Why People Should Even Care About the Oscars, Says Seth Rogen
Talking about the movie’s biggest night, ever? Like an event only for industry insiders, says Seth Rogen of the Oscars.
The “Pam & Tommy” star revealed to Insider that the entire emphasis on Academy Awards viewership is quite baffling.
“I don’t get why movie people care so much if other people care what awards we give ourselves,” Rogen said during an interview with Paul Rudd to promote their Super Bowl commercial for Lay’s potato chips. “To me, maybe people just don’t care.”
Rogen went on, “I don’t care who wins the automobile awards. No other industry expects everyone to care about what awards they shower upon themselves. Maybe people just don’t care. Maybe they did for a while and they stopped caring. And why should they?”
Last year’s Oscars had marked an all-time low in terms of viewership, even going on to lose half of its audiences from the 2020 Oscars. Post the Academy Awards tried to pivot amid the COVID pandemic by going all host-less, even shortening the runtime of the show by removing all of the Original Song performances, which resulted in less than 10 million people tuned in 2021.
Rogen and Paul Rudd even suggested “outside the box” comedians to take over Oscars hosting duties, even listing “Nathan for You” creator Nathan Fielder or How To with John Wilson’s John Wilson to have people start watching it. When asked who should be hosting the Oscars this year, Rogen replied, “That’s a tough one,” but added, “I’m sure there are comedians out there that want to, right?”
The 94th Academy Awards, which are set to take place on March 27, is expected to have a host for the very first time since the year 2018 when Jimmy Kimmel had hosted the show.
The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host also recently talked about the misstep of the Oscars not nominating “Spider-Man: No Way Home” for Best Picture to reflect the film’s record-breaking fandom.
“The biggest snub in my opinion, and I am actually even angry about this I am embarrassed to say, is the unforgivable omission of ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home?’” Kimmel said. “Why do Best Picture nominees have to be serious? When did that become a prerequisite for getting nominated for an Academy Award?”
Kimmel also went on to slam Adam McKay’s apocalyptic movie “Don’t Look Up” for landing Oscar nominations.
“You’re telling me ‘Don’t Look Up’ was better than ‘Spider-Man?’ It most certainly was not,” Kimmel continued. “Even if you go by the critics reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, ‘Don’t Look Up’ got a 46 percent and ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ has 90 percent. For god’s sake, ‘Jackass Forever’ has an 89 percent.”
Kimmel went on to add, “You want to know what happened? Voters looked at the list and saw the names Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep and they checked the box [for ‘Don’t Look Up’] and then they put their kids in the car and went to see the movie ‘Spider-Man.’ And they loved it! But they didn’t vote for it.”
“Don’t Look Up” is currently nominated across four categories of Oscar, which includes Best Picture. The additional nominations are for Film Editing, Best Original Screenplay, and Original Score.
