Anyone who’s ever worked on a film set knows how essential composers, production designers, editors, and other craftspeople are to making a movie work. Now an influential group of Oscar winners and industry titans are banding together to ask the Academy to give those people their proper due.
In an open letter sent to Academy president David Rubin and obtained by Variety, a group of more than six dozen people, including James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, Kathleen Kennedy, and John Williams, urge the Academy “in the strongest possible terms” to reverse their decision to hand out eight Oscar statuettes before the March 27 broadcast begins. “Critical artistic crafts like music scoring, film editing, production design, makeup, hairstyling, and sound will always deserve the same respect and recognition as crafts like acting, directing, and visual effects,” the letter reads. “To diminish any of these individual categories in the pursuit of ratings and short-term profits does irreparable damage to the Academy’s standing as impartial arbiters and responsible stewards of our industry’s most important awards.”
The Academy’s February 22 decision to cut eight categories from the broadcast was met with swift criticism that has only grown louder as the broadcast nears. No less an Academy stalwart than Steven Spielberg has publicly disagreed with the decision, and as in-person campaign events have resumed, chatter continues to revolve around the controversy and whether the Academy might be convinced to reverse it. At Monday’s luncheon for Oscar nominees, neither Rubin or producer Will Packer mentioned the category cuts in their speeches, but at Sunday’s Indie Spirits, the decision to award several statuettes during commercial breaks felt like a distressing harbinger of what the Oscars might bring in a few weeks.
Though many of the likely winners in the categories cut from the broadcast are not famous, that’s not true of all of them—Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is a favorite in the best-original-score category, and Riz Ahmed (a best-actor nominee just last year!) is nominated for his work on the live-action short film The Long Goodbye. True to Hollywood, it may be the power of other celebrities that convinces the Academy to reverse course. Dune director Denis Villeneuve has called the changes a “mistake,” while odds-on best-director favorite Jane Campion took the time to credit production design as a vital element of filmmaking, adding “I would have definitely included design in the main body of the awards.” (The Power of the Dog production designer Grant Major is among the film’s many nominees.)
“Seeking new audiences by making the telecast more entertaining is a laudable and important goal,” the letter reads in conclusion. “But this cannot be achieved by demeaning the very crafts that, in their most outstanding expressions, make the art of filmmaking worthy of celebration.”
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