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This was published 2 years ago
By Karl Quinn
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According to the Wikipedia page for the 94th Academy Awards, Rochelle, Rochelle was on Saturday night among the five frontrunners for the award for fan favourite to be handed out for the first time during the televised ceremony next month.
The only problem is, Rochelle, Rochelle doesn’t exist. It is a purely fictitious film — a European art-house soft-porn movie about “a young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk” — from the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld. (Though she looks a lot like Game of Thrones star Lena Headey, the woman in the poster is an extra called Chela Holton.)
Though it cropped up in a couple more episodes after its season 4 debut — even spawning an equally fictitious Broadway musical starring Bette Midler — it never made it to screen for real.
As for Art Vandelay, listed on the Oscars Wikipedia page as one of the film’s creators, that was just a pseudonym used by George Costanza (Jason Alexander) in his many failed attempts to make himself more appealing to women.
Of course, anyone can edit a Wikipedia page. And while its addition to the list was funny, harmless, and gone by Sunday morning this attempt to master someone else’s domain does point to a serious issue: the enormous risk the Academy and its US broadcast partner ABC is taking in its own publicly driven bid to bolster audiences.
Votes for the Fan Favorite category can be cast online (at a dedicated website) or on Twitter. You can vote up to 20 times a day, so long as you’re aged 18 or over, live in the US and do not have a criminal record. Other than that, knock yourself out.
On the surface, the category makes some sense. Last year’s COVID-affected Oscars telecast drew the lowest audience in history, just 9.85 million American viewers on the night (and 10.4 million with adjusted 7-day figures). That was down from 23.64 million a year earlier, which was itself a record low.
This year the slide into irrelevance threatens to continue, with 2021’s most successful film, Spider-Man: No Way Home ($US1.8 billion at the global box office), nominated in just one technical category. The combined box office of the 10 films competing for best picture, meanwhile, is just under $US600 million, two-thirds of it for Dune (though to be fair, four of them have reported no box office at all, as they were principally streaming releases).
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The introduction of a fan-voted category — which was proposed in 2018 but quickly dropped following a backlash from Academy members — has been widely interpreted as an attempt to correct that arty vs popular imbalance. But there is a real risk it will be hijacked by jokers, trolls or special-interest groups, thereby turning the populist ploy into an embarrassing farce.
Already fans of Cuban-American pop star Camilla Cabello have pushed her film Cinderella to the front of the pack. Fans of Johnny Depp (he still has them, apparently) have put his indie release Minimata in the running too. Zack Snyder’s legion of fans are expected to breathe new life into his zombie flick Army of the Dead. Spidey might still scoop the pool, but right now home looks a long way off.
Of course, having a category that can be manipulated by fanboys and girls in all sorts of unpredictable ways might be exactly what the telecast needs.
Talking points in this three-hour-plus ego stroke are few and far between, but no one will ever forget the train wreck of the 2017 ceremony, when La La Land was incorrectly announced as best picture (sadly, you might have to try a bit harder to recall that Moonlight was the actual winner). Planned or not, surprises spark interest.
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It may not be quite what ABC and the Academy had in mind when they announced the Fan Favorite award, but anticipation that it might veer crazily off the rails could be enough to draw viewers to the telecast on the night. And that, ultimately, is what counts.
It’s not a viable long-term solution to the Oscars’ existential crisis, even if it does work. But right now, staring into a potential ratings abyss, a little egg on the face might not be the worst thing that could happen.
Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin
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