At its best, the Academy Awards serve as part of the national (and increasingly international) season of the year. Long before hashtags, nominated films reflected what was “trending” in our minds. Platoon (1986) and The Hurt Locker (2009) revealed the hard facts and cultural assumptions of very different wars. Wall Street (1987) and The Big Short (2015) examined two sides of the same ego-driven coin. When art and technology converge around this cultural mirror, the Oscars become a microcosm of larger behavioral shifts. The event was expanded to not only express our collective concerns, but comment directly on where our attention is directed.
Irony has no sense of humor. The Oscars, America’s most-watched awards show celebrating the storytelling of the big screen, is headed to YouTube in 2029, a digital space often accessed on ever-shrinking screens for a few minutes at a time. Once a pillar of the monoculture that united Hollywood and its consumer segments, the awards show loses its gravitas to endless new niches.
For the first time, the Oscars are chasing the audience rather than leading it.
Total attention in the age of Entertainment Everywhere
You don’t need to be reminded that the Academy Awards are so bloody spectacular that it deserves its own Makeup nomination. The event failed to break 20 million viewers from 2021 to 2025 after decades of easily missing that mark. Its decline is telling how viewers use media these days. We are now in the age of Entertainment Everywhere.
The US audience was blown away 16.7 trillion streaming minutes in 2025, according to Nielsen. Instagram has developed an application for the TV screen. Podcasts are now on Netflix. You can watch a creator play video games on YouTube or Twitch while playing the same game on your phone. You can build a whole world in Minecraft and Roblox! Award shows don’t just compete with their late-night TV shows. They compete with all digital ecosystems.
The 1980s and 90s often saw as many as 50 million Americans watching the Academy Awards in a culturally emotional, mass gathering. Today, our cultural input is determined by personal recommendation algorithms.
Mainstream blockbusters constantly struggle to score, while smaller acclaimed films don’t always appeal or stick with audiences. Four of this year’s 10 best picture nominees (Bugonia, Hamnet, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent) failed to gross more than $50 million worldwide. Two nominees (Frankenstein, Train Dreams) are Netflix exclusive titles, namely historically seeing a sharp decline in betrothal. This has been more or less for the lesson as we progress through the 21st century of film.
I love arthouse films as much as the next cinephile. But the recognition of awards no longer motivates the masses. So if your Best Picture slate is filled with more The Maestros again Fabelmans than Top shot: Mavericks again Barbies, you won’t capture much attention.
Social media has shattered the Hollywood mystique
An audience used to interacting with celebrities only through traditional filtered channels: magazine cover stories, E! Channel, and dial-up internet (cut to Gen Z’s collective shudder). But today’s celebrity has gone directly to consumers. Social media creates unrestricted bridges to and from fan bases.
This has devalued the celebrity in ways that may have contributed to the Oscars’ decline in cultural relevance. As it’s known on live TV, the awards show once offered rare access to Hollywood’s biggest stars decked out in the best (and most flawed) fashions. But the novelty of celebrities is gone now that fans have 24/7 access to their favorite figures. Why watch an hour of the red carpet to catch a glimpse of Zendaya’s dress as she showcases her fashion to over 176 million Instagram followers? Hollywood’s long-fenced gate has been breached from the inside.
Young, social media-driven moviegoers, an audience of nearly 6.7 million American adults, are twice as likely as the average person to be influenced by online creators and a higher index on multiple streaming platforms, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I serve as Director of Data and Content Strategy. But the pop culture conversation continues to happen on Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Letterboxd and memes on all of the above. The overall live audience is small, and the viral load is a little more centralized. The source of influence has changed from the big screen to the phone screen.
The goal of YouTube’s migration is clear. The Academy wants to reach and recruit younger viewers, be more accessible to international audiences, and keep up with modern viewing behavior. But there are logistical challenges.
YouTube’s reported nine-person commitment bested Disney’s eight-figure offer for Oscars rights, but the platform lacks experience producing live events in-house. Broadcasting is difficult to match the broad reach of broadcasting. YouTube’s special NFL game in September drew 17.3 million viewers worldwide, down from the 18.7 million viewers the NFL averaged per game last season on linear TV and broadcast platforms. Changing distribution platforms is not a guarantee of an immediate audience increase.
The popularity of the Oscars has declined due to revolutionary changes that are reshaping audiences and industries. The proliferation and fragmentation of social media, the loss of monoculture, the visibility and reach of massive celebrities, and changing tastes have all changed the game. The cultural shift revealed in the Best Picture contenders now stands in the shadow of what the festival has to say about cultural decline as a whole.
Eschewing traditional distribution for a more modern alternative makes a certain amount of long-term sense. But it’s also permission. The Oscars no longer set the cultural agenda. The best the nearly 100-year-old Academy Awards can hope for today is to try to keep up.
