As a person of middling intelligence who has spent much of his life working around Hollywood, the lost year of 2020 has been keenly instructive. The show business I grew up in, long buffeted by disruption, has weathered a near-extinction event in Covid-19. Streaming is trumpeted as its salvation and future, but the leaders of most media conglomerates are having as much trouble navigating that cluttered landscape as you are finding something decent to binge on Friday night. Meantime, the layers-thick industrial cladding around traditional Hollywood—that venerable apparatus dwarfing the creative nuggets spat out at the center — disintegrates apace. We are only at the beginning of a painful process of redefining what show business is, let alone who gets to work in it.

These conditions predate the pandemic, but the upending of production schedules, tentpole release dates and the typical awards season calendar, make for nifty accelerant. The breaking down and rebuilding of our cultural machinery is inevitable and necessary, and it has lent itself to easy sloganeering about the brave, new, and more inclusive world that may supplant it. But it won’t come without more pain inflicted on an industry that precariously employs tens of thousands of human beings. Change of such magnitude has a way of being terribly exciting and terrible at once.

For the past 30 years or so, the sort of display case for establishment Hollywood (nominally based in Los Angeles, but a hegemony sprinkled throughout the English-speaking world) has been the awards season red carpet. During our long period of internment, this gargantuan promotional device has been neatly rolled up and tucked away, replaced by virtual and socially distanced approximations. Despite the best efforts of many creative minds, these have been dreary affairs. Conventional thinking within the industry presumes that a return to public spaces will also signal a rebirth of the red carpet as mega-spectacle — back and better than ever, as old ad campaigns for sequels used to vamp. We want a Hollywood liberated from confinement to erupt in giddy hedonism not seen since the roaring twenties—as if Clara Bow is going to miraculously  re-materialize, sipping champagne from a slipper. 

That’s the sunny way of looking at things, and Hollywood does love a comeback story. Entertainment events will of course resume, spurred on by muscle memory if nothing else. But Big Red Carpet, by which I mean the supercharged media and marketing juggernaut that grabbed the sustained attention of millions of mostly female consumers, is in inexorable decline.  Red carpets date from the early 1900s, when railroads unfurled swaths of scarlet for V.I.P. customers; they became synonymous with the glitzy showbiz premiere by the middle of the last century. The old industry wail that award shows ought to be about the work is a bit disingenuous — these events were intended to be vehicles for hype. That said, it’s only been since the 1980s that the carpet has been super-scaled as a major entertainment project in and of itself. From the ’90s until the twenty-tweens, the carpet was a nexus of Big Things: Big Movies, Big Networks, Big Press, Big Fashion, Big Beauty, Big Stars, and Very Big Audiences. Wherever we find our diversions, this is not our fragmented, fractious media landscape of today. 

Big Red Carpet shored up a multiplicity of interests. It promoted Hollywood to an interested world, gave fashion brands a new kind of runway, provided networks with star-studded programming that was relatively cheap to produce, and serviced legacy media companies and their advertising partners with content and lamprey-like sponsored events. This peak carpet of Bjork’s swan dress, E!, the Vanity Fair party, celebrity weeklies, digital galleries, live streams, and lately, Mario Lopez, was often lamely pitched as a Super Bowl for the Hollywood-obsessed, who allegedly tracked celebrities like sports teams. The supposed proof in this spangly pudding was in ratings, newsstand sales, clicks and streams. Even if viewers increasingly found the shows themselves dull, hadn’t seen the movies or television shows nominated, or weren’t terribly invested in the winners, the thrill of seeing the very famous all together surmounted it. 

That made some sense a generation ago, when, for better and worse, a monolithic media landscape meant that most everybody knew who was a star, and what was playing at the multiplex or airing on NBC on Thursday night. Mass audiences tuned into the Oscars, Golden Globes, and Emmys for the rare opportunity to get a rare glimpse of the A-list (a Boomer term if ever there was one), and what happened at an awards show — a stumble in heels, a ham-fisted political broadside, a diss between rivals, an encounter between ex-lovers— could be hashed over for weeks. Head-to-toe images of dresses fattened weekly magazines, extended Joan Rivers’ career, and goosed traffic. These were revenue drivers in an era when fame was a scarce, treasured commodity and scale mattered most of all. 

Today, we are exposed to ubiquitous celebrity in isolation, minute-to-minute, on our phones. The very notion of a “movie star” is quaint, and the line between television and film has evaporated. Critiquing what people wear, once sold as part of the fun, is beyond the pale, and social media short-circuits the need for the fashion-focused to take a style hit with a chaser of on-camera blather. The biggest talent mostly loathes walking the carpet and will do anything to shorten the ordeal. Hollywood’s most powerful publicists are demanding the notorious Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that quirky little cabal behind the Golden Globes, reform itself or lose access to their clients. Since there is now zero shelf life to “the red carpet experience” strenuously pushed by marketers, opportunities to make money off of it are severely constrained — causing nightly syndicated entertainment shows, E!, and celebrity magazine brands to wither. Then there are the battered awards shows themselves. The big telecasts—even the Grammys, which at least have the virtue of being a series of live performances— are struggling with audiences because audiences are hip to what the guests have always known: They really are all about the work, and attending somebody else’s work party, rubber chicken and all, is rarely entertaining. 

This year’s Academy Awards, held belatedly this Sunday, will be the capstone of a season peculiar and sour. Trade outlets invested in the dynamics of the race have trudged gamely along, outlining who is up and who is down in a contest that is barely registering with most. Although the traditional theatrical experience has been obliterated, all of the nominated movies can be streamed at home. Sadly, this has not made them magnets for audiences, and one can expect the usual soul-searching about who the Oscars are for to be more intense than ever. This isn’t the fault of the Academy. It’s simply that the enormous brief foisted on it by Big Red Carpet — Cultural Relevance! Artistic Quality! Global Popularity! Lots of Laughs!—is impossible. 

At such an acute inflection point, it might be wise to adjust the frame. Fragmentation means fascination with Big Red Carpet will wane, but intensity of interest in entertainment among smaller, devoted constituencies may, in the end, matter far more to the bottom line. There will always be demographic-crossing juggernauts in film and television, but awards season is very rarely about them. Why not accept that? When it comes to the red carpet, an addiction to scale has been unhealthy. Kicking it may pave the way for deeper, lucrative engagement with people who genuinely care. 

That may distress those, myself among them, who have felt the dizzy glamour of stepping on to the red carpet at an actual, in-person Academy Awards. For a good 30 minutes, there is genuine magic in that experience, just as there is in sitting through a Latin mass in an ancient cathedral; the ritual connects us back to a dimly remembered time, even if eyeballs in the modern world drift elsewhere. But perhaps by stripping away the smells and bells, we can rediscover something simpler and more compelling, which is what drew us all under the hot lights in the first place.