Week-to-Week: And the Winner is [Not Televised]...
Why the Grammys' solutions to ensure a "mainstream" broadcast may not work for the Oscars
Yesterday, Vulture’s Josef Adalian tweeted the following during one of my favorite yearly rituals (and one I nearly forgot about during a busy weekend of virtual conferencing): tuning into Grammy.com to watch the “Grammy Premiere” livestream of the nearly 90% of Grammy Awards that are given out before the actual broadcast begins on CBS.
My plan had been to use this week’s newsletter to confront the atypical proximity between two of the industry’s biggest award shows, and Joe pointing to this contrast offers a productive place to start. If not for a certain altercation between two extremely famous people, we would have spent more of the last week breaking down the Oscars’ treatment of the eight categories they clumsily presented during the red carpet and edited into the broadcast. That conversation, which got pushed out, would have naturally drawn questions like Joe’s, especially as we saw the Grammys put together a pre-show that felt celebratory and reverent to the categories that have been “relegated.”
Case in point: just after I sent my reply to Joe’s tweet, the Brothers Osborne earned their first Grammy for “Younger Me,” which won Country Duo/Group Performance. It’s a song inspired by lead singer and younger brother T.J. Osborne, who came out as gay early in 2021, and as he accepted the award he spoke about what it meant to him to be winning that award for a song about something he thought meant he could never make it as a musician, and after taking the risk of going public with this part of himself.1 As he spoke of the man he loves being in the audience to see it, the Grammy Premiere broadcast rose to the power of the moment, even managing to do a “where are the queer folk?!” scan of the crowd and get a camera on Brandi Carlile’s standing ovation.
The Recording Academy putting this—along with most speeches from the pre-show—on YouTube means this moment will live beyond last night, but it will still be seen by far fewer people than it it had happened on CBS. The Recording Academy’s official Twitter account admittedly live-tweeted every winner, always with a link to livestream the Premiere broadcast, but how many of their 3.6 million followers bothered tuning in yesterday remains unclear: the Grammy.com feed they’re linking to has no viewing data, while the 192k who were watching on YouTube as I started writing this at 5:23pm eastern, uh, may not necessarily be paying a lot of attention based on the chat.2
Now that it exists as a YouTube video, there’s a potential for Osborne’s speech to reach a larger audience.3 But weirdly, the Recording Academy didn’t share these videos on Twitter as they were being uploaded. Their social media approach was instead a scattered combination of prepared images (for categories in genres like country that have wide purchase) and what are obviously screenshots of the live feed (for the categories that do not). As a result, it doesn’t feel like these moments are going to live on compared to what the Recording Academy/CBS shared from the main broadcast, aka “the one that matters.”
There’s no question that relegating moments like the T.J. Osborne’s speech creates a clear hierarchy between certain winners and others, but this is an accepted reality of the breadth of the Recording Academy’s purview, and the stated purpose of the Grammy award broadcast. And so while I can understand why Joe would think about this type of approach as a solution for the Oscars, this year’s ceremony reinforced why the specifics of the Grammys make this an acceptable arrangement for the relegated artists in a way it wouldn’t be for that other Academy.
The central distinction is that for the most part, the Grammys are relegating genres based on clearly evidenced measures of mainstream appeal. Musicians in categories like Reggae or Americana are not ignorant to the niche audiences they appeal to, and are willing to except their exclusion from the main broadcast because they accept that broadcast functions as what NPR’s Stephen Thompson describes as an “infomercial” for the commercial music industry. Whether or not their awards are presented on the main broadcast carries no particular harm, because they’re relegated from that industry anyway.
The other reason there’s less concern over the relegation of so many awards and categories is because the awards are not the most important part of the Grammys broadcast. Performances are the primary currency on offer, and this year they consciously used the “Rooftop Stage” as a way to highlight the genres that had no part in the awards section of the broadcast.4 And in instances where artists from niche categories break into major categories like Brandi Carlile did back in 2019, performances give them a moment to highlight their community, and bring greater attention to the genre as a whole. It also allows for the Recording Academy to argue that relegating all but one category for larger genres like Rap, Country, and R&B is justified when they receive multiple performances over the course of the broadcast.
Shifting over to the Oscars, though, this type of strategy for simplifying the broadcast becomes far more complicated. Relegation at the Grammys is synonymous with a measurable deficiency of mainstream appeal, but at the Oscars the majority of categories pre-taped before the show started reflected the work of below-the-line laborers.5 And while producers of the broadcast might have argued that they simply chose the categories audiences might have the least investment in, the message is that they are less important to the filmmaking process than their above-the-line counterparts, which has long been a battle within the Academy as different branches fight to assert their legitimacy (as discussed in a panel at the virtual conference I attended this weekend).
And unlike with the genres at the Grammys, there’s really no readymade way to appease sound editors or production designers in the main broadcast that would simultaneously match ABC’s stated desire for “mainstream” appeal. There’s no equivalent of a “rooftop stage” that would be perceived as audience-friendly but also assert the value of those elements of moviemaking. For many, the introductions to the awards in these categories would have been one of the earliest ways we learned about those crafts and their importance to the movies we enjoy: with those introductions either shortened or erased entirely during this year’s frankenbroadcast, there’s no question these workers were displaced even if they weren’t erased.
