By Jonathan Morris, Antiscribe.com

It has now been about three weeks since the 2012 Academy Awards telecast aka “the Oscars,” aired.  Generally speaking, the Oscars represent one of the biggest televised events of the year, typically second only to the Super Bowl here in the United States; unlike the Super Bowl, however, the Academy Awards have not been setting new ratings records each year, instead having struggled with trying to ebb an annual ratings decline.  This year saw the Oscars stem that decline, briefly, with the much-ballyhooed return of Billy Crystal to hosting duties; despite that, it still garnered lower ratings than this year’s Grammys (which were admittedly inflated by the death of Whitney Houston the day before), the demographics for the show in the key 18-49 demographic were unremarkably flat with earlier years, and the show received fairly poor reviews almost across the board. What bothered me most about this year’s Oscars, though, was just how depressing and disheartening they were about the movies themselves, and how uncertain they seemed about the very medium they were ostensibly celebrating. Continue reading “A Desperate Nostalgia: Hollywood, the 2012 Oscars, and the Way We Watch Movies Now” →