This arrived in my email box. Oh, these Oscar naifs...
"Dear Ms. Finke: I'm the TV critic at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and I'm about to write a piece in which I propose the 'modest solution' that they stop televising the Oscars. At least try it for a year in an effort to halt the ratings decline. It's not just that so much of the suspense is gone now, what with all the other awards shows leading up to it. It's also a matter of the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between what TV viewers now want and/or expect from a show and what the people in the film community seem to want/expect from the Academy Awards..."