The prize for most troubled awards show goes to ...

Andy Pemberton

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 3:56PM UAE / November 4. 2009 11:56AM GMT

Last year's Oscar host, Hugh Jackman, won't be reprising his role for this year's ceremony. Kevin Winter / Getty Images / AFP

Critics are calling it a “huge but dwindling monstrosity” and now even the members of Hollywood’s elite are starting to admit the truth: the Oscars are in serious trouble.

The three-hour televised awards ceremony that recognises excellence in the movie industry has witnessed its audience fall off a cliff in recent years. The Academy Awards have shed 20 million viewers since 1998, when Titanic won Best Picture and drew a hefty 57 million pairs of eyes to the televised event.

While last year’s Hugh Jackman-hosted, Broadway-style telecast fared slightly better in the ratings war, the organisers are this year once again scrambling to stop the Oscars’ slide into irrelevance.

The Academy has announced plans to reshuffle the awards, upping the number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10, and ditching some of the less-exciting categories from the live broadcast. Last year’s director, Bill Condon, is “not available”, so he has been replaced by the musicals director Adam Shankman (Hairspray), whom it is hoped will bring some Broadway razzle dazzle to LA’s Kodak Theatre on March 7. And on Tuesday, organisers announced that they had tapped the comedian Steve Martin and the 30 Rock actor Alec Baldwin to co-host the show. Martin has hosted twice before but it will be the straight-man Baldwin’s first time in the role.

But despite these changes, the problems, say observers, are going to be difficult to overcome.

While it’s true that it is the films contending for Best Picture that attract audiences – last year’s uptick was helped by the popularity of Slumdog Millionaire, a movie that gave the awards show its “story” – there is a shortage of big, prestige films of the kind the ceremony was designed to cater to, say critics.

“In its heyday, the Oscars represented stellar old-school glamour and major mainstream movies,” says the Empire magazine contributing editor Damon Wise. “But today it seems to reward one-off performances and niche films that most people never see.”

“With fewer people having seen the nominated films, fewer are interested in watching the show,” says Richard Rushfield, from the Hollywood based movie site Defamer.com.

If an art-house movie is recognised, no one has heard of it, says Wise, and if a populist movie such as The Dark Knight gets the award, it degrades the honour. If the Academy goes for Oscar bait – upscale dramas released in the US in the December before the awards – that’s pandering. The Oscars can’t win.

But there are other difficulties, too. The TV format is dangerously out of date. Despite successive producers’ attempts to trim the show, it remains three hours long and features people in tuxedos making rambling speeches.

Meanwhile, the news cycle now spins so rapidly that honouring last December’s movies in March – because that’s how long it takes to collect the Academy’s votes – seems woefully out of date.

Some of Oscar’s competition looks a lot more fun. This year, the finale of American Idol may attract more TV viewers, while the Golden Globes, voted for by 80 foreign journalists in Hollywood, will be more enjoyable to watch. The reason, says the film editor of Heat magazine Charles Gant, is that the Globes honour TV as well as Hollywood and viewers would rather see the stars of House, The Office and 30 Rock than the earnest awards-bait movies that can dominate the Oscars. The Globes’ speeches also tend to be more freewheeling affairs, as was evidenced by Mickey Rourke’s Best Actor speech last year when he thanked his dogs.

But what can the Academy do? It has already tried everything. It has tried to make the show younger (Chris Rock, Jon Stewart), to get wacky (Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen De Generes) and to go mainstream (Billy Crystal, Martin). This year’s decision to plump for old-time glamour again – an idea it may have pinched from Broadway’s Tony awards – seems as good a strategy as any, says Wise.

“It’s not a bad move to put the show into the hands of a showman,” he says.

“Oscar is about prestige and capital-G glamour,” agrees Rushfield. “And if they don’t protect that, then all they have is a bunch of boring speeches and clips reels.”

But in the end, it may be that the Oscars are fighting a battle that will be very hard to win.

“In the age of multi-channel TV and the internet, audiences are fracturing across the map,” says Gant.

Still, there is hope.

“People will catch the highlights on YouTube,” he says.