The film academy and its Oscars manage to feed on their own mistakes

Well, the largely predictable Oscar nominations arrived on Tuesday morning without any disasters or truly glaring missteps. Even the snooze was fairly routine: no female directors, although women have won the director prize in the past two years; James Cameron and Joseph Kosinski, both nominated for best picture, were also left out.

Such normality is unfortunate. And I mean that in the nicest way.

It’s a strange but undeniable fact of Hollywood life that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and their favorite awards show feed on their own mistakes. Let things go well or follow an expected path and the Oscars turn into a yawn. But if you screw something up, suddenly it’s the greatest show on earth again – back on the podium waiting to be pushed off by the howling crowd.

Mistakes are an asset. Mistakes are gold. Academia has never been more interesting than when it is simply wrong.

This is not a random mechanism. In general, the average person doesn’t spend three hours staring at celebrities admiring their bosses or lecturing them. Rather, they want idols razed to the ground—embarrassed, caught misbehaving, tackily dressed, or raving like Joaquin Phoenix at a West Texas barbecue. It’s human nature. Piety and right judgment are boring. Pratfalls are fun, especially when they catch the glamor audience taking themselves too seriously.

Perhaps the best Oscar show in recent memory was the Hugh Jackman ceremony in 2009. It was a great show, like a cozy evening at the Hollywood salon, with relatively gentle humor and a hearty shot. Slumdog Millionaire, in the winning circle. What else would you like? (Academics actually begged Jackman to return this year, but was rebuffed.) But the show, which had virtually nothing wrong with it, drew lower ratings than the next six in a row. As for audience, it was neither here nor there.

Then look back to 2013 when Seth MacFarlane led the chorus in an impossibly cheesy production number, challenging actresses by name with the refrain, “We’ve seen your boobs.” It was wrong. It was ugly. Still, audiences topped the 40 million mark and stayed there the following year when host Ellen DeGeneres made amends with a woman-friendly show but shamelessly indulged a sponsor with her famous Samsung selfie. (Producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan were hired for a third year to deliver Neil Patrick Harris in his underwear, another tasteless moment with pretty good ratings.)

As far as nomination day disasters go, nothing compares to the back-to-back all-white acting rosters of 2015 and 2016. This spawned an online movement and caused changes in Academy membership and rules that continue to this day. But they also drew more attention than the Oscars have seen since. In fact, no subsequent awards telecast reached audiences during those two years as the #OscarsSoWhite campaign swept the Academy on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, the effort pays off. The truly memorable Oscar moments were almost all fumbles and missteps: the Littlefeather lecture, the speedster, Snow White, the Polanski ovation, Franco/Hathaway, that sex offender on stage in 2017, Warren Beatty’s last moment, the craft crunch, the pop oscar that wasn’t, chadwick boseman’s failed finale.

And of course the punch. For which I think the Academy should be grateful.

It was a bad moment, truly despicable and abused by almost everyone except Chris Rock. Will Smith gave the show a black eye. Temporary officers let him hang around. Cheering stars completed the embarrassment when he later accepted an acting Oscar.

On March 12, this year’s Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel has to deal with it.

But think about it. If Kimmel misses last year’s mistake — I’m guessing he’s there within the first 10 seconds — the Oscars will have another mistake to sell. After all, it’s what keeps things going.