Tag: Oscars

Ah, it's another year of the Academy Awards. And that means, not surprisingly, another year with news articles that don't show much understanding of...

Original Blog Post from 2020: An update from 2021 is at the bottom of this updated post Another year, another evening of the Academy Awards, a.k.a....

With Kevin Hart now definitively stating that he will not host the 2019 Oscars, it appears that the ceremony will move forward with a...

As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings. Two Data Points Are Not a Trend The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.

Tomorrow, my post will be about headlines that scream about ratings for The Oscars being "down from last year" or "the lowest in X years." As I've blogged about before, I'm always skeptical of such simplistic comparisons that might mask the real underlying trend. But first, could the Academy avoid last year's embarrassing mixup?

Today's Post in <50 words: Lean thinkers don't blame individuals who are in a bad system, whether that's a presenter at Oscars, a kicker in a football game, or a healthcare professional in a hospital.