The night of 28 February 2016 contained one of the great passages in Oscar history, and one of the finest addresses to the nation from this terrible electoral season. Chris Rock was aces. No one reckoned in advance that he had anything but a very testing job as host. He had to be tough, brave, witty, engaging – and decent. He triumphed on every count, thanks to sheer ability. He knew he was a part of show business, and not a black panther. Striding across stage in his bright white jacket, his voice soaring and cracking – like Charlie Parker’s – he was nervous but prickly eloquent, caustic yet encouraging. The vexed background to this show and its lack of black nominees could not have had a better release.



Then overkill began – and lasted. People of colour were pushed forward at every moment, just as extras are hired to fill empty seats at the Oscars if stars drift away. It would have been little surprise if this show had cut to the valet parking line outside, with 83% of the valets of colour.

That much tact and consolation would not be entirely out of place if this wasn’t a show. Boosting the numbers is all very well if you’re looking for a UN seal of approval, but it’s not show business – one of the citadels of organised unfairness, in which personality and popularity invariably crush political correctness.

America is a country in which racism is smothered, ingenious and rife – and I would guess that that dark mood was pierced by Chris Rock’s pungent talk. But the thought of future Oscar evenings turned into similar correctness parades will thin the audience quicker than the steady attrition of recent years. And this year, the audience on TV dropped by 8% – it was down to about 34 million.

Cheryl Boone Isaacs arrives at the governors ball following this year’s Academy Awards. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

The Academy is worried, but acting scared for over three hours is not heart-warming. At one point, the president of the Academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, stepped forward and said that the state of membership at the Academy was bad and it was going to be changed. That was shaming hypocrisy. It may not be Isaacs’ fault (she has been on the board close to 25 years), but Academy membership has been a joke for decades: too many whites; too few women; too few people of colour; too few young members; too few who have to see the films before voting – like none. Why? Because they don’t have to, because this is a club for the elite in show business, as hostile to the young and to outsiders as any club membership.

Isaacs could have agreed that the Academy was so archaic – as a portrait of America at large – that maybe it should be closed down. Or should have been reconstructed decades ago. A university with an admissions policy like that of the Academy could face closure.

Chris Rock’s Oscar monologue Guardian

Don’t assume that the connotations of authority, history, scholarship, hallowed tradition and judiciousness in the word “Academy” actually fit this self-serving club. The Academy was created to get the film business out of a few tricky spots. Several scandals in the 1920s had left parts of the public disapproving of Hollywood. (Others said, bring it on, what do you expect if you give the kids a lot of money all of a sudden?) Beyond that, the threat of unionisation had loomed and the moguls who invented the Academy hoped it would forestall organised labour. Anything else? Well, sure, industry leadership understood that much of their basic commodity was trash (not all of it) and hoped to dispel any unseemly smell by giving themselves a few prizes.

It was as simple and blunt as that, but now the myth is out of hand. Since the late 1920s, the movies have withered as a mass medium. So many of us don’t go to movie theatres any more. Weekly attendance is less than a quarter of what it was in 1945-47, when the population was half what it is now. Many young people neither see pictures nor care about the Oscars.

Against that background, the hysteria over these awards is demented and exhausting. Major newspapers and the forest of blogs start Oscar-baiting in September and the frenzy runs for six months. The disproportion is driving serious movie enthusiasts to a point of not reading, or getting angry with the Academy. The Golden Globes are more fun, and the Independent Spirit awards are a more suitable recognition for movies made from the heart. Winners and losers often go to that event in their own clothes – it’s like a trade convention, which is what the movies deserve now.

The gulf between cinephiles and the public has grown wide. There are pictures that make a lot of money, but seldom win big Oscars or attract young people to the show. Star Wars: The Force Awakens had grossed $925m by Oscars night – but it didn’t get nominated for best picture. The Revenant was seen as a likely compromise: it did earn serious money, but then it was beaten by Spotlight (a very entertaining, old-fashioned movie), which grossed only $39m because it did not appeal to enough people.

This gets at another weirdness in the Academy. The more we scrutinise the credentials of the membership the more pride they take in their artistic integrity. Show people can become snobs: so they now favour movies that not many people have seen. That’s human nature (and something critics understand), but it’s not the set-up for a huge show that pretends to be for everyone.

So the thought of closing the Academy is not based in malice; the action might prove enlightening and refreshing. The old club coterie has very little excuse, and its loss would leave few casualties. In fact, the plans for Academy reform are themselves cruel: they propose to make the membership younger by curtailing the voting rights of older members who are not senile, who have done good work, and see a lot of movies. But they will risk becoming members at a non-voting level – because they haven’t worked lately. Why? Because the industry doesn’t like to hire older people, for fear of getting out of touch!

The next Alan Rickman? Oscar winner Mark Rylance. Photograph: Karwai Tang/WireImage

That is another of their grievous errors. It’s plain that older Americans have become a more important and reliable part of the audience that goes to movie theatres. Yet a few years ago, the Academy gave up on honouring old-timers in the show – because they wanted kids to be watching? So this year, brief footage of their November event (private) showed Gena Rowlands (aged 85) getting an honorary Oscar. She spoke then, and sounded smart and touching. But on 28 February she was just a face in the audience. Doesn’t the management recall the days when veterans such as Deborah Kerr, Stanley Donen or Cary Grant came on for the big show and stopped it because of the overflow of emotion? Do you remember much of that at this year’s event? It was a drab night but for a few things, like the lovely, shy acceptance by Mark Rylance, someone with a great future in movies, if he says very little and looks wry. He could be the next Alan Rickman.

Without the Academy, would we be deprived or liberated? One issue has to be solved. The Academy has a superb library to which movie people have been donating paper archives and films for years. That would have to be preserved and maintained as a national resource, and it deserves a federal grant, support from the city of Los Angeles and the state of California. But the Academy has not done much else, though it has begun work on a movie museum, a project that worries those who recall how many such museums have opened, and closed.

The role of excellent, challenging entertainment fiction on screen is not over in the US, even if it is rare on the big screen. For we are in a golden age of long-form television. No one can claim that recent Hollywood movies have done anything on the big screen to match The Wire, The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. But if Hollywood can no longer make pictures that deserve prizes and get a vast audience – such as The Godfather – we might as well accept it and move forward.