The 94th Academy Awards Winners - Oscars 2022

[Bobby Henderson]

The AMPAS is in a no-win situation here.

First of all, artsy-fartsy movies winning the Best Picture Oscar instead of the year's highest grossing movie is nothing new at all. It's easy to find examples of this over the entire history of the Academy Awards. The AMPAS tried to appease the Joe Six-pack segment of movie fans by expanding the list of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10 in hopes more crowd-pleasing movies would make the cut. That hasn't really worked.

There are movie rival awards programs that cater more to the top money-making movies. The People's Choice Awards are still around. MTV still airs its movie awards show (I'm still trying to figure out why MTV is still called "MTV" since the channel rarely has any fucking thing to do with music at all, so why do they still have an annual music awards show as well as a movie awards show?).

The situation is getting worse for the AMPAS since a growing number of awards-worthy movies are effectively bypassing the theatrical release platform. Fewer grown-up movies more likely to be praised by critics are playing in commercial cinemas.

I still believe a movie should be required to play in at least some theaters in order to be eligible for Oscar nominations. If the feature is really a made-for-TV movie playing on a streaming service then it ought to go into the Emmy's ballpark. The AMPAS has loosened that theatrical release rule since it would otherwise have a much smaller pool of movies to consider for Oscar nominations. Still, the Oscar risks losing its relevance if a growing number of nominated movies are really made-for-TV movies.

I think the declining ratings numbers for the annual Oscars broadcast is a symptom of a larger decline of the entire movie industry. Commercial theaters are hurting pretty bad. I believe the nearly non-existent theatrical release window has severely de-valued many movies. Some of them play exclusively in theaters for a very short amount of time. That also means they have the attention of the general public for a very short amount of time. Once that movie goes to one of the various streaming platforms it quickly gets lost in a big pile of other movies and quickly forgotten.

20 years ago most movies had a far longer period of advertising value. There were weeks or months worth of trailers, TV commercials, billboards, etc leading up to the theatrical release. The movie would play in theaters for at least a couple or so months (unless it was a flop). The film would go into second run. Then there would be an ad campaign for the home video release. When it arrived in brick and mortar video stores there would be lots of copies on the shelves to rent and posters in the store windows. A lot of that physical advertising has vanished. Retail promotion of movies has been reduced to whatever end caps are on display in Walmart or Target. Most retail movies-music-books style stores were put out of business by Amazon. And now streaming services pretty much have physical media on its death bed. Instant gratification tends to cheapen anything that doesn't require any waiting to acquire, see or experience.

I think the way all this ultimately shakes out is with a bunch of commercial theaters disappearing or maybe even the entire theatrical release platform. If theater chains start shuttering dozens or hundreds of locations it's going to kill most of the cinema equipment market. Digital projectors and their associated products will go bye bye. In the future it may literally require a LED-based "jumbotron" display in order to show a movie to a crowd of hundreds of people. Those high-cost devices aren't going to get installed just anywhere. By the time that happens the general public really won't care. Because the "feature" playing on that jumbotron will just be some TV show.

[Martin Brooks]

I don't think theaters will disappear completely, but I think it will be more like legitimate theater in most cities (except New York): they'll eventually be one or two large venues per city. I predict we lose half the movie theaters over the next five years. Faster if either Regal or AMC goes under and no one else takes over those screens.

I think to be eligible for the Oscars, a movie should have to play for at least two weeks in at least ten cities. I think the current rule is one week in Los Angeles.

I also think that a movie should be eligible for the Oscars or the Emmys, but not both. A producer would have to decide which award they want to try for.

[Leo Enticknap]

I think the current rule is one week in Los Angeles.

Yes, Los Angeles being defined as within LA County. This qualification rule has occasionally led to the practice of "four-walling" (renting a theater for a week and then playing your movie in it) in the past, simply to get a movie into contention for Oscar nominations. At the time Netflix bought the Egyptian, it was speculated that their motivation for doing so was in effect four-walling on steroids - why mess around renting a theater when you can buy it outright?! Red State is likely the best known recent film to have been four-walled into Oscar consideration. Another example, though four-walled for a different reason, was Zyzzyx Road, which is claimed to hold the record for the lowest grossing theatrical release in US history ($30 over a one-week run).

