The AACTA ceremony keeps asking Australia to celebrate its own cinema and Australia keeps leaving early

I watched the AACTAs last year the way I suspect most people watch them, which is to say I watched about forty minutes of it before I started doing something else with my hands and then something else with my attention and then eventually I was reading the winners list on my phone the next morning while eating cereal. I want to say this is unusual behaviour for me. It is not. I have watched, or attempted to watch, the AACTA Awards ceremony for the better part of a decade, and the experience is always the same. I admire the work being celebrated. I recognise the names. I feel a genuine warmth toward the people giving speeches. And I cannot stay in the room.

The question I keep coming back to is not whether the ceremony is good or bad. It is who the ceremony is for. Because the answer to that question determines whether the declining audience is a problem to be solved or a symptom of something more structural, something about the relationship between Australian cinema and the country that produces it.

The numbers nobody wants to discuss

The AACTA telecast audience has been falling for years. The numbers are not catastrophic in the way that makes headlines, but they are persistent. A few hundred thousand viewers in a country of twenty-seven million. The ceremony moved from Channel Nine to Channel Seven and back, looking for a home, looking for an audience that would commit to two hours of Australian film celebration on a weeknight. The audience has not committed. The ceremony has tried shorter formats, celebrity presenters, musical performances, social media integration. None of it has reversed the trend.

I do not think this is because Australians are indifferent to Australian film. The box office data tells a more complicated story. Australians will show up for certain kinds of Australian films with real enthusiasm. The Dry made over twenty million dollars. Anyone But You made a fortune globally. Bluey is a national institution. But the films that win AACTAs are rarely the films that Australians actually go to see, and the films that Australians go to see are rarely the films that win AACTAs, and this gap is not a bug in the system. It is the system.

The prestige loop

What wins at the AACTAs tends to be what has already won elsewhere. Films that premiered at festivals. Films that were reviewed well in the right publications. Films made by people who are known within the industry and respected by the voting body, which is the industry. The ceremony confirms what the industry already knows about itself: who is doing good work, whose film came together, whose performance carried a difficult project. This is not nothing. Professional recognition matters. Having your peers acknowledge what you made is meaningful, especially in an industry as precarious as Australian film, where every project feels like it might be the last one for a while.

But it is also circular. The ceremony validates choices that have already been validated. The shortlists are drawn from a pool of films that most Australians have not seen, playing in cinemas for limited seasons, sometimes already on streaming before the ceremony airs. The winner walks to the stage, thanks the cast and crew and Screen Australia, and the audience at home, the small audience that remains, watches someone celebrate a film they have no memory of being invited to see.

What would it mean to include the audience

I keep thinking about the Oscars, not because they are a model to follow but because they illustrate what happens when an awards ceremony tries to serve two masters. The Oscars want to honour artistic achievement and they want ratings. They want the industry to feel respected and they want thirty million Americans to watch. The tension between these goals has produced decades of awkward compromises: popular film categories that appear and disappear, host experiments, shorter speeches, longer montages. The Oscars are a mess, but they are a mess that a lot of people watch, and the watching matters because it creates a shared cultural moment around cinema.

The AACTAs do not have this tension because they have mostly given up on the second master. The ceremony is, functionally, an industry event that happens to be televised. The people in the room know each other. The jokes land for the people in the room. The clips shown are from films the people in the room have seen. It is a celebration, and it is genuine, and it takes place inside a bubble that the rest of the country can see through but cannot enter.

The craft and the distance

I want to be careful here because I am not saying the work does not deserve celebration. It does. Australian cinematography is extraordinary. Australian sound design is world class. Australian performances, year after year, are as good as anything produced anywhere. The craft is real and the people behind it deserve a night where someone hands them a trophy and a room full of colleagues applauds. I believe this completely.

What I am less sure about is whether televising it serves anyone. The industry gets its night regardless. The public gets a broadcast they did not ask for and do not watch. The films get a temporary bump in visibility that rarely translates to tickets or streams. Everyone involved is performing a ritual whose original purpose, connecting the public to the national cinema, has quietly become secondary to its social function, which is connecting the industry to itself.

Celebration without witnesses

There is a philosophical question buried in all of this, and I realise it might sound absurd applied to an awards show, but I think it is the right question: does celebration require an audience to count? If the AACTA ceremony were a private dinner, invite only, no cameras, would the recognition mean less? I suspect for most winners it would not. The trophy would weigh the same. The speech would feel the same. The colleagues would still applaud.

And yet the ceremony is broadcast. It is put on television and offered to the country, and the country politely declines, year after year, and this declining is itself a kind of statement, not about the quality of the work but about the relationship between the work and the people it is nominally made for.

I watched forty minutes last year. I admired what I saw. I recognised the names and felt the warmth and understood the stakes for the people on stage. And then I was gone, the way most of the country was gone, not out of hostility or disinterest but out of something harder to name. A feeling that the party was not for me, even though someone had left the door open. A feeling that celebration, when it speaks only to the people already inside the room, becomes a kind of privacy, and that privacy, however earned, is its own answer to the question of who Australian film awards are for.

They are for the people who make Australian films. This is not a criticism. It might be the most honest thing about them.