If TV ratings are accurate, I am guessing few if any of you actually watched the Oscars on Sunday night. I didn’t even watch, but let me tell you about something that happened that bares examination for so many reasons.
Every year, the final award handed out is Best Picture. That makes sense, right? People that like movies want to know which one is determined to be the very best each year. Well, Sunday night, seemingly in the heat of the moment, it was decided that the last award handed out would be Best Actor.
The show’s producers wanted to create a moment that would bring attention to the ceremony and create a moment that would be replayed on all of the morning shows. Chadwick Boseman, who died in August, was not just a sentimental favorite to win the award. He was the odds on favorite for most online books as well. It would have been a perfect ending if it had worked out like it was supposed to.
You probably see where this is going.
When Joaquin Phoenix opened the envelope, Boseman’s name was not inside. Instead, Anthony Hopkins won the award. I can’t tell you which deserved it more, but I can tell you that it was an embarrassing moment for the Oscars. Not only did the award not go to Boseman, giving the evening a memorable payoff, it went to someone that wasn’t even there! How does that happen?
We make a lot of mistakes in radio. We try a lot out on the fly and sometimes something goes wrong or it just doesn’t land like it was supposed to. Still, I couldn’t help but think about how the Oscars didn’t follow a rule of live broadcasting that I feel like I learned my first day in the business. Don’t set your audience up for a payoff if you aren’t positive you can deliver it!
ABC looks bad. The Motion Picture Academy looks bad. Anthony Hopkins looks apathetic. Chadwick Boseman’s family was set up for a special moment only to instead get an emotionally devastating fall.
It did not have to happen this way, but the Oscars were relying on business as usual. You just can’t do that anymore. You have to have answers before you make grand plans.
Gregg Henson, program director of Audacy’s 910 the Fan in Richmond, told me that he is all for grand gestures. He would rather have his team thinking big instead of playing it safe.
“Many times in today’s climate the inclination is to judge an idea before it gets off the ground. We try to foster an environment where we are always thinking big and pulling back,” he told me in an email. “A lot of people have inner blocks and limiting beliefs that we try to break down to make a promotion bigger and better.”
Before he gets to that moment though, Gregg makes sure he has answers to a few questions.
“First, is there value to the listeners! Second, can we provide value to the client. After these components are answered in the affirmative, we decide if we can execute the promotion to provide a payoff for the audience.”
Sam Pines, the market manager of Good Karma Brands’ ESPN Cleveland, makes sure he surrounds himself with people that have the answers he doesn’t. Before he can make a big promise to a client, he wants to make sure that the people that are strong in his blindspots have had their say.
“I’m not great at understanding what goes into pulling off the idea, but generally an idea like this will involve at a minimum Matt Fishman (Director of Content ESPN Cleveland), Debbie Brown (VP of Marketing GKB), Amy Crossman (Director of Sales and Marketing ESPN Cleveland) and Nikki Hollis (Chief of Staff- ESPN Cleveland) and all play different roles within that brainstorming including whether it’s realistic or not.”
The Motion Picture Academy typically doesn’t let anyone except for the accountants that tabulate the votes know Oscar winners ahead of time. That is how things were done for the first 92 years of the Academy Awards and it worked out fine.
Moving the Best Actor category to the end of the night is a big change though. And it is a big change in a year where nothing was normal. Fewer than 10 million people tuned into the broadcast for the very first time. Do you know why? Because most people didn’t see a lot of movies in 2020. Why did the producers of the show not take that into account? Even the people that voted on the Oscars likely didn’t see some of the performances they were voting on. That seems like a logical explanation of how Hopkins won, right? You didn’t see the movies, but you know Anthony Hopkins is great! Just vote for him. The Academy wanted to do something special, and relying on business as usual bit them in the ass.
I asked Pines if he could think of a corollary. Is there something that used to be taken for granted in radio that now has to be completely rethought and remade?
“One word,” he answers. “Events.”
Henson says when he was at WDFN in the late 90s, it was possible to pull off some pretty epic promotions and events without a lot of internal communication. That just isn’t how business is done anymore.
“At the WDFN in Detroit in 1997 we traded a 737 and flew an airplane full of Red Wings fans to DC for the Stanley Cup finals, Henson says. “Bought the tickets and traded the charter and hotel rooms without ever involving sales. That can’t happen today as we have become more savvy and better at creating synergies between sales and programming.
Safety nets can be a pain in the ass sometimes. There is no denying that, but they exist so that your brand doesn’t end up looking foolish by building up to a payoff you cannot provide.
Can you imagine the world of hell we would give the NFL if Thursday night came and the plan for the Draft wasn’t well thought out? The event is live again after a year of virtual drafts across all sports. The players, the teams, the leagues, they all had to jump through hoops to make those work. Now imagine we are finally back in person and the first round picks who have made the trip can’t get up to the stage to take a picture with Roger Goodell because someone at the league office forgot to put stairs at the front of the stage.
This stuff is live event 101. It’s radio 101 and it is so easy to do. Get it right, and it goes unnoticed, but get it wrong, and it becomes infamous.
Ratings tumbled, but what tarnished the reputation of the Oscars and its trio of producers more this year was this single awkward moment that was supposed to be a sweet, triumphant remembrance of Chadwick Boseman. Instead, what we got was a winner that wasn’t even there. It all could have been avoided if the people in charge didn’t rely on business as usual and just asked a few questions.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
