The Oscars Including Twitter’s Top Fan-Voted Film Is Dumb, Shameless, And Crass

The Hollywood Reporter is exclusively reporting that the Oscars, in what appears to be an acknowledgement that their ratings are abysmal and don’t look to fare any better this year, will be including in their telecast the results of a twitter hashtag campaign #OscarsFanFavorite for what the fan considers the best movie of the year.

Any movie can be nominated under this hashtag, and randomly selected tweeters will be able to present an Oscar at the ceremony in 2023.

There are other promotions related to this, but honestly, who cares, this is such a dumb mistake indicative with how out of touch the Oscars are with the moviegoing public.

Let’s list a few reasons:

1)      Twitter users are a small, biased slice of America

a.       Only about 22% of Americans use twitter, and a tiny fraction of that send tweets.

b.       Twitter users tend to be more educated, younger, richer, and lean democrat. This is not a pejorative by itself, but it is a clear bias towards types of movies that this demographic will favor (Think MCU movies along with movies like “Don’t Look Up”)

2)      Twitter voters do not resemble real life movie watchers

a.       Twitter in general doesn’t resemble real life; it breeds toxicity, encourages extreme, hateful statements through its rewards system (likes, retweets, etc.), and punishes thoughtfulness while rewarding binary values.

We should not care one iota what these people think the best movie of the year is

3)      There are so many better ways to sample the public than twitter

a.       We’re not opposed to the concept of polling the public for their best movie of the year and publishing those results on the Oscar telecast. However, twitter hashtag campaigns are one of the least secure and unscientific ways to do this. A phone survey, a digital survey, big focus groups, or even a website dedicated to collecting votes could all target a representative sample size of movie goers and get their thoughts.

A twitter campaign is nonsense from start to finish.

4)      This is a stunt designed for cheap publicity to cover up their real issues

a.       There are several reasons why the Oscars telecast has lost relevance, but the big fundamental issue is they cater any movie with a hint of mass appeal to global markets, which leaves out a lot of the movies from yesteryear who were content to make $60 million box office on a $25 million budget. Its go big or go really small, and the small movies can’t have expensive destination shooting locations or have action set pieces that taken time and money.

Hollywood knows this, and they don’t care, because they think its unfixable. They’re happy to make billions on IP properties, and they view Oscar bait movies as a way to keep their big movie stars engaged and happy.

So now all they think if they solve their ratings issue with a twitter hashtag campaign, they won’t be embarrassed into admitting nobody cares about their prestige movies.

If they keep these stunts, up, nobody will care about their telecasts either. They would have nobody to blame but themselves.