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't know if Netflix is going to four-wall a couple or so theaters in LA and maybe NYC for their re-make of All Quiet on the Western Front or do a more legit limited release in multiple cities. I'm not sure any of it matters, it will be available to stream on home TV sets this Friday, the same day the movie opens in theater(s).

I don't think theaters will disappear completely, but I think it will be more like legitimate theater in most cities (except New York): they'll eventually be one or two large venues per city. I predict we lose half the movie theaters over the next five years. Faster if either Regal or AMC goes under and no one else takes over those screens.

What I find especially troubling is companies like Christie or Barco require a certain level of market scale in order to justify developing and selling a product like a professional level digital projector for commercial cinemas. A certain number of theater locations and screens is required to keep such a product line afloat. There is very little need for d-cinema class projectors outside of commercial theater uses. Hotels and other venues who host conventions use a lot of video projectors, but not cinema-grade projectors. Huge trade shows are more likely to erect LED jumbotron displays on their main stages. Adobe had such a thing going for its "MAX" show last week.

The same factor of market scale can apply to cinema sound system equipment. Those are specialized product lines not used much elsewhere. I don't think the companies who make seats, wall sconces and other kinds of cinema-specific equipment sell much of that to non-cinema customers. A certain number of theater locations is needed to sustain those product lines.

It would be interesting to know what the tipping point might be for how many theater closures would send the cinema products business into a fatal tailspin. I think it's pretty clear those companies wouldn't be able to survive off of just a few cinemas existing in the biggest of major cities.

Some former cinemas have managed to get second lives as venues for live music or stage plays. That approach usually works best on a former single screen cinema with a large auditorium (like the Ziegfeld or Astor Plaza in NYC). It doesn't work so well for a run of the mill, cookie cutter, multiplex building. Supposedly a church group is going to renovate and re-purpose our former Carmike 8 location in Lawton. I'm not sure how that's going to work. But then again, I've seen a former twin theater here turned into a Blockbuster Video store. So I guess anything is possible. The end result won't involve showing movies commercially.

[Martin Brooks]

What I find especially troubling is companies like Christie or Barco require a certain level of market scale in order to justify developing and selling a product like a professional level digital projector for commercial cinemas.

Absolutely. Sony didn't stay in the business with their projectors and SDDS before that even before the pandemic and all these recent theater closings. The companies could only survive if they substantially downscaled and became far more efficient, much like the photography industry has had to do as the market for DSLRs and mirrorless cameras has collapsed. Worldwide, from Japanese manufacturers, only about 5 million interchangeable lens cameras will be sold this year, plus about 1.7 million compacts. In 2008, 110 million compacts were sold and in 2012, over 20 million DSLR's and Mirrorless were sold. So the manufacturers have had to adjust. Most, if not all are profitable after some years of losses, but they're much smaller operations.

If things get real bad, I think we'd see Christie and Barco merge to survive. The key will be what happens to AMC and Regal. As of the end of last year, AMC had 595 U.S. sites and 7768 screens and Regal had 511 U.S. sites and 6853 screens. If they each closed even just a third of their theaters, that would put about 5000 used projectors into the marketplace. That obviously would not be good for Christie and Barco unless perhaps they each went into the install and service business.

[Bobby Henderson]

In the case of companies making DSLR cameras, those guys haven't been doing themselves any favors.

As smart phones have been cannibalizing various categories of dedicated digital cameras what did the DSLR people do? Jack up the prices. A lot. Lens prices are outrageous now. And that's just on the now-dying traditional reflex mirror style DSLR platform.

