At their best, the Oscars serve as a time capsule of the year’s national (and increasingly global) consciousness. Long before hashtags existed, nominated films reflected what was “trending” in our minds. Platoon (1986) and Pain locker (2009) expose the harsh realities and cultural considerations of very different wars. Wall Street (1987) and The big short (2015) explore two sides of the same greed-driven coin. When art and technology intersected alongside this cultural mirror, the Oscars became a microcosm of larger behavioral shifts. The ceremony has been expanded to not only highlight our collective concerns, but to provide direct commentary on where our attention is headed.
Irony is not without a sense of humor. The Oscars, America’s most-watched awards show that celebrates cinematic storytelling on the big screen, is headed to YouTube in 2029, the most popular digital destination accessed on ever-shrinking screens for a few minutes at a time. Once one of the pillars of the monoculture that united Hollywood and its consumer components, the awards ceremony began to lose its appeal in the face of never-ending new fields.
For the first time, the Oscars are chasing the audience rather than leading it.
Limited interest in the age of ubiquitous entertainment
You don’t need reminding that the Oscars bled viewers so profusely that it should be eligible for a makeup nomination of its own. The concert failed to attract 20 million viewers from 2021 to 2025 after decades of easily surpassing that mark. Her decline speaks to How viewers consume media these days. We now exist in the era of ubiquitous entertainment.
The American public spent 16.7 trillion broadcast minutes In 2025, according to Nielsen. Instagram has developed an application for the TV screen. The podcast is now available 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 entire worlds in Minecraft and Roblox! Awards shows don’t compete with same-night-only TV schedules. They compete with entire digital ecosystems.
The 1980s and 1990s often saw the estimated 50 million Americans watching the Oscars as a culmination of cultural sensations, experienced collectively. Today, our cultural input is determined by personalized recommendation algorithms.
Mainstream box office hits consistently struggle to get nominations, while smaller, popular films aren’t always exciting or stick with audiences. Four of the 10 best photos nominated this year (Bugonia, Hamnet, Sentimental Value, Secret Agent) failed to earn more than $50 million worldwide. Two candidates (Frankenstein, dream train) are titles exclusive to Netflix, which Historically we see sharp declines In engagement. This has become more or less the case Equally of course As we progress through the film’s 21st century.
I love art films as much as the next cinephile. But award recognition no longer motivates audiences. So, if your best photos list is full of more Maestro and Fabelmans from Top Gun: Mavericks and BarbieIt won’t attract as much attention.
Social media has deconstructed the magic of Hollywood
Audiences are accustomed to interacting with celebrities only through traditional, filtered channels: magazine cover stories, E! canal and dial-up Internet (cut to the collective shudder of Generation Z). But today’s celebrities are going direct to consumer. Social media builds unhindered bridges to and from fan bases.
This has demystified celebrities in ways that have likely contributed to the Oscars’ decline in cultural significance. As it did on live television, the awards ceremony once provided rare access to Hollywood’s biggest stars decked out in their finest (and most flawed) costumes. But the novelty of celebrity has eroded now that fans have 24/7 access to their favorite characters. Why watch an hour of the red carpet to get one look at Zendaya’s dress when she’s promoting her own fashions to her more than 176 million Instagram followers? The old fenced gate of Hollywood has been pierced from the inside.
Young, social media-driven moviegoers, with an audience of nearly 6.7 million American adults, are more than twice as likely as the average person to be influenced by online creators and over-indexed on multiple streaming platforms, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as director of insights and content strategy. But the pop culture conversation is increasingly taking place on Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Letterboxd, and memes across all of the above. The overall live audience is smaller, and virality is less centralized. The origin of the effect has shifted from the big screen to the phone screen.
The goal of YouTube migration is clear. The Academy wants to reach and recruit younger viewers, be more accessible to international audiences, and align with modern viewing behaviour. But there are logistical challenges.
YouTube reported Nine-figure commitment It beat out Disney’s eight-figure bid for the Oscars rights, but the platform lacks experience in producing live events in-house. Streaming struggles to match the breadth of streaming. The YouTube-exclusive NFL game aired in September 17.3 million viewers Globally, less than 18.7 million The NFL averaged viewers per game last season across linear TV and streaming platforms. Switching distribution platforms does not guarantee an immediate increase in audience.
The Oscars’ popularity has declined alongside sweeping changes that have reshaped the audience and the industry. Live streaming, the fragmentation of social media, the loss of monoculture, the increased visibility and accessibility of celebrities, and changing tastes have changed the game. The cultural shifts depicted by the Best Picture contenders now stand in the shadow of what the dwindling ceremony says about culture more generally.
Escaping traditional distribution to a more modern alternative makes a certain amount of sense in the long run. But it’s also a privilege. The Oscars no longer set the cultural agenda. The best the Oscars, which are nearly 100 years old today, can hope for is to try to keep up.
