Academy president admits Oscars weren't that great, but at least "we tried something"
While pundits continue to offer their postmortems for the Oscars, and James Franco continues to print out his critical jibes and paste them onto a 12-foot papier-mâché sculpture he’s titled “The Weeping Wall,” Academy president Tom Sherak sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to offer his own take on things—a decidedly “whaddayawant from me” shrug of contrition tempered by a lot of spin. For example, while Sherak admits that “the chemistry seemed to be off” between the ironically detached Franco and the supercalifragilistic Anne Hathaway—saying, “Franco is a very charming guy, but sometimes you need a comic to make fun of things”—he also blames the 9-percent decline in overall ratings on the movies themselves. “We didn't have an Avatar or a Titanic this year,” he says, adding that if next year should see an equally huge film, the viewership will go up. Not that he thinks things were all that bad: “You can say we failed,” he says. "I'd say we still got 38 million people.” Unfortunately, of those 38 million people, few of them were the demographically desirable young audience they were hoping for—and whom Franco and Hathaway were explicitly hired to attract. The average age in viewers actually rose to 50.6 this year.