I thought that the Oscars were always pushed and talked up because the people doing the pushing and the talking were in the business. Apparently there are also some regular folks who watch, but why? I don’t know. 
I’m a big movie fan, but I’m kind of meh on awards shows. I caught the last part of the Oscars last from I guess around the part where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock and felt like I didn’t miss much.
They seem very self-important and fake to me. Like the nominees and presenters are trying to win Oscars for their performance of “this is me at the Oscars”.
A lot of people evidently agree with the OP.
It’ll probably take more than a slap to revive interest in the show. Maybe a full-scale audience-clearing brawl?
The Academy Awards ceremony is the world’s most expensive infomercial. Even though it directly affects a relatively small number of people, it is eagerly promoted/exploited by mass media seeking to cash in as well.
I think a big part of the appeal is that the Academy Awards have a long history involving famous people, making the whole awards ritual a source of interest despite the fact that most of the public does not vote and the outcomes of the voting are intrinsically meaningless owing to the lack of objective standards in judging. Given that this is Hollywood, “controversial” incidents involving the awards should be regarded suspiciously as being manufactured in order to drive the public imagination by adding to the history.
While there is nothing wrong with celebrating or even publicizing the industry, I find the amount of time, resources and attention paid to the ceremony by the media and public to be obscene.
I enjoy watching them - sometimes there are funny bits, sometimes there are moving bits, sometimes there are very good speeches.
I was watching that as well, fortunately by the end of the first half it demanded less attention. 
For any of the awards shows,I generally record them and watch the opening. Then I read the winners.
The fact that someone with knowledge of the business thinks they are good is enough for me to read a summary and decide if it is for me. Not a perfect screening but also not my only source. Across all entertainment including books, there is more than I’ll be able to consume so some filtering helps.
This is the most succinct description of the Oscars and industry award ceremonies in general. The Golden Globes (a competing film industry award ceremony kind of wedged between the Oscars and the laughable “Peoples’ Choice Awards”) slid so far into irrelevancy that the repeatedly hired Ricky Gervais to host it by continually slamming the hollowness of the ceremony, the Hollywood Foreign Press who sponsor it, and the attendees as a bunch of perverts and hypocrites who were fine working with Harvey Weinstein before he was indicted, and cheerfully defend fugitive child rapist Roman Polanski. Watching the attendees awkwardly laugh and squirm in their chairs is the highlight of that ceremony, and being essentially cancelled is just means that NBC will have to find something to fill a three hour slot. (Maybe some old CHiPs reruns, or that Dateline special from 1992 where they deliberately blew up GM trucks to show what a fire hazard they were.)
I’m a big film enthusiast; I’ve faking film classes as USC, have seen every Kurosawa film (even the really obscure ones made during and just after WWII), can talk in depth about the themes in Tarkovsky films, and will explain at any opportunity why Raiders of the Lost Ark is he best pure adventure film ever made despite the problematic Indy-Marion relationship and the fact that Jones’ actions have virtually no impact on the final resolution of the movie. But award ceremonies are mostly pointless slogs of self-congratulatory autofellation by an industry over-impressed with its importance in world affairs, and the best moment in the history of the Oscars is when Marlon Brando snubbed his well-deserved award for The Godfather and sent Sacheen Littlefeather in his steed to lecture about the film industry portrayal and treatment of Native Americans. They should have just ended the award ceremony there and quietly mailed them out in subsequent years. But the film industry is nothing but shameless in promoting its own self-inflated importance.
Stranger
I wasn’t aware that the Oscars were on last night either until they were in full swing and then of course the slap stuff.
But I get it. People like movies. People like celebrities. People like pageantry. People like low-stakes competition*. People like feel-good moments of thanking parents or talking about overcoming adversity or seeing an underdog win.
So it’s nothing I’m interested in but it’s no mystery to me why anyone else would be interested. Or a lot of anyone elses.
*Edit: By which I mean sitting at home to see if “your” movie won an award. Obviously the stakes feel much higher to the nominees.
Sure beats watching a Royal Wedding, and a whole lot of people do that. But count me among those who have little interest.
The list of nominees is interesting to me. I almost always hear about a few movies that I missed and end up really enjoying. The actual award show or who wins is not interesting.
When I was a kid, there was the appeal of watching your favorite actors supposedly unscripted. You’d get a glimpse of the “real person” that you didn’t get from a film or a Carson interview. Now that celebrities’ lives make up nearly half of all news, the Oscars are competing with an already over saturated market.
I think the motive is purely the same as watching sports. You have an emotional connection to some team, movie, or idea winning and you want to see if your emotional attachment will win in reality.
I love movies but have gone from “don’t care about the Oscars” to “actively turned off by them”.
They are no longer anything to do with an appreciation of cinematic excellence and a mildly diverting conversation starter, to a yearly grandstanding opportunity for identity politics, box ticking and cultural conflict. That seems to be par for the course for all awards ceremonies.
No thanks. Ditch the drama and just give me good films and actors being congratulated and celebrated.
in my experience, sports fans are much more knowledgeable and much less invested in the awards.
As a side note, I don’t think Oscar viewers know much of anything about what an editor does, or a director for that matter. They don’t even understand, for the most part, what actors contribute to a movie–a part can be very difficult to interpret, for example, and a bold choice can used to playing, or it could be actor-proof and played right down the middle, with very creative input, and most viewers couldn’t begin to tell you which was which. And “acting” is relatively easy to evaluate. And don’t get me started on screenwriting–most people are convinced it’s all about the dialogue, when that’s the third- or fourth-most important element in most screenplays.
that should be "a bold choice can used in playing it, or it could be actor-proof and played right down the middle, with very little creative input
I used to care a lot about he Oscars. Almost to the point of obsession. Between 1984 and 2000 I recorded almost every ceremony on VHS so I could rewatch them.
Around 2010 I stopped caring much them. What happened was, there used to be a lot of movies I liked that were nominated for major awards. I rooted for my favorites, I was invested in the outcome. But now I hardly see movies at all, and practically none of the nominated ones.
Don’t go on NBA Twitter or Reddit right now. There is a ton of arguing over who deserves to be on the All-NBA team… and are you telling me people don’t get invested on who the MVP is going to be? In baseball there are always a ton of debates on Cy Young and MVP awards (unless it’s an obvious case like Otani for AL MVP last year).
Hell, people argue about weekly Power Rankings which is just a site trying to stir up shit.
I kind of like the list of dead people. I didn’t watch it last night, though.
It the largest, and televised. Employee-of-the-Year Award. Hollywood has managed to convince the average person that it matters. So I guess it does. Oscars still translate into money for the winning films.
But IMO it’s never been about the best film. Hell, I suspect the majority of Academy Voters never even watch all the films nominated. It’s a popularity contest.
I prefer TCM’s in memoriam