Last year was no great shakes, and this year it seems overall viewership dropped a full 20 percent. From Variety:

The 21.9 rating is also considerably below the 25.5 rating earned by the 2003 Academy Awards telecast, which set the low-water mark for viewership when it averaged just over 33 million viewers. It would seem to be a long shot for this year’s show to come in above the 2003 figure, even with population increases.

In other words, this could be the lowest-rated show of recent decades. The telecast, stripped down, even short, bore marks in tone and quality of the effects of the writer’s strike, which gave the presenters a limited time to put a show together. But even that can’t excuse the lack of a substantive tribute to Ingmar Bergman. What in the hell is wrong with them?

Jon Stewart should have come out with guns blazing; couldn’t his writers come up with ten good jokes in a week? Instead, he was subdued, pressing on somewhat wanly after his opening few lines went nowhere. While the Academy can attribute the low ratings to the dismal mood of Hollywood post-strike, it’s also true that someone wasn’t trying very hard.

The quality of the show is an issue distinct from the ratings, however. That’s the Academy’s big problem. What’s going to happen if the membership continues its trend of honoring quality movies, which will inevitably be smaller-grossing films? As I wrote earlier this year:

That all goes double for the overseas audience the academy whimsically describes as “one billion viewers around the globe.” This has big implications for the Academy’s prestige and influence in general and the money it makes off the broadcast in particular. For the next few years, the behind-the-scenes discussions in the academy are going to be about how to continue to make a lot of money off the TV broadcast of a ceremony designed to showcase the decisions of a membership that, peskily, can’t be counted on to make the right decisions for the ratings.

On the other hand, what’s the Academy supposed to do? Nominate  “Alvin and the Chipmuks” for something? “Wild Hogs”? “Beowulf,” to cite just three of the film’s that outgrossed all of the major nominees save “Juno”?

Now, that would be an Oscarcast! (”Who’s going to win Best Actor Too Young to Be Packing Such a Paunch? Vince Vaughn in ‘Fred Claus’ or Adam Sandler in ‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry’? I can’t wait for the show!”) Accordingly, A.O Scott’s NYT gripe fest about the Oscars was confused and odd. One the one hand, he was upset that “Lust, Caution” and “3:10 to Yuma” (!?) didn’t get more nominations. Then he turns around and says, now that the Oscars are beginning to recognize good films, the process isn’t populist enough:

Connoisseurs may be satisfied with this arrangement—we can watch the broadcast without superciliousness or slumming—but a showbiz populist might complain that, in honoring the products of the studio specialty divisions, the academy has lost touch with the mass audience.

It’s hard to see how this is the Academy’s fault. The pictures didn’t get small; the audience did.

The NY Post says the only thing the Oscars have going for it this year is the fact that there hasn’t been much glitz around, what with the writers strike. Advertisers are telling themselves that that might bring in some more viewers, despite the fact that relatively few people have seen the most-nominated films:

Advertisers are counting on TV-starved viewers to make this year’s Oscars show a ratings winner despite a lineup of obscure and bleak films.

With much of the TV landscape in ruins after the writers’ strike, marketers believe the star-studded telecast will attract a relatively large audience desperate for something - anything - beyond reruns and reality shows.

An accompanying graphic detailing the falling ratings for the annual event, however, shows the paper’s true feelings. Oscar has a bag over its head in shame—and we’re told “ho-hum host” Jon Stewart may keep viewers away. It’s unfortunately true that the box office of the best picture nominees seems to have the most effect on viewership. If the ratings (after a slight bump up last year) continue to decline it seems inevitable that the Academy will have to figure out something to rekindle the show’s appeal, despite the fact that the group can always hike ad rates in the interim. While ostensible competition like the Globes come nowhere near the Oscar telecast’s ratings, the group can’t be unaware that that might not always be the case.

David Denby, in the New Yorker, ruminates on the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre in general and “No Country for Old Men” in particular. It tracks cleanly the plain veneer of contempt in the pair’s films Damien Bona talks about below …

The Coens form a conspiracy of two—industrious, secretive, amused, and seemingly indifferent to both criticism and praise. Early in their careers, they gave detailed interviews, but in recent years they have discussed only specific and relatively trivial matters concerning their movies, avoiding comments on larger meanings or anything approaching a general intellectual outlook. This strategic reticence—the avoidance of art talk—is solidly in the tradition of American movie directors’ presenting themselves solely as pragmatic entertainers. But the Coens have gone further into insouciance than any old-time director I can think of. In the opening titles for “Fargo” (1996), they announced that the movie was based on a true story, though it wasn’t. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) begins with a title stating that the movie is “based upon ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer,” which they later claimed they had never read. From the beginning, they’ve been playing with moviemaking, playing with the audience, the press, the deep-dish interpreters, disappearing behind a façade of mockery.

… and in the end isn’t buying what the Coens are selling:

The spooky-chic way the Coens use Bardem has excited audiences with a tingling sense of the uncanny. But, in the end, the movie’s despair is unearned—it’s far too dependent on an arbitrarily manipulated plot and some very old-fashioned junk mechanics. “No Country” is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness.

Meanwhile, in New York Magazine, David Edelstein discusses the movie’s chances with Lynda Obst. He likes “No Country,” despite the fact that Ethan Coen wasn’t nice to him at a party once:

Are the Coens a Best Director lock? It would seem so. They have managed to make difficult movies without selling out or sucking up or becoming players. (I said hello to them at the recent New York Film Critics ceremony, and Ethan could barely conceal his contempt … I didn’t take it too personally. I think they’re good guys who only give a shit about critics and awards insofar as it will ensure that no one bothers them.)

He too tries to come to grips with the world view of the Coens’ work:

Speaking of no climax, no catharsis, the front-runner for Best Picture is No Country for Old Men, a film that critics — this one included — cherished but has left audiences crying out in despair over the nominal hero’s resignation and the endurance of evil, however hobbled. The downbeat nonending is presented not so much as systemic failure, as in HBO’s The Wire, or the power of unbridled capitalism to poison human relations, as in There Will Be Blood. It is simply that God the Creator has left the field.

Hitsville has been waiting for it, ever since noting dyspeptic screeds from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Village Voice. Dana Stevens in Slate looks at the controversy and finds … a dyspeptic screed in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Steven then goes on to begin to track an anti-backlash backlash, but, much as it pains me to say it, I think the “Juno” backlash never got off the ground in the first place. The film is at $117 million and still making $5M a week, which isn’t going to stop for at least another month, assuming it comes away with at least one Oscar win. (Stevens tracks well the critical consternation over screenwriter Diablo Cody’s twee hipster patois in the first act of the film, but it can’t be denied that the character developments are handled with a preternatural control; her only real competition in the screenplay category is “Michael Clayton.”) That’s a lot of money for a film with such modest ambitions, but since it is so modest there’s really not a lot there to get all het up about.

In the end, I think Cody handled well the potential minefields of the plot that might actually have fueled a genuine debate over the film. For example, in the end, Juno’s trip to the abortion clinic was handled with just the right meta touches. Juno’s flip attitude toward the decision and her even flipper about-face once she went to the clinic was a sign from Cody where her feelings on the subject lay; to an audience as hip as Cody (and, by extension, Juno), the sequence ultimately read:”Woman’s right to choose, blah blah blah. This is a story about someone who didn’t happen to.”

Cody’s a smart writer and “Juno” is a touching movie, so it probably doesn’t deserve a backlash in any case. But gosh are those first 20 minutes twee. And I still don’t get how Juno can like Iggy Pop and Kimya Dawson.