The Oscars, Anything to Learn?

The Oscars are by far the Creme del la Crème of the awards shows. They, like the Tonys, have had declining viewership over the last several years. The Oscars took it head on and tried to figure what their problems were and how to fix them. First, they added more movies to the Best Picture category. They noticed that the Best Picture nominees were often leaving out some of the year’s biggest blockbuster movies. Should we add more Plays and Musicals to the Best Play and Musical categories respectively? I am not sure that would solve our problem. Usually our blockbusters do make it onto the nominee list.

Another thing the Oscars did was embrace social media. With their average viewership age at 49.5 they tried to use social media to accomplish a couple of things. The Oscars streamed the nominees live on the Facebook page bringing in 170,000 unique visitors. Then there was my favorite the Oscar iPhone application. You could pick your predictions then see how you faired. They also upgraded the site this year. The goals of all this was to of course get viewership up. But to also enhance the experience and hopefully make people continue the conversations after the awards show was over.

This was the best year for the Hollywood Box Office so let’s see how that relates to their new strategies and lets borrow what we can.