Two Great American Pastimes That Aren't So Different

Yahoo

02-03-2025

My father-in-law, Bill, and I watch sports differently. Picture Clint Eastwood sitting in front of the TV with Jesse Eisenberg. When a college football game is on, Bill becomes serious, and my surface-level commentary—things like 'Not looking good,' when Arizona State is trailing—is usually met with silence.
I wasn't raised a college-football fan; casually saying terms like 'Big Ten' or 'Ole Miss' still seems unnatural to me. But as I've tried to get closer to Bill over the years by trying to understand the sport, I've learned important lessons about my own relationship to fandom.
For me, the most essential broadcast on live television has always been the Oscars. As a kid, the ritualized, fanfare-laden process for announcing the year's best movie evoked a grown-up world I was excited to inhabit one day. But over time, Oscar angst has overshadowed my pure enjoyment of my 'sport.' Like many movie fans, I experienced a blow to my sense of reality when I grew up and realized that terrible movies often win at the Oscars. The more I learned about the flawed nominating process, and the misconduct and exclusion tacitly sanctioned by the Academy and the wider movie industry—as crystallized by the #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo hashtags—the more I struggled to maintain the idea that the ceremony 'mattered.' And I don't seem to be alone. The ratings trend for the Academy Awards has shown a decline for much of my adult life.
Bill's preferred form of entertainment always intrigued me, seeming to offer a less tense viewing relationship than I had with the Oscars. Though as I learned more about the game, unlikely parallels between our favorite sports seemed to pop out. For instance: As the TV industry has changed in the streaming era, both live sports and awards shows (despite having fallen from previous heights) remain some of the highest-rated programming—and throughout their history, both have relied heavily on TV to help build and maintain their cultural relevance. The original 1929 Academy Awards 'ceremony' was a dinner during which statues were dispersed quickly to a preannounced list of winners. In 1941, sealed envelopes and the element of surprise were added. Not until 1953, when the event was first televised, did it become, as host Bob Hope put it at the time, 'Hollywood's most exciting giveaway show.' Over the rest of the 20th century, the Oscars were a standout night of TV programming, even in a monocultural era when seemingly everything on the tube was, by today's standards, appointment viewing.
College football games were occasionally televised in the 1930s and '40s, but the sport started airing widely on TV in the early '50s, around the same time as the Oscars. As Daniel Durbin, the director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at USC Annenberg told me, TV helped expand college-football fandom beyond students, alumni, and local fans. 'As national television became the dominant financial medium and support for sport, the NCAA and college leadership sought to make the game and its championships more profitable by expanding its TV footprint,' he said.
[Read: College football's power brokers are destroying it]
Like the Oscars, the sport has also evolved to become more TV friendly. For most of its history, the national champion was decided by a poll, rather than on the field—and without a championship game, there was no yearly climax (or, for that matter, an opportunity to make money through TV commercials). A championship game finally materialized in 1998, but college football relied on a byzantine system where a computer algorithm would essentially determine which two teams competed for the title. Eventually, this system was supplanted by the College Football Playoff, in which a committee-selected pool of teams—ostensibly the country's best—compete until one becomes the champion. Crucially, the refinement of the championship process has also created the addition of high-profile games that 'matter,' making college football more important for a longer period of time—and keeping it on television.
I came to understand some of the vagaries of the selection committee from talking with Bill, who, like many college-football fans, has a lot to say about them. The 2024 committee, Bill told me, 'didn't look at strength of schedule,' which takes the win-loss records of a team's opponents into account. That means that big teams can look like they're coasting to the championship by devouring hopeless little fish without proving their mettle against any great whites. To make matters uglier, coaches and heads of conferences openly lobby for their teams' inclusion.
The idea that the playoffs are subject to bias and influence felt relatable to this Oscars fan. As the Academy Awards ceremony became more popular over the years, it became less casual—and less pure. Any devoted Oscar fan who once believed in fairness would've stopped after the 1999 awards, when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture. Behind the scenes, Shakespeare producer Harvey Weinstein had waged a lobbying campaign to push his movie ahead—and it worked. At the time, the film critic Jack Mathews wrote that Weinstein's awards campaigns created 'the appearance of influence-buying' and were 'tainting the Oscar process, making Miramax a Cold War villain, and demeaning the films themselves.' Any Oscars fan can point to some year where the result seemed obviously rigged and even now, after the Academy has refreshed its voting body, it still always feels like the wrong movie can somehow win.
At breakfast a while back, Bill was thumbing through the sports page of The Wall Street Journal, and I noticed he was looking at a story about the latest minor scandal: the near-collapse of the Pac-12 conference, a consequence of teams now jockeying to join conferences that can offer them more TV revenue. I told Bill how the erosion of college football felt like the controversy-plagued, constantly shifting environment around the Academy Awards. He just let my words hang in the air, and then looked back down at his paper, but it felt like, on some level, we had seen each other in a new way.
[Read: Here's who will win at the 2025 Oscars]
As time has gone on, I've shed the expectation that Bill will nod along at such comparisons between the two. Instead, he waits patiently for me to finish my latest speech, and once I take a breath, proffers some complaint of his own—usually about something like a blatant case of targeting against Arizona State that didn't get called. In his way, he's commiserating—telling me to stay focused on what's happening on the field, not the politics. Bill is no Pollyanna about college football, but he seems to accept the broader structure of the sport even as he recognizes its flaws. Where I feel paranoia and cynicism, Bill just shakes his head and moves on.
Bill's attitude has rubbed off on me. This year, the movie with the most nominations is Emilia Pérez, in my view a so-so film whose star has said some pretty odious things online. The conversation around Emilia Pérez has come to focus on the awards-campaign sideshow, and not at all on the movie's theoretical merits. In past years, this all might have unsettled me, but I'm Bill-pilled now. If Emilia Pérez still wins Best Picture over a competitor with stronger fundamentals like Anora, it'll be annoying, sure. But if Bill can suspend his disbelief and keep moving, with an eye toward the future, why can't I?
In truth, the Oscars matter every bit as much as college football, which is to say, as much as we collectively want them to matter. On some level, football—a coliseum-style violent spectacle that damages the brains of many young participants—should be passé. Instead, its viewership is only growing. Similarly, the Oscars are a combination Borscht Belt variety show and fashion gala for the wealthy. Yet cinema itself is a struggling art form that many of us want to persist, and here in the United States, the Oscars are deeply embedded in the movies as we understand them. They're not just a certificate of merit for the year's most notable films; maybe movie fans should also think of an Oscar statue as something more like a championship trophy, a thing Bill intuitively understands to be won in an arena of competition via an entertaining but questionably fair process.
Perhaps I could've saved myself a lot of angst by embracing this mental sleight of hand earlier in life, but I'm glad to move forward with a clearer perspective. So yes, I will be watching on Sunday to see who wins. Bill, however, won't be joining me. 'I don't like to waste time watching crap,' he told me.
Article originally published at The Atlantic