The YouTube Oscars

News broke yesterday that the Oscars will move online to YouTube in 2029. The Oscars will continue to run on ABC through 2028, which is its centenary year, and then will shift online in 2029 for a five-year deal with YouTube that includes access to the red carpet and the post-show Governors Ball, and ancillary events like the Governors Awards, Student Academy Awards, and Scientific & Technical Awards, none of which are currently televised. YouTube boasts a global audience of 2 billion, if even 2% of their base tunes in, that’s twice as many people as have been watching the Oscars, on average, for the last several years.

So while everyone is shocked that the Oscars are leaving TV, just think about that math and then ask yourself if it’s REALLY that shocking. The audience has already left linear television, and the Academy has been struggling for years to produce a telecast with ABC through declining viewership and ad rates. ABC has seemed increasingly hostile to the Oscars, demanding shorter speeches, shorter telecasts, and “viewer friendly” dumb sh-t like the “Oscars Cheer Moment”, which fans voted online to be when the Flash entered the speed force in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Do you remember that? Do you remember how dumb and embarrassing for everyone that was?

If YouTube saves us from dumb sh-t like that, I am fine with this update. And I’m actually okay with it, in general. Young people don’t watch linear TV and they don’t watch movies, but they DO watch YouTube. If the Academy can move the Oscars to YouTube and perhaps interest a younger audience in cinema, great. It will also make the show more accessible to cord cutters, as networks continue to refuse to offer one-off events like the Oscars for an a la carte rate online. 

And maybe YouTube, with no linear programming, won’t give a sh-t about how long the telecast—webcast?—is and will just let the Oscars run as long as they need to be. Notably, the last two years have featured longer telecasts and the highest ratings since 2020. It’s almost like the people who want to watch the Oscars don’t care if the show is long, it would be nice if the Academy’s programming partner felt the same way.

There is also the century of it all. 2028 is the Oscars’ 100th anniversary. It feels like the right time to shift to something new. The whole film industry is on the cusp of major change, what it has been for the last hundred years is not what it will be for the next hundred (for better or worse). Celebrate the centenary on TV, with ABC, who has broadcast the Oscars for the last 50 years, and then exit stage left and figure out what the next evolution of all this is, because it certainly cannot continue going the way it has been. Nothing about the film industry can keep going like this, it all has to change. The Academy might actually make this change just in time for the ship to avoid hitting the iceberg of too little, too late.

Maybe I sound fatalistic, like it’s all going away so who cares if the Oscars are on YouTube, but I am genuinely optimistic about this change. There’s a big audience on YouTube, there’s a younger audience on YouTube, there is space to include more events like the Scientific & Tech Awards. Sure, there is a disaster scenario like hiring a bunch of influencers to produce the Oscars and it turns into a train wreck like the Streamer Awards, but I don’t think the Academy will let go of their quality control like that. 

I love movies and I love the pageantry and frivolity of the Oscars, I will be happy for the Oscars to find a new home where they can go full pageant and produce a big show that, maybe, will make the older audience happy and attract a younger audience to cinema. Because we really do need to get the youths on board with watching movies as movies, not as two-minute bites on TikTok. THAT is what really worries me, not the Oscars going online.

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