Fragmented audiences united by program's crossover appeal
03/25/2001
By Ed Bark / The Dallas Morning News
Lights! Cameras! Ratings!
The annual Academy Awards ceremony still has an abundance of all three in times when television is getting down to a bare handful of communal viewing experiences.
Sunday night's Oscar telecast, January's Super Bowl XXXV and May's final episode of Survivor: The Australian Outback likely will be this year's only water-cooler-worthy attractions. The American way of watching TV en masse has been waylaid in the last two decades by an explosion of channel choices, multiple sets in most homes, the advent of VCRs and the onset of the Internet.
"Now you can get the left-handed woman's cooking show if you want," said Andrew Bergstein, an instructor in marketing at Penn State University's Smeal College of Business Administration. "I don't disagree with individual choice. But if there's no shared experience, you could have some erosion of the culture. You do end up, I think, having some of the social fabric beginning to melt away."
The Oscars continue to cut across age and gender lines, with the show's ratings still ascending against the grain. Its widespread appeal, not only in the United States but globally, makes it a uniter, not a divider in a seriously fragmented TV universe.
Professor Laura Shamas, a self-described cultural mythologist who teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California, said the country sorely needs "more collective experiences and entertainment rituals" of this sort.
An escalating number of school shootings illustrates "how increasingly isolated our culture has become," she said. "We're losing our commonality, and indeed television used to serve that function. You could depend on people watching the same things and then having a discourse on it. Now we don't do that much anymore, and the standards for what's acceptable on TV have changed, too. They've gotten lower."
As has the visibility of TV's top-rated shows.
The Beverly Hillbillies, prime-time's runaway No. 1 show in the 1963-64 season, was watched weekly in 39.1 percent of the nation's 51.3 million homes with televisions, according to Nielsen Media Research.
At the peak of its popularity in the still largely pre-cable 1980-'81 season, Dallas held sway in 34.5 percent of a considerably more populous America's 79.9 million TV homes.
Last season's highest-rated series, Tuesday's editions of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, managed to be seen in just 18.7 percent of 100.8 million homes.
Some of TV's longtime special events, including the Miss America pageant, the World Series and the Olympics, also have seen their Nielsen ratings decline significantly. Even the Super Bowl has been losing some of its kick since national cable subscribership first exceeded 50 percent in 1987.
That year's game was watched in 45.8 percent of 87.4 million TV homes. Only one game since then, 1996's Super Bowl XXX between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers, has bettered that percentage, and only by two-tenths of a point. The latest matchup, between the Baltimore Ravens and New York Giants, was seen in 40.4 percent of 102.2 million TV homes.
Meanwhile, the resplendent, resilient Oscars have been acting as though none of this is happening. The show's 29.2 household rating last year was better than the 27.5 percent showing in 1987. Only the 1997 telecast, with a 27.4 rating, has ranked below the 1987 show.
Ms. Shamas, who also is the editor and creator of HeadlineMuse.com, thinks she knows why Oscar will never fade to John Doe.
"We watch because the Academy Awards are on an archetypal plane," she writes in the "e-zine's" latest edition. "The huge cinema screen elevates films and film stars to a larger-than-life mythic realm. One night a year, we can see our celluloid gods and goddesses in their 'civilian' clothes of haute couture. We can review ... as a collective ritual the key imaginal figures and motifs as featured in pop culture for the last 12 months."
Marketing helps, too.
"They've managed to keep reaching this broad audience and have built up both their history and expectations," said Michael Real, director of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and author of a paper on audience perceptions of the Oscars. "And no one is better at promotion than Hollywood. In many ways, it's a three-hour commercial for the film industry."
Recent telecasts actually have topped four hours. But Oscar's running time has become a reliable running joke for the program's high-profile hosts. During the home stretch of the 1995 show, host David Letterman almost recovered from his opening "Uma/Oprah" chant by cracking, "I know it's been a long night. But remember one thing: The continental breakfast is included."
The performance of the host is but one of many Oscar night subplots. Steve Martin, in the spotlight Sunday, hopes to measure up to esteemed emcees such as Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal.
Mr. Carson, who hosted five Oscar shows, enshrined himself during one opening monologue by observing, "I see a lot of new faces – especially on the old faces."
Viewers also can agonize over their Oscar pool picks, critique production numbers and applaud or pan the fashion sense of Hollywood's latest parade of red-carpet-walkers.
On this last front, Joan Rivers' all-purpose "Who are you wearing?" query is starting to rival, "And the winner is..."
"The Super Bowl is about warriors," Ms. Shamas said. "The Oscars give us our gods and goddesses. Can they stand up to the scrutiny? If they seem too human, we're going to attack that because we want them to be heavenly."
Penn State University's Mr. Bergstein said it's one of the few times he can bank on most of his 125 students bringing a shared experience to class the next morning.
"There aren't many benchmarks anymore, unless it's something enormous," he said. "Usually not 10 percent of them saw the same TV show the previous night. But the American public, and the world public, has a continuing interest in the movies.
"We've always adored celebrities. And movie stars are more than that. They're our royalty."