Now, this displacement could have been handled much better. The Academy fell behind in livetweeting their own awards, for example, leaving journalists like Kyle Buchanan and nominees like Guillermo Del Toro to effectively do their jobs for them as a corrective to the failure to offer a feed to either journalists (Buchanan was in the audience, not in a press room) or to viewers at home.
Buchanan’s videos, in particular, revealed the degree of editing that went into the shorter versions of speeches shown to audiences, which others in attendance like Phil Lord called attention to as the awards went on.
But I would argue that even if they had handled the displacement better, the nature of it will always trigger a historical push-and-pull between the different branches of the Academy, each jockeying for position. And so while it may be nice to imagine a secondary broadcast, perhaps on Hulu, that offers time for the Academy to celebrate these categories and the artists working within them with proper reverence, I don’t think there’s a version of that which doesn’t feel “secondary” in ways that will make it untenable. There’s just too much at stake in the Oscars as a statement on how different parts of the filmmaking process are valued for a livestreamed pre-show to solve the layered problems at play.
Who knows, though: maybe the Academy will look to this weekend’s other major entertainment event—Wrestlemania—and decide that the solution is a two-night Oscar ceremony, with the awards evenly divided between them. Feel free to start brainstorming how you’d divvy them up.
Random Grammy Observations
In lieu of links, as it was a busy week where I didn’t do as much reading as I might have otherwise, here’s some scattered Grammy thoughts.
The first award during the pre-show broadcast was the Most Online: a TikTok-originating “Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” winning Musical Theater Album in what was, admittedly, an off year for the category due to the Broadway shutdown.
Jack Antonoff has arguably had bigger years as a producer, but he earned his first win for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical for his work with Lana Del Ray, St. Vincent (who won Alternative Album) and Taylor Swift’s Evermore, which earned an Album of the Year nomination and nothing more.
Speaking of Taylor, not shocked she sat out that lone Evermore nomination after the coronation of Folklore a year earlier.
In terms of performances, the frontloading of the Future of Music—Rodrigo, Eilish, BTS, Lil Nas X—was pretty strong across the board.
As touched as I was by their win during the pre-show, ending on that Brothers Osborne performance was strange.
I realize that the slap threw things off, but it’s still crazy that the Oscars went through all that rigamarole about pre-taping awards and still ran forty minutes late, while the Grammys clocked in right on time without breaking a sweat.
Enjoyed the ritual of bringing backstage crew up to introduce many of the performers, although their various levels of comfort with public speaking brought out a lot of sympathy anxiety (especially Carrie Underwood’s).
I really had pegged this as an Olivia Rodrigo coronation, but it seems like whereas Eilish had the “childhood bedroom, brother as producer/collaborator” angle that carried her through the four general categories, there was more pushback to the more directly commercial, less “indie”-facing approach Rodrigo took.
“Leave The Door Open” is deeply catchy, and thus I find it hard to be too angry at its appeal to the Academy’s love of the old carried the day, especially after such delightful speeches.
A week removed from a last-minute Oscars presenting invite, Rachel Zegler makes her way into the Sondheim-themed In Memoriam? Impressive, although her best work in the past week was absolutely calling into the George Lucas Talk Show from backstage at the former ceremony.
I’ve been thinking (a lot) about the opening anecdote from Dave Holmes’ Esquire profile of Osborne—in which Osborne recounts his sudden realization about how coming out was going to change his understanding of himself as he was giving his “coming out interview”—since I read it.
I cite the number of concurrent streams because it’s the most legible metric: it now says “6.2m views,” but that’s just people who tuned in for at least 30 seconds, so it doesn’t really provide a number comparable to the Nielsens that will emerge today.
Before the Academy posted it, my solution was to use YouTube’s own “clip” function for livestreams, which I didn’t know existed.
This meant you only saw the beginning and end of each performance, with the rest seemingly living online somewhere although I couldn’t find them during the broadcast itself, to be honest?
Below-the-line and above-the-line are in reference to call sheets, but the simplest explanation is “above-the-line people get to make big creative decisions and/or make lots of money, below-the-line people don’t.”
Admittedly the Grammys are the only awards show I consistently watch every year. The main reason being the awards are less the point. You essentially get to watch what is being nominated, which is impossible to do for the Oscars or Emmys. I don’t think clips cut it and I don’t even remember how much they do of that. I probably care more about who is nominated/wins in the TV Academy but even there, it has many limits. Meanwhile the Oscars feel less relevant each year. The middle class type movies that used to win have now moved to TV. (The Queen’s Gambit strikes me as Oscar bait except it’s not a movie. 20 years ago it would have been.) All this to say it doesn’t surprise me the Grammys are more successful as an evening of entertainment.
As a regular GLTS watcher, seeing them shouted out here is great. More people should watch!