It’s easy to identify success, but much harder to distinguish where that success comes from.

The Academy Awards has received widely changing ratings throughout the 21st century. Each year’s broadcast brings a new attempt to steady them, particularly never letting them drop below the 40-million-viewer mark. To ensure this, organizers have picked comedian Chris Rock to host the 88th Oscars.

Rock went on a string of extremely well-received interviews last year promoting his film “Top Five” that made him more popular than he’s been in years. He seems to be the perfect blend of accessible and edgy for the job and his previous Oscar hosting gig in 2005 was the last time viewership exceeded 42 million.

However, no matter how good a job Rock does, it will not be the deciding factor in the success of the Oscars. The importance of the host in an award show is a popular narrative, but not a true one. Instead, it will be the variety of movies that stand to be awarded that will ultimately decide how many choose to watch the ceremony.

The Oscars remain the most respected of award shows and the one most likely to award worthy creations. The Oscars occasionally honor a film worthy of being called “best of the year.” But too often it gives glory to an “award movie,” one that appears to be important, but may not actually be.

These movies tend to appeal to a very small audience, but, as every corner of television is learning, the key to gaining great ratings is to appeal to as many audiences as possible. The large amount of choices in media has diversified audiences more than ever before and it’s harder to reach a large portion of them.

To remedy this, the Oscars expanded the number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10 starting with the 2009 Oscars. This brought in a few more movies, particularly indie films, which wouldn’t have had a chance at the top prize before the change. This culminated in the extremely worthy, but pretty challenging, “Birdman” winning Best Picture last year over something like the more traditional, but dreadfully mediocre, “The Theory of Everything.”

Though last year was helped by the notable outliers of “Foxcatcher” and “Wild,” of the 35 nominees in the seven major non-Best Picture categories at the 2014 Oscars, only five were for movies not nominated for Best Picture. The attempt to diversify has actually forced voters to consolidate only the films that have a chance to be nominated for Best Picture, increasing the “award movie” effect.

Many more movies used to get a couple nominations and less focus was placed on Best Picture. When Chris Rock last hosted about 10 years ago, the number of movies nominated in the eight major categories was 17; the number in 2014 was 12. The movies in 2005 catered to all sorts of crowds and every single Best Picture nominee had crossed the $100 million mark at the box office.

The host is borderline irrelevant, Neil Patrick Harris is essentially as popular as Ellen DeGeneres, yet he got a 16-percent lower rating in 2015. Rather than depending on an engaging, high-profile host in efforts to boost viewership, the awards show must realize that the problem that has held it back is the lack of films that appeal to all sorts of audiences.

The only way to ensure consistently great ratings for the Oscars is to return them to the expansive award show it used to be. If it continues to insulate the show with rules that forces it to focus only on a few movies, many valuable films with passionate audiences will be left at the door.

Films shouldn’t be nominated because of popularity among the public, but nominating films that only “appear” worthy to a select few is just as absurd.

Mark DiBona is a senior television, radio and film major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at mdibona@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @NoPartyNoDisco.

Published on October 26, 2015 at 11:55 pm