And the 2009 Oscar Nominees are…. (see last years review last years nominees)
Best Picture:
- Benjamin Button
- Frost Nixon
- MILK
- The Reader
- SlumDog Millionaire
Main points of note: Heath Ledger gets a nod, Slumdog Millionaire is still the darling, Meryl Streep is up yet again, Dark Knight didn’t get a nomination. get the rest of today’s nominees here.
blah blah blah
The Academy Awards are such a funny thing. Like blogs, it’s content about content. It’s not really “content unto itself”. Content about content is bound to the quality and audience sway of that underlying content it makes commentary on. In that way, the Academy Awards have a difficult situation in trying to seem legit in honoring truly remarkable films while attending to the facts that a diminished awards show audience doesn’t want to see a show all about indie films and no names.
As CNN notes:
Either way, the Oscars could probably use the ratings help a box office success can bring to its broadcast. In recent years, the Academy has nominated several independent or low-budget films for top awards, many of which didn’t crack the $100 million mark at the box office. Oscar ratings have tumbled; last year’s numbers for “the Super Bowl for women” — as the Oscar broadcast is known by advertisers — were the lowest on record and a far cry from 1998, when more than 55 million people watched all-time box office king “Titanic” take home the top prize.
Again, very similar to blogs and web traffic. If I don’t blog about the oscars or post pictures and stories from the ceremony, my blog will get buried. Any website that doesn’t talk about the Oscars will get slightly less traffic today than those that do. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like such a big deal, except when you consider what a dog fight it is in the publishing and media industry to get advertisers right now. And getting those ad dollars is directly correlated to daily traffic numbers (ratings!).
Perhaps more blogs and media outlets should try to create original content and develop first party audience. Unfortunately, it’s too expensive and has a very low probability for success. The data demonstrates this.
There’s a fine line to ride here and more often than not it’s crossed on blogs, in newspapers, and the Oscars. Some purists and critics will cry fowl, but in the end, money talks.
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