{"id":1664,"date":"2011-03-02T05:00:29","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=1664"},"modified":"2011-03-02T05:00:29","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T12:00:29","slug":"the-young-hip-oscars-a-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=1664","title":{"rendered":"The “Young & Hip” (Oscars) a Bust"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the fresh faces of James Franco and Anne Hathaway co-hosting the 2011 Academy Awards, this was the year for the Oscars to rebound with the viewing public.\u00a0 Wrong.\u00a0 What some have described as one of the worst Oscar telecasts in history <\/a>seems to be accurate, if the Neilson Ratings are any indication.\u00a0 In the coveted\u00a018-49 demographic, the Oscars were off by 11% from last year and were\u00a0the next-to-last watched since Neilson began tracking the demographic in 1992.\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0 So much for “hip and cool” to attract a bigger\u00a0audience!\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Hollywood elites — increasingly out-of-touch with mainstream America — continue to produce drivel like this past Sunday’s show, the American public will stop watching — at the theaters and in their homes.\u00a0 Does anyone in Hollywood have a clue or even care?\u00a0 They continue to make excuses as to why box office numbers are down instead of looking in the mirror and realizing that they have become so radicalized that they have “lost” a large segment of our country.\u00a0 And, they will most likely not be able to get them back.<\/p>\n

I am one of those that the Academy has lost.\u00a0 I used to love to watch the\u00a0Academy Awards show every year.\u00a0\u00a0 From\u00a0the opening number to the always late (at least on the east coast) final award of the night for Best Picture, viewing the Oscar\u00a0broadcast was entertaining.<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the way, however, the show became less and less\u00a0enjoyable to watch.\u00a0 When I would attempt to sit through the annual telecast, I would find myself increasingly frustrated at the nominated actors, actresses, directors,\u00a0and movies.\u00a0 When Michael Moore won\u00a0the 2003\u00a0Academy Award for Best Documentary for his anti-gun propaganda piece, “Bowling\u00a0for Columbine,” <\/em>that was about the final straw.\u00a0 I won’t even comment on the pathetic Oscar\u00a0given to Al Gore (you know the awards\u00a0had truly jumped the shark when this happened).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other than a few minutes\u00a0here or there over the last ten years, I can’t tell you the last time that I sat down to watch any significant portion of the Academy Awards.\u00a0 This year, I did\u00a0not watch any of the broadcast.\u00a0 And, I really didn’t miss it.\u00a0 That’s because\u00a0things have changed.\u00a0 Oh,\u00a0 I don’t think that I changed that much, but it sure does seem that the biggest awards show of them all has changed.\u00a0 And,\u00a0the “talent” that the Oscar telecast showcases seems to have changed a lot\u00a0since I first started watching back in the early 1980’s.\u00a0 We’ve sure come a long way from Johnny Carson and even Billy Crystal.\u00a0 I think I might take Whoopi Goldberg as host at this point!<\/p>\n

Do the Oscars need to keep up with the times?\u00a0 No doubt.\u00a0 Are changes needed to reach a broader audience?\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 However, what appears to have been a sure-fire formula for success has backfired.\u00a0 When you take what is tested and beloved by millions and turn it into some radically different show, you will lose your audience.\u00a0 It sounds counter-intuitive to think that two young, “hip and cool” attractive stars like Franco and Hathaway would bomb, but that’s exactly what happened.<\/p>\n

You can blame the producers or the writers (both easy scapegoats), but in the end, the two up-and-coming celebrities did not connect with the audience primarily because they were so radically different from the majority of their audience.\u00a0 If you look at the Neilson numbers, the worst showing was among men, ages 25-54.\u00a0 I can certainly relate to that.<\/p>\n

You see, most people are not “hip and cool” nor do they particularly desire to be so.\u00a0 However, the powers-that-be always seem to overestimate the audience who will relate to “hip and cool.”\u00a0 They somehow think that “hip and cool” attracts a wide audience when in fact it does the opposite.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe a few minutes with the “hip and cool” crowd would suffice, but\u00a0much more than that will be a turn-off for most folks.\u00a0 It’s not that we dislike\u00a0people who are\u00a0“hip and cool”\u00a0(although some we dislike more than others).\u00a0 It’s just that we don’t want to be condescended to like many<\/del>\u00a0most of the hipsters have a tendency to do, whether they realize it or not.\u00a0 It is off-putting and really not something that\u00a0most people want\u00a0to be willingly subjected to.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the “hip and cool” folks don’t really understand this concept.\u00a0 Instead of dialing back the hipness factor, they turn it on full speed.\u00a0 Rather than admit that being “hip and cool” is not as popular as they think it is, this same crowd will continue to impose their will on the majority of us who are decidedly neither hip nor cool.<\/p>\n

I wish I could say that the “hip and cool”\u00a0disease was relegated to Hollywood.\u00a0 In our modern culture, however, the hipster bug has infected just about every aspect of our life and has even infiltrated the church.\u00a0\u00a0How else to explain 50-year old pastors with bleach blond hair\u00a0wearing jeans, half-unbuttoned shirts (untucked of course), and sitting on stools trying to appear 30 years\u00a0Young(er) than they are?<\/p>\n

The bad news is that the “hip and cool”\u00a0crowd is\u00a0still in charge and think that everybody is going to follow whatever\u00a0it is that they are selling.\u00a0 The good news is that the audience for this kind of hipster madness seems to be shrinking, if it ever was as big as the “hip and cool” people say that it was in the first place.\u00a0 When the audience tunes out in record numbers,\u00a0the “hip and cool” folks just might begin to notice.\u00a0 But then again, I could be wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the fresh faces of James Franco and Anne Hathaway co-hosting the 2011 Academy Awards, this was the year for the Oscars to rebound with the viewing public.\u00a0 Wrong.\u00a0 What some have described as one of the worst Oscar telecasts in history seems to be accurate, if the Neilson Ratings are any indication.\u00a0 In the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,26],"tags":[56,57,91,157,253,3373,491,493,3385,539,567,751,3393,1046],"class_list":["post-1664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-hollywood","tag-academy-awards","tag-academy-of-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences","tag-anne-hathaway","tag-billy-crystal","tag-cool","tag-culture","tag-hip","tag-hipsters","tag-hollywood","tag-james-franco","tag-johnny-carson","tag-oscars","tag-southern-baptist-convention","tag-whoopi-goldberg"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-qQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}