For the first time in two decades, coverage of the Oscars was free to watch for Britons this year. More than a million of us tuned in to Hollywood’s biggest night of the year. That’s a huge audience, but with a full day’s distance from the event I feel comfortable speaking on behalf of us all to say: well, that was anticlimactic.

An awards ceremony that brought to mind the meme “Could this meeting have been an email?”, the 2024 Oscars turned out to be a rather bland affair: a perfunctory giving out of awards where category winners had long been a foregone conclusion. There were no hiccups, no muck-ups, no jokes that went too far, not too much politics – but not so little it would draw criticism, either. It was so tightly curated it even finished early.

Perhaps that would all be fine if it wasn’t this year. This year, with two record-breaking movies (Barbie and Oppenheimer), nominations for powerful, urgent stories such as Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest, and an industry backdrop of tumultuous strikes and technological disruption. And that’s not to mention political protests across the US, the scale of which even the traditionally ostrich-like Hollywood can’t ignore.

Against these conditions, the same-sameyness of the ceremony felt a new order of let down. Indulgent, even. That’s not to say there weren’t some high highs – Ryan Gosling’s rendition of I’m Just Ken (so many open shirts! Sixty-five men! Why is Slash from Guns N’ Roses there? Doesn’t matter!); John Mulaney’s joyful bit on Field of Dreams; the exceptional speech of Jonathan Glazer that dared to directly address Israel-Gaza. The presence of the Osage singers, meanwhile, felt historic (even though a win for Lily Gladstone could have made it more so). And there is something undeniably satisfying about watching solid films and singular talents win. But those moments make up a mere slice of the three-hour-plus show. The rest felt like it could have been lifted from literally any other Oscars.

So, here’s my question: are the Oscars still fit for purpose?

The answer might depend on why you’re watching. Is it for the landmark fails and celebrity spectacle: someone reading out the wrong winner or a comedian getting slapped? Or for the way the Oscars deepens our relationship to film, showing us treasures we might have missed in perhaps the most giant public conversation about art on Earth? Though, reader, I’ll contend on both counts it’s failing.

Revitalising the Oscars is not an easy gig. The last time it picked up major viewing numbers (about 43m) was in 2014, when 12 Years a Slave won best film (the record is 55 million viewers in 1998, when Titanic won). Compare those numbers with this decade: last year only 18.7 million tuned in, up from the show’s 2021 low point (10.4 million). Some argue that the reason those shows bombed is because they championed films people hadn’t seen, and so viewers were less invested. The 2021 best film winner was Nomadland, in 2023 it was Everything Everywhere All at Once. Compare them to Oppenheimer and Barbie and it does makes a crude kind of sense.

But the triumph of the underdog, and often of ingenuity over budget, is supposed to be a central pillar of the Oscars – just look at Parasite from 2020 and the record-breaking boom from its win. Such upsets define the awards as a cultural king-maker worthy of beholding. Could it be that this is now at odds with being an entertainment event? If that’s not reason enough to rip it up and start again, I don’t know what is.

But at least we can still rely on the Oscars for some good old-fashioned celebrity ridiculousness. Satisfaction guaranteed, right? Hmm, not quite. Because increasingly, the Oscars looks like it’s trying to manufacture these moments. Red-carpet sections now feel as long as the awards, with more and more skits during the ceremony feeling as if they are designed with virality in mind. Why else would John Cena pose naked with a blank sign (perfect for writing our own pithy text on it)? Or the repeated cutaways to Messi the dog? This charade goes on, and on and on, even though we all know the magic will come from the unscripted, the natural, the free, like Meryl Streep just shouting in 2018.

The truth is that the writing is on the wall. Each year the Oscars gets slicker, it gets sleeker – and annoyingly, it gets safer – no matter how much more diverse, creative and bold the films being feted are. Without a change of course it feels as if this flagship of culture is doomed to fail, forced to choose between unfortunate gaffes just to remain visible, or being so dull and controlled it exiles itself to cultural irrelevance.

And so while this year’s edition won’t be one we talk about, it’s the one that signalled the beginning of the end; the one that shone a light on its own obsoleteness. Without a change soon, it’s not hard to imagine the Oscars as little more than a list published on a feed, with some red carpet pictures we can thumb through at the hairdressers. At this moment it even feels probable.

• Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK