was a surreal experience for me. Though many here at AD write about the Emmys I don’t pay as much attention to them as I do the Oscars. I was watching them as an outsider who isn’t all that familiar with most of the nominees, save for a few here or there. Despite the fact that streaming has made many of the shows readily available, I just hadn’t watched them. But like many others, I was eager for things to go back to “normal.”

But almost immediately, I became aware of that thing that hovers over almost everything now in our post 2020 world. We know several things are happening at once. Twitter is watching and waiting for anything to be wrong so they can call it out. On the right, they were watching for hypocrisy that they could then call out to expose the left. On the left, they were looking to see whether the Emmys met all of the requirements of right now. I noticed a low-key anxiety on the faces of the participants. Kind of like the family that goes into the water after the shark attacks in Jaws on the 4th of July.

It was never going to be perfect because how do we define perfect now? Perfect for whom? For which group? For which niche? This was not a problem in the past. You didn’t have niche shows. You had primetime. You had network television. Families all sat down together to watch them and watching the Emmys was a celebration of all of the people in all of the shows audiences liked to watch.

It worked together to produce higher ratings. The networks competing for those ratings. The winners maximized income from advertising. Needless to say, things are not like that anymore. It leaves you wondering – what is the purpose of awards shows now? What is the purpose of the Emmys? Right now, to me anyway, it looks to be something similar to what the Oscars are now – a way for the industry to show what it is they stand for. That has made both of these shows very activist driven, particularly in light of the Trump election where an entire underbellly of this country was exposed to the left in a way they most definitely were not prepared for. It has changed both the award shows themselves and who watches them; there is very little doubt that after 2016, both the Emmys and the Oscar ratings took a dive. The 73 million who voted for Trump, for instance, are not invited to watch these shows, and would not want to watch them, so that cuts the audiences in half.

But they really aren’t just alienating the half of the country they obviously despise. They go further than that to alienate people who believe Hollywood, and sports, and every other industry, has “gone woke.” This is obviously a controversial thing to say. The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club. We don’t talk about the elephant in the room. It’s the thing almost everyone thinks, talks about and worries about “off camera” but would never say so in the mainstream. So they have to just go along with it and make the best of it.

The Television Academy, like the Motion Picture Academy, like every other major institution in this country suddenly must present themselves as not just inclusive and diverse, but equitable. What that means is everything is equal across the board. It is not dominated by, built for, and populated by mostly white people – instead it is an array of multicultural white people, along with an equal share of BIPOC. The problem was – despite the record-breaking nominations for non-whites, only white people won the acting awards. All of them.

I guess I’m not sure what they have solved with the way they have re-ordered things to present themselves as something other than what they actually are. Their ratings weren’t worse than they were in 2020 but they weren’t much better either. They were 6 million or so in 2020 and 7 million or so in 2021. They gained back about one million from 2020 but their overall trajectory is pointing downwards. But look at how bad it’s gotten:

The question is, can they fix it? The bigger question is, do they want to fix it?

The problem for a good many people out there in the country is the same problem the left has in general. It is a problem that is as difficult to talk about as it is to solve. It’s difficult to talk about on this site, difficult to talk about on Twitter, difficult to talk about in any media that exists in the mainstream. Most people don’t want to risk any kind of bad reaction to their honesty. So they keep quiet. But plenty of people aren’t keeping quiet about it. The dissenting voices are becoming louder and more popular. One of the reasons is that many people feel frustrated by the way Hollywood uses their power and influence to push for political action. They use Instagram for that, they use their speeches – they loudly broadcast that they belong to one side of the ideological spectrum.

There used to be a time when they didn’t. They used to want to be more tolerant. Some of them still are but they are few and far between. I think personally if the Oscars want to survive they should think about how they can broaden their reach. The Emmys did not do that and that is why their ratings suffered. There isn’t much they can do about the kinds of shows they rewarded, but they did what the Oscars did – they were wearing their “wokeness” on their sleeve. Even Generation Z is getting tired of that. It’s exhausting to watch people trying so hard to look like good people.

They want to be good people doing good things, making the world a better place, not be a white-dominated industry. But in so doing they have shifted their focus away from art and entertainment and more towards activism and that is hurting them with audiences.

When you watch the Emmys, and to a certain extent the Oscars this past year, they talk a good game. They have done what they needed to do to show they are virtuous and inclusive and most definitely not “white-centric.” But in fact, the whole system is set up to largely benefit whites, despite the image they put forth. And only some of that is the fault of the “gone woke” industry. Some of it is due to the strident demands on BIPOC actors and filmmakers to adhere to a certain standard in order to reflect a certain kind of BIPOC ideals. White people, white men especially, continue to get most of the better roles and the more complex roles. They are allowed to be as dark and weird and off-putting and funny as possible, where non-white performers must speak for an entire community.

That greatly limits the kinds of opportunities for black actors, and writers and directors.  Additionally, since the audience is majority white and the membership is majority white, and most are majority “woke,” that means the kinds of material they respond to are the ones that stand for something. They vote for it if they agree with what that show or performer stands for. Take the show Queen Sugar – a show that I think is one of the best on television. But it isn’t so much about activism or even about race. It is about a successful black family in the South – their relationships, their work life, their family life, their struggles. It’s just a solid drama that’s been playing now for several seasons. Can someone explain to me why this industry that is so diverse, so inclusive and so activist has not yet bestowed a single Emmy nomination to Queen Sugar? Do I have that right or am I misreading it? 

“If you build it, they will come.” Well, not always. Who are the Emmy voters? They’re people who like shows like Downton Abbey and The Crown. So why do they pretend like they are anything other than that? Because they think that is the only way to survive now.

The reason I bring this up is not to get screamed at in the comments or get called out on Twitter but simply to say that it is both an illusion and a house of cards. For one thing, it’s artificial, as those who watched the Emmys found out. It isn’t real. It’s artifice. It’s performative. But secondly, and more importantly, audiences are abandoning the shows in droves. They have other options now and are probably going to seek them out. Even if streaming can’t really be measured the same way network television can, if cable news is any indication, the trend is most definitely moving away from MSNBC and CNN towards Fox. It might not be moving in that direction, but the left-leaning outlets are losing viewers and the right-leaning outlets are gaining viewers.

The Emmys weren’t bad overall. They were mildly entertaining, I thought. But if I were the Academy and I wanted more people to watch I would hire a controversial host – someone who doesn’t care what Twitter thinks about them and isn’t trying to obey the commands of the strident orthodoxy and has no problem offending people. I would not play to the niche of Twitter.  I would do what Saturday Night live can no longer do – I would find a comedian to make fun of the left. Even if it makes Twitter mad. Especially if it makes Twitter mad. Ricky Gervais, Dave Chapelle, Kevin Hart, even Ellen DeGeneres. I would shake things up enough that the broader public feels like they can watch too.

I think the Emmys played it way too safe, preached to the choir and delivered something kind of inoffensive and mushy, like a youth group talent show. I think the Oscars should work very hard to subvert that highly mannered game. I don’t think they should pander, or pretend they are something other than what they are. I think they should have the biggest stars in the industry in attendance and the biggest stars even outside the industry. I would break out of the tribalism on the left and broaden the appeal as much as possible by inviting people who do draw big audiences.