Pete Hammond

But, you know, it's way down when you consider like 1998 Oscars.

when Titanic was in there and that was like almost 60 million and it might be a very shrewd move on the part of the Academy because with YouTube without that production infrastructure of a network or even a streamer like Netflix which is doing live events now they have the ability to have more control over the broadcast it can be longer it can be whatever you want on streaming

Every year they have these discussions about can we take some categories off the main broadcast?

They did it one year.

It was a disaster.

They did some of them in a pre-show and it didn't work out at all.

You know, you have all these branches in the academy, the below the line cinematographers, all of that.

that really made a stink about it, and they don't want to go through that again, so this works for them.

So it's no problem with YouTube, but I'll say the key thing here.

In my opinion, it's international.

It's the way the Academy membership's been going, and adding more and more international filmmakers to the membership.

And also, I think they want to be felt as a global organization and that the Oscars are global, not just Hollywood, not just in America.

But it's a business that's been struggling.

So it's just a way people are consuming content, consuming movies are changing.

And I think the other key thing about this, people have been watching the Oscars on YouTube already.

They watch bits and pieces.

You just go on YouTube and type in, you know, Jamie Lee Curtis winning the Oscar and it comes up.

And that's how the younger audiences actually have been watching the Oscars all along.

This isn't a dumb move, really, when you assess what the Academy can get out of it.

They're sort of admitting they're way behind the times.