This year, like recent years before, not many people will be watching the Oscars. No, it is not because of the writers’ strike, which threatens to turn the Oscars into a one-hour press conference fiasco. Even if the strikers do not interfere, there still will not be as many people tuning in to the Academy Awards as there should, because it has some problems of its own that need reform first.

What a shame that the Oscars ceremony is, in its big 80th milestone year, plagued with both external troubles from the strike and internal decisions that are losing viewers. Here is some advice to put the show back in front of viewers’ eyes, and the Academy Awards back on the list of must-see programs of the year.

Primarily, the entire show’s running length is simply too long. Scrutinizing the dresses and listening to rambling thank-you speeches is only so entertaining. The main purpose of watching the show is to find out who the winners are. That said, I do not want to sit through a three-hour long show that feels more like an extremely long school period than an exciting awards show.

Last year’s Academy Awards featured five human interpretations of film nominees from the dance company Pilobolus. The last time I checked, the Oscars was an awards show, not an interpretive dance show of human-structured penguins, cars and guns.

In addition to the dancing last year, there was also the singing—a choir made movie sound effects with their voices for what seemed like hours. Like the dancers, I do not doubt the singers’ talents; the Oscars are just not their occasion to perform. The Academy Awards should not include anything besides purely film-based content. By weeding out extra performances, cutting down thank-you speech times and avoiding the host who just stands around, not really making jokes or introducing anyone, the Oscars could become much more engaging and less drawn out. Viewers would actually look forward to watching the awards show, rather than dreading an hour-long mixed performances show.

But even more important than shortening the length of the show, the Academy must change the type of films it chooses to award and nominate. Every January when the nominee lists come out, people have to look up the films to learn what they are about because no one has seen them. If people have never even seen the films, nobody will care about which film wins. There are no connections or attachment to the nominees, so naturally there would not be any either to the Oscars awards show.

In the past, however, the situation was different. Nominees were typically hits with the Academy and in the box-office. In the Best Picture category, “The Wizard of Oz” was nominated in 1939, “Gone With the Wind” won that year, “Casablanca” won in 1943, “The Sound of Music” in 1965, “The Godfather” in 1962, “Forrest Gump” in 1994 and “Titanic” in 1997. Enter the recent years of Academy history, when “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” was nominated in 2003, “Sideways” in 2004, and this year, “Michael Clayton,” “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.” None of these films were box-office hits, because they don’t have the same mass audience appeal that films like “Casablanca” had.

To remedy this problem, the Academy needs to do what it used to do—nominate more popular films and save the indie flicks for the Independent Spirit Awards. When was the last time a much-loved comedy received an Oscar?

Finally, the Academy needs to recognize a greater variety of films: similarities are easily drawn between 2005 winner “Crash” and 2006 nominee “Babel.” When the current nominee list came out Jan. 22, the Academy indeed tried to address the aforementioned problem. In addition to “Michael Clayton,” “No Country for Old Men,” and “There Will Be Blood,” “Atonement” and “Juno” were also nominated this year. “Juno” is not a violent bloodbath like “No Country for Old Men,” nor is it a mix of worldly stories like “Crash” and “Babel”—it is simply a film that the public appreciated.

The Academy took a step in the right direction with this nomination, and many viewers will surely tune in to the awards show to support a film they enjoyed. By recognizing even more popular films and working on shortening the show length in the future, the Oscars will win back many viewers who used to actually care about it.