Only The Muppets Can Save The Oscars

Note: This essay was originally posted on my Patreon over a month ago after The Oscars aired.

Last night's Academy Awards ceremony was probably the best the show has been since pre-2020. That's an insanely low bar, though; this year's broadcast was a triumph only because it managed rise above being downright unwatchable.

Here's the thing about The Oscars: I love watching them every year, but I cannot imagine any normal person enjoying the experience. 

For me, the one awards category during The Oscars broadcast where I tend to zone out is Best Live-Action Short Film; usually, I never got around to watching any of the nominees, so it all just sounds like noise and names to me. And when the winners come up on stage and give a fond and sincere speech, I think "that's nice for them. I suppose I should get around to watching that film sometime." Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

But here's the thing I've realized recently: that feeling I have during that one obscure category is what the average mainstream audience member feels watching every category. If there's a single biggest threat looming in the way of The Oscars being watched by the masses, it's that nobody has watched (or sometimes even heard about) any of the movies being nominated and awarded. And who would want to watch a 4-hour show celebrating a bunch of movies they've never seen?

There was a time, or so I've been told, when the general public was in-touch enough to actually know most of the nominees in a given year. But that ship pretty much sailed when theme park movies became the only thing we see in theaters. Now, unless we can figure out some way to get people to see better movies more often again, the question becomes "will the audience change, or will The Oscars change?"

It's so easy to throw out snide comments like "The Oscars are just a big party for Hollywood to pat themselves on the back," or "I never watch The Oscars because awards don't mean anything," or "The Oscars don't matter," but the truth is that if you care about any particular artists achieving more recognition and awareness, awards do matter. Audiences don't often know about the nominees, but they do know about the winners. Try getting on a plane sometime and looking around at what all the passengers are watching on their little TV screen; there's always going to be a decent percentage of passengers watching whatever won Best Picture that year. Not just that, but if we really value art, celebrating the artists who made good movies should be considered worthwhile! Even beyond some utilitarian career-furthering purpose, I want to live in a world where beautiful art is rewarded with praise and appreciation.

It seems like there are two ways The Academy could approach the predicament in front of them: one would be by asking "how do we get normies back on board with watching the show?" and the other would be by asking "how can we make the show better for the people who still do watch?"

Spoiler alert: the first question is the one that's been addressed time and time again, with little thought given to the second. The dream of "getting normies back on board" with The Oscars has been the impossible task The Academy has been trying to crack for years now, and with pretty downright disastrous results. Feeble attempts at getting normies back onboard were what gave us the "Oscars Fan Favorite" awards that Snyder Cut bots spammed and managed to win last year. They're also what has given us the recent brand of self-deprecating Oscar humor where the host is always joking about how the show is too long, Hollywood is elite and out-of-touch, and nobody has actually watched the movies nominated. Last year, Wanda Sykes quipped that she'd never even finished The Power of The Dog in front of the film's director. Gross! The issue is this: mainstream viewers range from ambivalent to vocally loathsome toward The Oscars. Every time Hollywood tries to do something to appease those viewers, they end up just performatively loathing themselves, and it's not only insincere, but it utterly defeats the purpose of watching something to celebrate artists.

At the end of the day, I don't care about The Oscars, the public doesn't care about The Oscars, and I really don't think The Academy should care about The Oscars. What I care about, what The Academy should care about, and what people who still watch The Oscars care about, is one simple thing: movies, and celebrating them in an enjoyable way.

So, how do we fix The Oscars? I've got one, single, ultimate solution.

Let. The Muppets. Host. 

This sounds like a joke, but it's not. If there's anything the last few years have shown, it's that The Oscars thrive on chaos, and The Muppets are chaos incarnate. But it's more than that, because The Muppets are also charismatic red-carpet movie stars in their own right who can banter and bounce off just about anyone.

Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and Gonzo The Great would bring much-needed spontaneity and innocent silliness to the show, allow famous actors to appear onstage with them (always a good look and career dream for anyone,) and indicate to the world that Hollywood doesn't take itself too seriously. 

If it's the usual brand of eye-rolling self-deprecation you're looking for, let Statler & Waldorf take that job and create a nice recurring conflict between Kermit (the purehearted believer in cinema) and the critics. The self-aware anti-Hollywood humor can persist, but you can pit it against a more optimistic view of cinema that comes from our beloved Muppets. There's your dramatic arc for the whole broadcast!

The Muppets, after all, have always been tied to performance and the movie industry; the original Muppet Movie from 1979 is all about Kermit and Fozzie traveling to Hollywood to make their first big motion picture. There's a starry-eyed sincerity about the magic of moviemaking in Kermit's showmanship, in Gonzo's eyes, in Fozzie's jokes, that The Academy sorely needs. And not to mention, they're owned by Disney/ABC.

It doesn't have to just be a one-time event, either; each year you could utilize new Muppet characters, have other celebrities co-host with them, create a running gag where Miss Piggy tries to steal the spotlight from an original song performance every time, and let The Muppets make parody versions of each movie nominated. Maybe if the pattern continues, knowing that The Muppets will make parodies of each nominee would actually encourage audiences to try to see them in advance again! It might be the closest thing we'd ever get to a true return-to-form for the original Muppet Show, but even better: there's nobody, film fan or normie, who would leave unsatisfied. The questions of "how do we get normies back on board with watching the show?" and "how can we make the show better for the people who still do watch?" would both be resolved at the same time. Hollywood's reputation is saved, The Oscars viewership is saved, The Muppets are saved, and all it takes is a little sense of humor and ego-death on the part of Hollywood. It's possible to have fun without hating yourself!

I've got other ideas about how to fix the show: make it longer, target it explicitly toward cinephiles, produce exclusive behind-the-scenes material to air throughout the ceremony that really dives into the complexities of filmmaking, show more clips from the movies nominated and explore their themes and relevance to the world, generally take the movies more seriously...but all of that pales in comparison to the final solution. The Muppet solution. It's still possible to save it all. And I think it's time to play the music. It's time to light the lights.