He might be one of the most famous people on the planet, not to mention one of the biggest movie stars of the last 40 years, but it wouldn’t be too harsh to say that Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t very familiar with the Academy Awards. Obviously, he’ll have attended more than a few ceremonies over the decades, but it’s not as though any of his iconic performances had him in the running for Best Actor.
That being said, the action icon has some ideas for how to freshen up the biggest awards show of the year. The recent 93rd edition of the Oscars was beset by surprise and controversy, after it appeared as though the entire telecast had been building towards a posthumous victory for Chadwick Boseman’s turn in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, only for Anthony Hopkins to be named as Best Actor winner for The Father instead.
Hopkins wasn’t even present at the ceremony either in-person or virtually, but that’s not his fault when he’s an 83 year-old man living on the other side of the planet in the middle of a pandemic who’s publicly voiced his lack of interest in awards season, not to mention the fact that he probably wasn’t expecting to emerge victorious.
Circling back to Schwarzenegger, though, and in a recent interview, he said that he didn’t even bother to watch the Oscars, and blasted the ceremony for being boring. Not only that, but the 73 year-old offered a unique solution to spice things up for next year’s broadcast, location-wise at least.
“I was asked several times, did I watch the Oscars? I told people, I said, ‘I watched maybe one third of it’. So, I couldn’t even tell you if I won. Did I win yesterday? The reason I only watched one third was because it was so boring. I basically just turned it off. I just couldn’t watch it anymore because there was so much talent there on the stage but it was so boring. How could they with all this talent make it so boring? I think the next step is, they should take to it Muscle Beach and have the Oscars on Muscle Beach. What do you think about that?”
The 93rd Oscars drew the lowest televised viewership ever, so there are clearly a lot of people that share the same sentiment as Arnold Schwarzenegger. As such, maybe Muscle Beach is the solution the shake up the stagnant formula.
