Television audiences for the major entertainment awards have declined markedly from their peaks. The decline is real, sustained, and shared across most of the big ceremonies.
The explanations offered tend to be about the shows themselves — too long, too political, wrong hosts. Those may all be true and none of them explains a decline that's this consistent across ceremonies with quite different characteristics.
The nominees changed
The structural cause, and I think it accounts for more than everything else combined.
Award ceremonies were once celebrations of films most of the audience had seen. The nominees included the year's biggest hits, and viewers watched with a stake in the outcome.
That's no longer true. The films nominated for the major prizes are frequently mid-budget dramas that a substantial share of the audience hasn't watched, and in many cases hasn't had convenient access to.
The reason isn't snobbery on the part of voters, exactly. It's that the kind of film that wins awards and the kind that dominates the box office have diverged. The commercial centre moved towards large franchise productions; the critical centre stayed with character-driven drama.
When those two things overlapped, the ceremony was a mass event. When they separated, it became a niche one.
The live television problem
The second factor, and it applies to nearly all live television that isn't sport.
A three-and-a-half-hour ceremony requires sitting through a great deal of material to see a small number of moments you care about. Every one of those moments is available as a clip within minutes.
The rational behaviour is not to watch and to catch the clips afterwards, and that's what a large share of the potential audience does.
This isn't a failure of the ceremony. It's what happens to any long-form live format when highlights become instantly available. Live sport resists it because the outcome matters in real time and spoilers are unavoidable; an awards ceremony has neither property.
The monoculture question
A broader point. These ceremonies functioned partly as an annual convergence — a moment when a large share of the audience was engaged with the same set of cultural objects.
That convergence has weakened generally, and not only for awards. The share of the population watching any given thing has fallen because there's more of everything and no scheduling constraint forcing people together.
An awards show is a monoculture institution operating in a fragmented environment. It's asking a mass audience to care about a shared set of works at a time when there isn't a shared set of works.
The campaign economy
Something that's changed the character of these events and is rarely discussed publicly.
Awards campaigning is a substantial industry. Studios and distributors spend significant sums on screenings, advertising to voters, and consultants who specialise in the process.
The consequence is that outcomes reflect campaign effort as well as merit. A well-funded campaign for a modest film can outperform a strong film with no campaign behind it.
This is widely known within the industry and generates a certain cynicism that leaks into coverage. It's difficult to sustain a sense of occasion around a result that people believe was substantially purchased.
What still works
Some things about these ceremonies remain genuinely valuable.
They surface films that would otherwise go unseen. A nomination measurably increases viewership for smaller productions, and for many the awards season is the only marketing they get.
They create a moment for craft categories — editing, sound, production design — that receive attention nowhere else, and the people in those fields value it enormously.
And the moments that do land travel very widely. A genuinely surprising or emotional acceptance can reach an audience many times the size of the live viewership, which suggests the format's cultural function survives even as its television function declines.
What would help
Shorter. Two hours is achievable and the reasons it doesn't happen are commercial rather than editorial.
Better access to the nominees. A ceremony celebrating films most viewers can't easily watch is asking a lot. Coordinated availability of nominated titles in the weeks before would help considerably.
And a more honest relationship with the clip economy. Producing a ceremony designed to generate shareable moments rather than one designed for uninterrupted viewing would acknowledge how the audience actually consumes it, and might make the live show better rather than worse.
The international audience
One counter-trend worth noting: while domestic television audiences have fallen, the international audience for these ceremonies has held up better and in some markets grown.
That reflects the globalisation of the industry itself — more international nominees, more co-productions, and streaming distribution that makes nominated work available worldwide simultaneously.
It also changes what the ceremonies are for. An event whose live domestic audience is shrinking while its global clip audience grows is no longer primarily a television programme. Several organisers appear to understand this and are producing accordingly, which is probably the right response even if it makes the live broadcast a slightly odd artefact.