Oscars 2016: Will you watch?

I don’t know if you’re going to watch the Oscars this weekend. At present, I don’t even know if I’m going to watch the Oscars this weekend.

It’s always difficult to tell exactly at what point the romance has gone out of a relationship.

I can’t really point to any one moment, a host, a musical number, or an acceptance speech, where I threw down the remote in disgust and declared my grand intentions to never watch another Academy Awards ceremony for as long as I lived.

It just sort of happened.

My viewing experience fragmented one commercial break at a time until finally I started skipping it altogether — and it would seem that I’m not alone.

According to an article published in Variety last year, the television audience for the 2015 Academy Awards was the lowest it has been in six years, declining 16 percent from 2014 for an average of 36.6 million viewers.

To be clear, those are still numbers for which any network executive would gladly trade their assistant’s right arm.

So the Oscars aren’t going anywhere — at least not yet — but they are persistently trending downward.

There’s a good chance that this has nothing to do with the telecast itself. Broadcast television has been facing stiff competition for years now and the downturn in awards interest could simply be a part of the natural erosion of its audience base to cable channels or online content.

We could all just have an incredibly short attention span. Or maybe we’re just bored.

These types of things tend to fall into cycles. Jennifer Lawrence is 25 years old and has already been nominated for four Oscars.

In recent years, the Academy expanded the number of slots in the Best Picture category to eight to help encourage variety and this year’s slate, at least from genre perspective, makes good on that idea.

With that kind of leg room even “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a summer blockbuster that is by all accounts brilliant, managed to score some recognition.

In all likelihood it won’t win though. Tradition tells us that the Oscar for best picture will go to more serious minded fare like the socially relevant “Spotlight” or something with a historical bent like “The Revenant.”