It will be strange. I can't really name any movies that came out in the last year. I certainly never saw any of them. My guess is that most of whatever movies came out in 2020 went directly to video streaming services. Few if any opened in movie theaters. The same is true here in California. I liked the first Wonder Woman movie. I heard about the second one being delayed. Maybe it opened somewhere, but I don't know where. A sad result for a movie that everyone expected to be a blockbuster. All of our California movie theaters have been closed too. Same thing here. It's interesting to speculate about what the long term effects on the movie industry might be. I suspect that many of the movie theaters may go bankrupt and never reopen. Live in-person movie watching was already in decline pre-Covid and this will only accelerate a growing trend. If movie-going shrinks away, the revenue streams to the Hollywood film industry will shrink as well. Studios lived off the proceeds of a few huge worldwide blockbuster movies each year, and that was mostly box-office, ticket sales at theaters. If that goes away, will revenue from streaming services be able to replace it? Or will the whole Hollywood industry shrink dramatically? There are definitely storm-clouds on that industry's horizon. That's another interesting point. Movies have long been part of popular culture. The average person watched movies. They talked about movies with each other. Going out to the movies was part of a week-end ritual. But if movies cease being part of popular culture and become something that average people no longer follow or care about, the whole cultural dynamic will be transformed. The Oscars may continue to exist, but will anyone care about who wins if they are always rewarding "movies" that most people have never heard of, let alone seen? Movies will stop being part of casual daily conversation. The cultural gap between the film industry and the people will grow into a chasm. And if the film industry manages to survive by retreating to streaming services, what difference will there be between the Oscars and the Emmys? It will all just be small-screen TV entertainment. Right. The importance of box-office is two-fold. First it represents revenue for the studios. It's how they fund new movies and keep all those Hollywood celebrities rich. And second and more importantly, it represents cultural penetration, the extent to which movies pervade and influence the larger surrounding culture. If those are threatened, "the movies" will assume a very different place in our world. The Oscars may still exist as a way for a Hollywood elite to dress up and pose and preen, and for auteurs to masturbate about their self-perceived technical excellence, but what will it matter if nobody outside the Hollywood film industry knows or even cares? Will there even be a 2020 Oscars event? Probably not physically in person, since the government will never allow so many over-dressed celebrities to sit next to each other in a crowded theater. Will it be a virtual Oscars of some unprecedented sort?? Will they just announce the winners in some kind of press release? I predict that assuming it even happens, that this year's Oscars will attract less interest from the general public than any in living memory. Precisely for the reasons you have given, Saint. The Academy Awards look more and more like vestigial role-playing in what may be a dying industry. Certainly a rapidly transforming industry, one whose ultimate shape is still unknown. People out here in the real world aren't going to be sitting on the edge of their chairs in anticipation of what movie wins a hotly contested 'Best Picture' Oscar, when nobody has even heard of the movies in contention. The Oscars simply won't matter like they used to, not so long ago.
The Oscars are essentially industry awards. It just happens to be the case that many of the end products of the film industry attract the attention of the general public. The Oscars do not give out awards in categories like "Most popular actor" or "Most popular sound recordist" or "Most popular director". They could, but they don't. Instead, they give out awards like "Best actor", which is the actor judged to be the best among a short list of nominees, nominated by insiders in the film industry and judged by an "academy" also made up of industry insiders. Not all awards work this way. In Australia, for example, the closest thing with have to a general awards show for TV is called the Logies. The logies accepts votes from the general public, and hands out awards for things like "Most popular actor in a TV drama series" - i.e. most popular, as voted by those who vote for that kind of thing in the publication which handles public voting. But at the same awards ceremony, there are also awards handed out for "Best documentary", for example. That's a category voted on by representatives in the TV industry, not by the general public. The Oscars should "matter" to you only if you care about what insiders in the film industry have to say about the films they are involved in making. If you only care about what is popular with people outside the industry of "experts" who make films, then you don't really need the Oscars for anything. Twitter, or whatever, might be just as good for finding out what is popular.
