The Actor, SAG’s Award, Is Still Seeking an Audience

The movie industry has the Oscar. The television industry has the Emmy. The recording industry has the Grammy.

But have you ever heard of the Actor?

Weighing more than 8 pounds, the Actor is a bronze human figure holding the masks of comedy and tragedy. It is given out annually by the Screen Actors Guild to actors who, by a vote of their peers, achieved outstanding performances in motion pictures and television.

On Sunday, the guild will hold its fourth annual awards show at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The two-hour event will be televised live at 5 p.m. by TNT.

In an era when televised awards shows are proliferating like rabbits, the SAG Awards have struggled to find a viewership.

Last year, the show was broadcast on NBC and posted a lackluster 7.7 rating/17 share in metered markets, coming in third in the ratings in its Saturday evening time slot. The previous year, it had a 10.0 rating/17 share on the same network.

The SAG Awards were not alone. Even last year’s Academy Awards telecast saw a drop in viewership, drawing a 27.4 rating (26.6 million homes) compared to 30.3 (29.1 million homes) the previous year.

“I think the ratings went down across the board for awards shows last year,” said Kathy Connell, the show’s producer. “Some of it had to do with the films that were nominated last year. They were mostly independent films--not blockbusters. I think the buzz is better this year now that we have ‘Titanic’ and ‘As Good as It Gets’ [among the actor nominations].

“I know we are really happy to be on TNT,” Connell added. “NBC had us on Saturday night. TNT offered us Sunday night, and we’re very happy.”

It’s at best a mixed blessing though. Jumping to TNT means that the potential viewing audience for the SAG Awards could be smaller this year because basic cable is available in only 65% of U.S. households.

One enormous hurdle facing the SAG Awards is simply getting noticed.

Besides the Oscars, Emmys and Grammys, viewers are inundated with all kinds of televised awards shows. They include: the Golden Globe Awards, the Tony Awards, the American Music Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards, the Country Music Assn. Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, the MTV Movie Awards, the VH1 Fashion Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, the Daytime Emmy Awards, the Soap Opera Awards, the American Comedy Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, the Soul Train Music Awards, the American Latino Media Arts Awards, the ESPY Awards--and the list goes on and on.

(Earlier this week, the Hollywood Reporter, an entertainment industry trade publication, reported that HBO is considering withdrawing participation in the CableACE Awards while the National Academy of Cable Programming is thinking about discontinuing the awards and the show.)

Though the Screen Actors Guild, one of Hollywood’s biggest unions, has a storied history dating to 1933, its awards show began only in 1995.

Guild President Richard Masur conceded that building the show into a TV tradition is “a challenge” given the glut of awards shows.

“The problem is that the timing [of the show] has always been tricky,” Masur said. “We don’t want to, in any way, run into and take away from the Oscars [which this year air on March 23]. On the other hand, we don’t want to slam up against the Golden Globe Awards [which took place on Jan. 18].”

Nevertheless, Yale Summers, chairman of the SAG Awards Show Committee, said he is heartened by how much the SAG Awards has grown in recognition in four years.

George Schlatter, who has produced the American Comedy Awards for 12 years, said it is difficult for a new awards show to establish itself in the public mind.

“It took us a real long time to become a credible award,” Schlatter said.

Part of the problem, Schlatter said, is that there are too many awards shows. He said he once tried to list all the shows on TV and found there were “something like 36 shows on the air.”

“Eventually, everyone in the world will have received an award,” Schlatter joked. “I was going to do an All-Awards Show Channel. I once pitched an awards show for the best awards show. There would be a best acceptance speech by an actor, best acceptance speech by a director, most boring speech by a hairdresser.”

Don Mischer, who over the years has produced such shows as the Tonys, the Emmys and Kennedy Center Honors, said the awards season now stretches from early January through the Oscars.

“I think after you see three or four of these shows, it’s harder to get viewership and also harder to get the industry--actors, writers and everybody else--interested because they just feel there are so many awards shows,” Mischer said.

“I think it was easier to establish a tradition 50 years ago with the Emmys or 70 years ago with the Oscars,” Mischer added, because viewers today can sit in a chair and surf 75 channels and dare a show to grab their interest in 10 seconds.

Even filling a stage with celebrities is no guarantee of high ratings, Mischer said.

When he produced the Tony Awards one year, Mischer recalled, the show was hosted by Angela Lansbury, who at the time was starring in a top-rated TV series, “Murder, She Wrote.” The list of celebrities that night included Madonna.

“We had Angela, we had the covers of 70% of the Sunday television supplements, it was a big PR push . . ,” Mischer said. “ ‘Murder, She Wrote’ had a 36 share in the ratings that night followed immediately by the Tonys. We dropped to about an 18 share, and it drifted down over the next two hours to a 14 share.”

By comparison, last year’s Tony Awards show saw a big jump in viewership fueled, in part, by the appearance of daytime talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell. The 1997 broadcast was seen by 9.3 million viewers, compared to 6.3 million viewers in 1996, the lowest rating ever for the show.