Column: Baseball & Oscars fight losing battle for relevancy

Yes, folks, dinosaurs do still roam the Earth.

Come Sunday night, an increasingly irrelevant Hollywood elite — look, kids, Dame Judi Dench got another nomination! — will gather for their annual fete to an astonishing lack of self-awareness, a.k.a. the Academy Awards.

In less than two weeks, Major League Baseball will throw out the first pitch on another fun-filled season of jockstrap adjustments and dallying even longer than usual between pitches so every fielder, plus a couple of hot dog vendors, have time to shift to one side of the field.

Baseball & the Oscars.

Two relics of a bygone era, both fighting a desperate but ultimately losing battle to avoid relegation — sorry, a soccer term seemed appropriate here — to Nicheville U.S.A.

Each seems to think it can somehow become must-see viewing again, despite plunging ratings that confirm they've already been written off by a sizable chunk of the population.

For the Oscars, that means going to increasingly desperate lengths to honor films that people have actually seen, even though we all know snooty Academy members favor flicks attended by 14 people — all of them movie critics — at an art house on the Upper East Side.

A few years ago, they proposed an "Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film" — in other words, whichever superhero movie sold the most tickets — but that plan quickly fell apart and was shuffled off to purgatory to gather the dreaded "additional input.”

With nothing more heard about whatever additional input was received, the 2022 Oscars have turned to that bastion of rationale thought and respectful debate — Twitter! — to give the fans a say on their favorite film and best movie moment.

Granted, the Twitterverse can't do much worse than Academy voters who selected “Green Book” as the...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Column-Baseball-Oscars-fight-losing-battle-for-17029585.php