Awards like the Grammys have officially passed their peak

Incredibly low Grammy and Golden Globe ratings prove the traditional mainstream awards show is over

Yes an organization has started handing out trophies for the most amazing collapse of cultural relevance, this year’s top prize is expected to go to – awards shows. The audience drops for the recent awards are staggering, suggesting a major turning point for a ritual that has been vital for the entertainment industry for decades. Finally, it looks like the traditional mainstream awards show is over.

This week’s CBS show on grammys is the most recent example. Ratings fell 51% from a year ago to a record 9.2 million viewers who listened to or broadcast the show. (The all-time low in 2006 was 17 million viewers.) Incredibly, the ceremony wasn’t even on the top-rated show of the week, coming in second behind an episode of NCIS. This audience humiliation came just weeks after an equally gruesome performance at the Golden Globes, whose audiences shrank 62% to a miserable 6.9 million – its smallest ever by far.

The collapse of the awards show is a side effect of a bigger change that the cliché says happened gradually, then all at once. It’s been a generation since cable and the internet began to erode the mass market paradigm that has persuaded society to turn its cultural gaze in the same direction at the same time. Entertainment has become more about endless choice serving niche audiences on their own terms: My Spotify or Netflix experience may not overlap with yours at all, and that’s the point. The rapid expansion of new forms of entertainment such as live streaming, massively multiplayer online video games and TikTok have just underscored this shift.

Along the way, the role of the awards show as a campfire for culture to come together has been undermined by public impatience and disgust at the continued underappreciation of minority and female cultural creators. Add to that the stifling and dated awards format established decades ago when producers could expect tens of millions of people to tune in to watch a multi-hour ceremony.

It seemed like some of those shows had at least made progress on format issues – critics actually praised this year’s Grammys as a surprisingly successful production – and you could make an intuitive argument that 2021 should have been a lot. best Year for Awards: Pandemic isolation has loved us in digital entertainment more than ever, looking for an excuse for virtual gatherings and shared experiences. The ultimate captive audience.

Instead, what Lockdown Culture has revealed – all at once – is that our interest in virtual gatherings depends on real-world interpersonal relationships: chats with water coolers, dinners, random interactions. in the bars and on the beaches that quietly fuel our interest in what everyone else is consuming, and how that informs what we want to encourage or counter as a culturally sanctioned award recipient.

The final collapse of the awards show as a cultural campfire shows how a year of isolation has taught us that we don’t really care what everyone thinks is the movie to see or the song of the night. season. For better or for worse, we’ve learned to be entertained.