I still question the "wisdom" behind the whole shift to mirror-less DSLR bodies. To me it seemed like a solution in search of a problem. And it turned into an opportunity to charge a whole lot more money for the same old thing. A full frame mirror-less DSLR body costs roughly $500-$1000+ more. The lenses cost more too. On the Canon side of things, an L-series lens for mirror-less R-mount DSLR bodies costs more than the same kind of lens for older EF-mount DSLR bodies. The R-series lenses aren't necessarily any better.

Professional photographers are still buying a lot of that high priced gear. But a lot of amateurs in the "enthusiast" or "pro-sumer" category have basically said "no thanks" and settled for other solutions, be it a one piece super-zoom point and shoot camera or a smart phone with multiple lenses.

With as much as the DSLR market has declined companies like Canon, Nikon and Sony still have enough unit sales to make the development of new DSLR image sensors and other parts feasible.

The entire world has an estimated 200,000 cinema screens. The US has the most by far of any nation, around 40,500. India is second with 11,000. Install numbers go downhill from there. Trends that hit US cinemas can affect theater markets world-wide.

If major Hollywood studios and streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon allowed big chains like AMC or Regal to go bust they might not be prepared for a cascade of other consequences from hundreds or thousands of theater locations closing. If the major studios wanted to slide in and re-open some of those locations there is no guarantee they would be able to do so. Major theater chains going bust could equal cinema products companies going bust too.

In a much smaller cinema products market I could imagine Barco and Christie merging. But the product lines from both companies would be severely cannibalized and simplified. And that's assuming there would be a large enough number of cinema customers to keep the merged company solvent.

[Leo Enticknap]

DCI-compliant digital cinema equipment is a small proportion of Barco's overall business, and, although a proportionally bigger part of Christie's, still not the only one. I don't think the future of either company would be at risk if the movie theater market massively contracted, but I can see this threatening the DCI model. What would likely happen is that the manufacture of media blocks and other aspects of the DCI security infrastructure would cease, and the remaining movie theaters would have to use projectors with broader use cases in the AV world more generally. The studios would not be able to stick with the DCI model, and would likely have to come up with an alternative that wouldn't be as secure, but would require less bespoke hardware in the projection and audio systems.

[Bobby Henderson]

It makes sense that a company with a diverse enough line of products, such as Barco, would be able to weather a massive loss of cinema locations. Dolby would probably survive such an ordeal as well. But, yeah, the way projectors and sound systems are configured might change.

The less professional "industrial" AV lineup of projectors just aren't nearly as good as real cinema-grade projectors. Then there is the issue of laser projectors to consider. If it wasn't for the global pandemic and other geo-political disruptions the theatrical industry might have already been very deep into a conversion to laser-based projectors. I imagine a transition to laser projection is going to take far more time now. And that's assuming commercial cinemas don't lose a lot of screens within the next several years.

In a scenario where there are far fewer cinemas I can imagine a growth market of multi-purpose specialty venues where they could show movies or host live concerts, plays and other kinds of events. The MSG Sphere in Las Vegas will be an extreme example of this.

Still, the movie industry would likely be worse off in this kind of arrangement. I believe viewer ratings of the Academy Awards are falling off because overall public interest in the movie industry is plummeting. Movies are less visible to the general public than they were several years ago. Much of the retail and advertising footprint is gone. The same thing goes for popular music. Look how little of that is selling compared to decades ago. So many people went from buying LP and CD albums to buying one song download at a time and then just listening via streaming services. Movies are getting caught in the same race to the bottom business model.

Then we have to factor in just how the attention level of the general public has become very scattered. Every home has multiple screens and devices delivering info and entertainment. There is an epidemic of multi-tasking happening, even at inappropriate times. How can a new movie thrive in that environment? Combine that with the bad design of basically every streaming service app. It's easy to lose a lot of time just scrolling and scrolling trying to find something interesting to watch. A still fairly new movie can fall into a black hole and be forgotten in those apps. It's a hell of a lot different than a physical video rental store where it was a lot easier to see what was available to rent or buy.