Reaction -- surprise! -- is not good in the affected branches. Fascinating tidbit from this piece: the sound branch was specifically promised that, if they combined the two sound awards, there was no way their award would be bumped off-air...a promise that had roughly the shelf-life of an agreement between the U.S. government and Native Americans.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235098007/
There's an awful lot of what-about-ism in this thread -- Okay, this is a terrible idea, but what about Soderbergh's crappy show/Jimmy Kimmel's dumb stunts/vapid starlets giving out awards? They seem to me, like most what-about-ism, utterly beside the point The only questions regarding this change are, is it a good idea, and will it play any role in reversing the Oscar's slide in the almighty ratings? I think the answer to those is No and No, and anything after that is sophistry.
However...I'll try to address a few of the points raised.
If they're emulating the Tonys, that's just bad news. The Tony producers have never made much secret that all they want is a long commercial for Broadway, up to and including musical numbers from shows like Jersey Boys that are in their second decade. Last year, thanks to the Paramount+ deal, the broadcast Tonys only featured 4 awards -- and the producers were fine with that. (They could give one fuck who wins lead actor in a play -- unless it's a star like Denzel or Cranston). Anyone who's actually interested in the awards has no advocate in the process. Oh, and kicker: the Tony ratings continue to decline every year -- so none of these "improvements" are helping.
The Oscars are still going to run the same amount of time, because -- dirty little secret -- they rely on selling that amount of time to advertisers. What they're going to do is fill that time normally spent on those awards with...well, I don't know, but, given the ideas they've had for improving things in recent years (tribute to John Hughes, Best Popular Film award), I wouldn't expect anything stellar.
I took Sabin's "have these categories ever offered any excitement?" question as a bit of a challenge. I'd say I view each of them in two ways: Have they ever thrilled me simply as choices?, and Have they ever been interesting as part of a narrative for the evening? Focusing on simply shows from this millennium, I offer:
Sound: None of us liked it, but that Kevin O'Connell guy finally won on his -- what, 28th try? How anti-climactic for that to be off-air.
Production design: Lincoln was an interesting, atypical choice. And Black Panther had the first African-American winner in the category.
Make-up: It certainly wasn't a pleasant surprise, but Suicide Squad's win shocked us all.
Editing: Traffic came into the 2000 show looking like supporting actor/screenplay was its limit; the un-forecast editing prize presaged its directing win, at which point it was fully in the best picture chase. The Departed's win in a very contested category made the Scorsese at-last victory seem even closer. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was thrilling on its own -- unexpected, not a best picture nominee, but fully deserving. And the Hacksaw Ridge win over favored La La Land gave a hint of what was to come for Chazelle's film.
Score: But this is the one I'd really miss. We had Reznor & Ross' first win, a triumph for hardly-Academy-style music. Alexandre Desplat and Ennio Morricone winning long-overdue prizes (in competitive races). And Joker winning for its female composer. Could any of these have had the same emotional impact if, instead of seeing the electric moment when the envelope is opened, the audience was told "X Person won half an hour ago (which you already know from Twitter), and here's a snippet of his or her speech?"
By the way: Max Mad Fury Road -- the big awards-getter of 2015 -- would have seen only costume design presented live. It's possible this year's potential big numerical winner, Dune, will only get visual effects on-air.
And is it coincidence that costume design made the live cut, when a prime contender for the win is Disney's Cruella?
Finally, Magilla's take. I'm going to half-agree with you, and half say, You're romanticizing the past. First, the latter: if you look back at the presenters of my early years of watching the Oscars, you'll see there were plenty of non-entities and passing-through starlets -- Elke Sommer, Pamela Tiffin, Virna Lisi...they're not a whole lot different from the nobodies you sniff at today; you were just more familiar with them. Plus, MacDonald Carey -- he was what Jack Valenti became: someone I knew almost nothing about, except he gave out an Oscar every year. And, as far as Kimmel's stunts bringing the show to a new low...again, you're looking through the rose-colored glasses of the past. If I'd hung on to reviews of Oscar shows past, I guarantee you, most of them complained about how bad the show was, how stupid many of the routines were. (Gary Trudeau parodied presenter-patter in Doonesbury back in 1974.) Oh, and, for the record: the selfie was actually the most successful Oscar stunt of out time, as it set records for retweets around the world.
However, where you're not wrong (and this ties in to one of Sabin's big points): there's no question that there are fewer Hollywood legends available to appear on the show, because the older generation (Nicholson, Hackman, Duvall et al.) has aged to the point where they're not suited to public appearances, and the current movie environment has created few stars who have the level of respect and success the heroes of our youths had. Apart from DiCaprio and the off-in-her-own-world Streep, there are no truly respected actors who are consistently viable commercially outside of a Marvel movie. This isn't to say there aren't people who've had multiple successes (Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, etc.), but none at the titan-level Hoffman/Nicholson/Pacino/Fonda/Dunaway held in decades past. This, of course, is partly because Hollywood just doesn't much try to create the kinds of movies that would make such careers possible. Lots of actors would love to work in/create such a niche...but no one outside of DiCaprio has achieved it (and he was simply blessed, to have signed on to an otherworldly blockbuster at a young age, and to have bonded with female fans who follow him most anywhere). I don't know what you do about this...but I will say that moving film editing off he broadcast does nothing to address the issue.