The Oscars’ Fight to Stay Relevant Amid Its Cultural Decline

At its best, the Academy Awards function as a time capsule for the year’s national (and increasingly international) consciousness. Long before hashtags, nominated films reflected what was “trending” on our minds. Platoon (1986) and The Hurt Locker (2009) revealed the harsh realities and cultural considerations of very different wars. Wall Street (1987) and The Big Short (2015) explored two sides of the same greed-driven coin. When art and technology intersected alongside this cultural mirror, the Oscars became a microcosm for larger behavioral shifts. The ceremony expanded to not only externalize our collective cares, but make a direct comment on where our attention is heading. 

Irony is not without a sense of humor. The Oscars, America’s most-watched awards show celebrating cinematic big screen storytelling, is heading to YouTube in 2029, a digital destination most commonly accessed on ever-shrinking screens for a couple of minutes at a time. Once a pillar of the monoculture that unified Hollywood and its consumer constituents, the awards show is losing gravitational pull to never-ending new niches. 

For the first time, the Oscars are chasing the audience rather than leading it. 

Finite attention in the Entertainment Everywhere era

You need no reminder that the Academy Awards have been bleeding viewers so profusely that it should be eligible for its own Makeup nomination. The ceremony has failed to crack 20 million viewers from 2021 to 2025 after decades of easily clearing that mark. Its decline speaks to how viewers consume media these days. We now exist in the Entertainment Everywhere era. 

U.S. audiences spent 16.7 trillion minutes streaming in 2025, per Nielsen. Instagram developed a TV screen app. Podcasts are now 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 whole worlds in Minecraft and Roblox! Awards shows aren’t just competing with their same-night TV schedules. They compete with entire digital ecosystems. 

The 1980s and 90s often saw around 50 million Americans watch the Academy Awards coronate cultural sensations, experienced together en masse. Today, our cultural inputs are determined by personalized recommendation algorithms.

Mainstream box office hits struggle to consistently score nominations, while lauded smaller prestige films aren’t always sexy or sticky with audiences. Four of this year’s 10 Best Picture nominees (Bugonia, Hamnet, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent) failed to earn more than $50 million worldwide. Two nominees (Frankenstein, Train Dreams) are Netflix exclusive titles, which historically see sharp declines in engagement. This has more or less become par the course as we progress through the 21st century of film. 

I love arthouse movies as much as the next cinephile. But awards recognition no longer galvanizes the masses. So if your Best Picture slate is filled with more Maestros and Fabelmans than Top Gun: Mavericks and Barbies, you’re not going to capture as much attention. 

Social media has dismantled Hollywood mystique

Audiences used to only interact with celebrities through filtered traditional channels: magazine cover stories, the E! Channel, and dial-up internet (cut to Gen Z’s collective shudder). But celebrity today has gone direct-to-consumer. Social media builds unimpeded bridges to and from fanbases. 

This has demystified celebrity in ways that have likely contributed to the Oscars’ decline in cultural relevance. As experienced on live linear TV, the awards show once offered rare access to Hollywood’s biggest stars adorned in the finest (and most flawed) fashion. But celebrity’s novelty has been eroded now that fans have 24/7 access to their favorite figures. Why watch an hour of the red carpet to catch a single glimpse of Zendaya’s dress when she promotes her own fashion to more than 176 million Instagram followers? Hollywood’s longstanding fenced gateway has been punctured from the inside. 

Young social media-driven moviegoers, an audience of nearly 6.7 million adult Americans, are more than twice as likely as the average person to be influenced by online creators and over-index on multiple streaming platforms, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. But the pop culture conversation increasingly takes place on Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Letterboxd and memes across all of the above. The overall live audience is smaller, and the virality is less centralized. The origin of influence has shifted from the big screen to the phone screen. 

The goal of the YouTube migration is clear. The Academy wants to reach and recruit younger viewers, be more accessible to international audiences, and align with modern viewing behavior. But there exist logistical challenges. 

YouTube’s reported nine-figure commitment bested Disney’s eight-figure offer for Oscars rights, but the platform lacks experience producing live events in-house. Streaming struggles to match the broad reach of broadcast. YouTube’s exclusive NFL game in September drew 17.3 million viewers globally, less than the 18.7 million viewers the NFL averaged per game last season across linear TV and streaming platforms. Swapping out distribution platforms is no guarantee of an immediate audience increase.

The Oscars’ popularity has fallen in lockstep with landslide changes reshaping the audience and industry. Streaming and social media fragmentation, the loss of the monoculture, greater celebrity visibility and access, and changing tastes have all changed the game. The cultural shifts depicted in Best Picture contenders now stand in the shadow of what the waning ceremony says about culture at large. 

Escaping traditional distribution for a more modern alternative makes a certain amount of long-term sense. But it’s also a concession. The Oscars no longer set the cultural agenda. The best the nearly 100-year-old Academy Awards can hope for today is to try and keep up.