A return to posting! The Boring Oscars.

Wow, who knew I'd lost so much touch with the blog it took me 2 weeks to work out how to login again!!!
Since podcasts are finally finding their feet, I decided to dust off my key typing fingers with the travesty that is now the Oscars.....

Summary: The bottom line is, adding a live Twitter feed to a format that was created 90ish years ago, isn't going to save it. The same exact principles apply to the Olympics. Culture and society has changed as well as desirable media formats. It is questionable that people will appreciate an awards show rooted in politics, PR wars and an incredibly wealthy niche population so far removed from the rest of society.

As a child, the Oscars were a wondrous event. Live, the event was at about 1pm Sydney time, but broadcasters would wait to air the 3 hour extravaganza at prime time in the evening. My brother’s media blackout initiative was enforced and worshipped. Winners were true surprises as much for the actors and for ourselves.

Move forward 10-15 years later. Digital media rears its head.
Media blackout not so difficult because the news cycle is so fast that the who of winning is over within half an hour. Don’t look at Facebook, Twitter or the internet for a few hours and your golden.

I watched the event, a day later with not much effort on the blackout. I fast forwarded most of it. It was genuinely boring. Ali G was ok, but the rest was about a very small and wealthy number of people congratulating each other for an art form. All the winners seem political and devised via backroom channels. The whole thing started out with good intentions 88 years ago, but The Academy Awards has turned into something unsavoury.

The awards don’t match the time we’re in- think Arab Springs, the toppling of conglomerates for bad business practices and Ariana Grande being lampooned for licking doughnuts.
We live in a heavily materialistic society, Hollywood’s A players are the apex, yet most people are turning away from the self-aggrandising nature of these award ceremonies and looking for initiatives which are more meaningful.

It could also lend itself to the fact that movies are just not an occasion like they once were. Downloading and watching a film at home doesn’t give movies the same weight that they were once given.

As I pressed the fast forward button on my PVR remote for the 8th award, I began to realise that these award ceremonies were generated in a different, simpler era. Attempt to bring an event into a modern era by Including tweets and hashtags is just not going to be.
The Olympics faces a similar problem, relying on a new type of media to modernise won’t help what is intrinsically broken. It’s a reformatting of the premise of these events to make them more inclusive and democratic, less about the pomp and bluster, which is what will keep them relevant today.

However, beyond that the lustre is gone. This year’s outfits were underwhelming. It could be because of the boycott that not that many people seemed to be there, but still that just seemed like a whinger upset about a nomination he wasn’t good enough to get