Maybe it is about the cost of tickets and availability of streaming services
The “Oscar movie” is dying
121–130 of 165 posts
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#122I'm astounded that this article doesn't mention what to me seems like a no-brainer: We're in the golden age of television. People don't want to watch 10, unconnected movies now. They want 10-20 hours of a continuous story. Netflix, Apple TV, Prime, and other streaming platforms have been delivering a quality experience that immerses the viewer in an engagement that film can't compete with on depth, world-building, et…
Almost all modern TV series are just a movie spread out over entire TV seasons. They are filled with nothing but teasers and cliff hangers in order to artificially stimulate intrigue and extend the relatively thin plots. I can barely imagine something more boring than modern streaming TV series. They also tend to devolve into characters forming romantic relationships with each other, because there's usually nothing e…
I'm sorry, but I think this is an incredibly reductive take on television.
You could make all the same arguments about novels vs. short stories. The fact is that they're both related forms of art which take different approaches to developing narratives.
> Movies are far deeper because they try to focus on a coherent story and character development. The incentives for TV series are all wrong aside from episodic comedies and docuseries.
Here you seem to be arguing that movies, as a form, are superior (or perhaps that TV can't practically compete with film because the incentives are wrong, so that in practice, films are higher quality than TV).
I wasn't making an argument about the potential of the form though, merely about what viewers want. It should go without saying that in long-form writing you have more of an ability to develop characters, stories, and plot arcs than in short-form writing. These more fully developed characters, stories, and plot arcs are more compelling to readers/viewers.
Historically, this is why we've rarely seen short stories achieve the same level of commercial success as the successful novels, and now that we have the internet, the barriers[1] to television asserting the same dominance over videographic media have been torn down.
edit: And to be clear, I also disagree that in practice, television (as produced) is inferior to film (as produced). Of course there is plenty of filler and contrived drama in television (this has always been the case in film too), but we're in a renaissance of television shows which are incredibly tightly written and even dense, from a storytelling perspective.
[1]: namely, that you couldn't run a movie/episodes for 10+ hours on television, due to the complexity around scheduling slots, so you'd have to break it up, leading to confusion and fragmentation of understanding among the viewership
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#123I don’t want to spend my entertainment dollars subjecting myself to political gaslighting. I want to be entertained by a good story. Sadly, this seems to be an insurmountable hurdle for Hollywood at the moment.
Nothing quite breaks the immersion for me like having so many gay and interracial couples crammed into the cast that I end up sitting there wondering if there is any place on Earth that's anything like the "normal" town Hollywood is presenting to me.
"interracial couples" wow.. Perhaps this really speaks to our difference in perspectives based on where we live. I live in Vancouver, and find the increased representation of gay, queer, nonbinary, interracial people very true to my lived experience. Of course, lots of film and television is filmed here so maybe it's not that surprising.
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#124Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an actor myself, I find that the Oscar bait is often the "Academy Award for the Most Acting". It has become a cliche that you seek an Oscar by playing a highly damaged character with obvious quirks. More subtle performances are usually passed over, even though I consider them more challenging. They're often nominated, but rarely win. Which is fine, since those kinds of films are usually not going to attract big au…
This reminds me of Eddie Murphy's reaction to some "dramatic moment with a look he gave" in Showgirls that everyone reacted to as great acting, and he was like -- "Did you not see me in the Nutty Professor where I was FIVE PEOPLE AT THE SAME TIME? That was harder."
It's such an odd comment. Doing that is a great stunt... but it's a stunt. None of those characters were really all that well developed. The makeup team did amazing work, and it was an extraordinary technical feat (especially at the time), but Murphy's biggest contribution was some caricature voice work.
It must have been exhausting for him as an actor, and worth a ton of respect. But it's no surprise to me that other actors found it not to be his most interesting work.
Compare Tatiana Maslany, who portrayed multiple characters over several seasons, without prosthetics. If you want a real acting stunt, watch her play some of those characters pretending to be other characters.
I hope she doesn't get slotted entirely into genre films. Not that there's anything wrong with genre films, but all of the special effects tend to obscure what can be really great, subtle work. I'd love to see her do some theater.
Tatiana, if you're reading this ... I'm directing Midsummer Night's Dream next year and you'd be a killer Titania...
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#126This article feels so very out of touch, like a car enthusiast telling parents with 4 kids that their minivan should have a manual transmission since it's a better driving experience. It gets the whole situation backwards: it blames the modern audience for not wanting to take the time and money to go out to the theater unless they get a theme park-style spectacle. In other words, the article is blaming the customer.…
> The article laments that things aren't right in the world when Steven Spielberg can't draw a theater crowd. Well, Steven Spielberg is an old, wealthy man now, and he is making movies for himself, not for the kind of audience that made Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park massive successes. I sort of agree. I've enjoyed many of Spielberg's movies, but I have no interest in watching a fictionalized Spielberg biopic. West…
If Schindler's List was made today it would be best suited as a streaming mini-series.
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#127I've never really understood the hand wringing about this, or the assumption that movie theatres are real cinema, and watching at home is something lesser. As long as films are being made and people are watching them, what does it matter how big the screen is?
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#128During the pandemic a few movies that were supposed to be in theaters launched as expensive paid streams (mostly Disney, but also stuff like Bill and Ted). I gladly paid for every one of them. My wife and I used to go to the movies every weekend, sometimes twice, before we had kids. After we had kids we went to theater maybe three times. I was perfectly happy to pay $30 to watch a movie in my house, where I can watch…
Hell is other people.
Last time I went to the cinema there was an annoying gang of teenagers having fun in the row two ahead of me. I'm not angry at them; we were all teenagers once. But they were annoying. And the guy to my right thought so too, and let them know. The "movie-going experience" was the drama that this confrontation generated.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll watch it on my inferior screen, with my inferior sound system, but my massively superior solitude.
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#129I'm astounded that this article doesn't mention what to me seems like a no-brainer: We're in the golden age of television. People don't want to watch 10, unconnected movies now. They want 10-20 hours of a continuous story. Netflix, Apple TV, Prime, and other streaming platforms have been delivering a quality experience that immerses the viewer in an engagement that film can't compete with on depth, world-building, et…
Almost all modern TV series are just a movie spread out over entire TV seasons. They are filled with nothing but teasers and cliff hangers in order to artificially stimulate intrigue and extend the relatively thin plots. I can barely imagine something more boring than modern streaming TV series. They also tend to devolve into characters forming romantic relationships with each other, because there's usually nothing e…
It honestly doesn't sound like you have watched many modern series at all.
Re: The “Oscar movie” is dying
#130Too much unrealistic computer graphics in US movies. Also melodramatic story-lines. I no longer watch them.
British movies, on the other hand probably can't afford too much CGI and have more realistic story-lines as well. I've watched several of those in the last few years.
But overall, movies are just no longer on my 'to-do' list.