new media and the oscars.

I watched the majority of the Oscars this year, although I had assumed I wouldn't.

I'm neither strongly for or against the awards show, I just didn't see a point. The formatting of the Oscars seems more or less irrelevant, given the way I curate my online media consumption.

Standard (old) Model: Watch the red carpet, discuss / mock interesting choices, ignore bland ones. Watch the intro, laugh / discuss good jokes, ignore bland ones. Watch the performances, usually well executed but somewhat boring. Watch the presenters, half-paying attention to the pre-presentation patter, and half checking to see if they flub a line or mispronounce a name. Watch the Winners, ignoring the bland (often technical) awards, and agree / disagree with the marquee award winners.

Debatable Model: Read / Compulsively refresh 2-5 different liveblogs of the event on your laptop while watching, so as to achieve the maximum amount of witty commentary / recap possible. (Does anyone actually do this?)

New Model: Ignore the Oscars broadcast. Wake up, and go to your RSS reader. You now have a breakdown of Winners, Snubs, Reactions, Bad Outfits, Good Outfits, Great Jokes, Flubs, and the Performances deemed relevant. With this comes youtube videos of anything notable (therefore, time/location shifting, replay, etc), smarmy commentary, little bits of supporting info you wouldn't have known otherwise, etc. This is basically a distilled version of the standard watching experience, and you can feel free to ignore what doesn't interest you. You will learn everything you would from the show that you cared to, and in around a quarter of the time.

More importantly, the parts that most people enjoy are readily available in online coverage. The context, critique, jokes, etc, take the place of the unending montages that no one cares about, the technical awards (which, I'm sorry, do not matter to wider, not intensely dedicated to film crowd), and the thank you speeches.

Funnily, watching the Oscars made my RSS list a lot faster to sort through this morning, as most of the information had already been absorbed. But, it should be noted that I didn't finish watching the broadcast, because I got bored at around 10, brought my laptop to the TV, and then left at 11.

The standard counterarguments about 'knowing first' or 'shared experience' only partially apply. The interesting thing to me is that watching the Oscars has become an entirely dispensable part of the Academy Awards Experience.