Academy president Tom Sherak recently told TheWrap that the buck really stops at the desk of Bruce Davis, the organization’s executive director for the past two decades. Though Davis laughs that “it’s best for executive directors to deflect such comments whenever possible,” he agreed to address the challenges AMPAS faces in a time of declining Oscar viewership and uncertain finances.
Is it accurate to suggest that the Oscars have reached something of a crisis point?
Yes. Clearly, it’s tricky when an organization has essentially one source of income, which happens on one day a year. And in recent years we’ve been threatened both by world political situations and by the Guild negotiations. If we had a down year like the Golden Globes did (in 2008), that would be a nightmare for us, a complete disaster. So yeah, we need to be feeling our way very carefully to see if there’s still a way to run an operation this complex and this worthwhile in a new kind of environment.
What changes do you think are needed in the Oscar show itself?
We get lots of help with that from the general public, the membership and every film critic in the country. And we’ve considered lots of wild things, although at this point I think we have decided not to do anything terribly radical.
Our philosophy is that the key craft areas that we give Oscars to are worth continuing to recognize, and to recognize on the same evening. We need to move the show more rapidly and streamline it, but I think we can do that without taking away any awards.
Does that mean an option like eliminating the three short-film categories, which at one point was very close to happening, is now completely off the table?
It’s not on the table right now, but I think we are absolutely in an era where we have to try things. In that sense, nothing’s off the table. If a year comes when we decide you just can’t do 26 awards in three hours, then I think we have to look hard at maybe doing some of the awards prior to the show, or interstitially.
Did the recommendation to move to 10 Best Picture nominees come from this year’s Oscar show producers, Bill Condon and Laurence Mark, or had it been discussed before that?
They certainly recommended it, but there had been other groups talking about it. We got a lot of suggestions that we should sub-divide the Best Picture category, as other awards shows do. Once you start doing that, you could have dramas and comedies and musicals and science fiction films and whatnot.
But what we didn’t like about that is that as soon as you subdivide it, you’re not really committing to a Best Picture anymore. You’re saying, “Okay, this was the best of that subsection, and this is the best of this subsection.” We’d like to continue to say, “Out of all the different kinds of movies, this one we think was the very best.”
