Oscar Seasoning: YouTube Hosting the Oscars Could Be Good, But…

In a move that surprised pretty much everyone, the Academy announced its new deal with YouTube to screen the Oscars. From 2029, you won’t need to tune into ABC, which has been the home of Hollywood’s biggest night for a long time. Just fire up the live-stream and go for it.

So far, the news has been met with what I would categorise as cautious optimism with a cynical aftertaste. I’ve thought for a while now that it would be smart for the Oscars to go to a streaming platform. This isn’t a sign of confidence in these corporate giants that continue to enshittify their platform. It’s more that I, and many other Oscar watchers, were so effing sick of how oddly contemptuous ABC seemed about the entire endeavour. They cut out so much from the ceremony, like the honourary awards, and pushed speeches to be shorter and shorter for below-the-line winners, just so we could get more montages of “the magic of the movies” or riffing from the host. Remember when they floated the idea of not even showing some winners during the show? It felt like ABC didn’t like the Oscars and was trying to make the show more appealing to people who never had any interest in it. Dude, it’s one night a year. Let it run over and focus on the films!

So, on paper, the idea of hosting the show on a platform where matters like scheduling are insignificant is a good thing. I’m all in on a ceremony where people get the time to enjoy the moment and we see more details like behind-the-scenes craft of the nominees. Wouldn’t it be great to get the honourary winners back in the fold? It’s a crime we never got to see people like Agnes Varda and David Lynch accept their awards to the biggest audience possible. The deal does include access to the Governor Awards, as well as programs on the nominees luncheon, the Student Academy Awards, the tech Oscars, and “filmmaker interviews, film education programs, podcasts, and more.” This sounds intriguing!

(FYC: Wagner Moura for Best Actor!)

Accessibility is also a great thing. It’s kind of ridiculous how hard the Oscars is to watch for most people around the world. For a long time, even in the UK, it was only available to those with a Sky subscription, which is not cheap (ask me how I know.) I remember my undergrad years when I was scrambling between pirate streams of ABC to watch the ceremony, jumping from to another once they cut off. The Oscars remain one of the most-watched live TV events in the world, even with falling viewership numbers, but it’s a fraction of what it could be. What, you think making the show easier to watch for Brazilian stans or audiences in East Asia would be a bad idea, AMPAS? Bong Joon-ho wasn’t wrong when he said that the Oscars were a local industry shindig, but the Academy believes itself to be worldwide. It needs to walk the walk on that front, and YouTube could be the way forward.

But the cynicism remains. We were all making “MrBeast hosts the Oscars” jokes because it’s not like we have sky-high expectations for this site. YouTube has said it’s working hard to fight issues like spam, radicalisation, and hate speech, but many people I know who host their work on the platform say otherwise. Copyright strikes is an oft-abused system that hurts a lot of small channels. AI has only gotten more prevalent, clogging up already wonky search results. I imagine YouTube will roll out the red carpet for the Oscars and try to iron out those kinks, but they’ve lost a crap-ton of goodwill over the years for a reason.

I’m not sure I trust YouTube to do the ceremony justice. Will they decide that they have to jazz things up to appeal to a certain demographic (one that wouldn’t watch the show anyway)? Who do they bring in to host? Will we get more time with the nominees and winners, or will it be like The Game Awards, another YouTube exclusive, where most of the time is dedicated to ads and trailers? That’s my biggest concern here, to be honest. YouTube will want to milk this cash cow, and it seems like in-event plugs will be the easiest way to do that. Bless the Game Awards, which is a great idea on paper, but it’s unwatchable to me because I just don’t care so much about the trailers. Then again, it’s not like Disney or ABC were above this with previous shows. Remember that weird Bond tribute from this year’s show that was shameless Amazon propaganda?

We’ve got years to wait for this to happen, of course. There’s a whole arse Presidential election before the Oscars go to YouTube (ugh.) But this is a sign that the old guard of Hollywood is aware of its growing obsolescence. The entertainment industry, and especially the Oscars, have always dragged their feet about modernisation. Any form of progress tends to be maddeningly incremental, whether it’s diversifying the membership or finally getting an award for casting. For now, I’m choosing to be somewhat optimistic about this news, but Cory Doctorow is right about the enshittification of everything, and I can’t help but worry that even the Oscars can sink lower under new management.