Over the weekend I have seen reports that some senior member of the MPAA are planning to introduce new rules that they hope will stop companies such as Netflix from competing in the Oscars.

To be eligible for an Oscar nomination a film, among other factors and there are many, is that the film must play for seven consecutive days at a commercial theater in Los Angeles and the film must not have been broadcast or available via home video or pay per view prior to that L.A. exhibition.

Netflix, having moved solidly into the film production as well as the exhibition business and looking for the validation that serious awards grant gamed the system to get its movie Roma  into Oscar consideration for the 2018 awards. It lost Best Picture to Green Book,  a film that upset many people and it likely to be one of the lesser-remembered Best Picture winners, however Roma’s near victory has unsettled those with a more traditionalist view of the motion picture industry, fueling this charge to change the rules.

Frankly, I am not concerned.

The distinction between television and feature films has been vanishing for decades. Movie theater attendance never recovered from the blow that was the adoption of television and now with more movies being made than ever most people get their experiences in such diverse environments as state of the art theaters with massive sound system to ear buds while sitting on a moving mass transit bus. Trying to hold to an outdated model first constructed at the start of the last century is a fool’s errand. What matters, and what has always mattered more than anything else, is that people see the features.

Art without an audience is worthless. A book has value only when it is read, a song when it is heard, a movie when it is watched.

I prefer seeing films in theaters, I love that experience but I see far more films for the first time on my television. It is the point of discovery where I learn about new voices that speak to my own.

The olds ways are dying; let them.