Screenshot: Joel Cunningham
Every year, the ratings for the Academy Awards dip and a bunch of entertainment journalists try to figure out what can be done to “fix” the Oscars. While that’s actually a problem without a solution—it’s hard get an increasing number of people to care about a movie awards show when, outside of a few mega-blockbusters, the movies’ impact on the culture is decreasing at a rapid clip—I did at least come across a website that makes gaming the Oscars a little bit easier and more fun for those of us who do actually still care.
Oscaround is a website that seeks to inject a little social media juice into a dying tradition. Because it certainly is—for all the digital ink spilled over The Slap last year, the 2022 Oscars were the second-lowest rated ever with around 16.6 million viewers (or approximately 100 viewers per Will Smith/Chris Rock think piece). The movies that win also seem to be increasingly irrelevant to the mainstream with each passing year—the last Best Picture winner to make more than $100 million at the box office was Argo, way back in 2012, and nobody even likes Argo anymore.
But the people who still love the Oscars really love them—I can list four podcasts off the top of my head that spend most of the year talking about them—and if that’s you, Oscaround is for you. It’s a website that allows you to easily track the award nominees you’ve seen and share your progress on social media with a square-filled, Wordle-like grid.
As you can see above, I’m doing only OK with my progress this year—I hope to fill in at least three of those Best Picture squares over the next week. (Sorry All Quiet on the Western Front, but trench warfare is a no from me.)
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But Oscaround goes beyond just sharing your progress by also making it really easy to make your predictions for who should and will win in every category: As you check off what you’ve seen, you can also select which nominee is likely to come home with a statuette, and voice your personal preference if it’s different, and you can easily copy and share those results with the rest of Film Twitter.
Basically, it’s the triple threat for Oscar nerds: You can show how much of a completist you are, how in tune you are with the awards buzz, and how much better your opinion is than that of the Academy voters, all in a few clicks.
