There continues to be revolt within the ranks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with dozens of influential filmmakers including James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro signing an open letter this week asking them to reconsider the decision to announce winners in eight categories before the live Oscar telecast begins. But for now, the Academy is not backing down.
“Every single award will get their moment,” one Academy awards-committee member, who voted on the change, told Vanity Fair. “And if it weren’t for the press releases and everybody talking about it, everybody watching the show wouldn’t know the difference.”
Winners in the eight categories—which include best original score, makeup and hairstyling, and editing—will give their speeches in the hour before the broadcast begins, and the Academy has said the speeches will be “seamlessly” edited into the broadcast. There is still no official word on what, exactly, that will look like, but one Academy insider told Vanity Fair that speeches will be edited only to remove the time spent walking to and from the stage, and not for content—even if a winner, say, decides to criticize the Academy’s choice to shunt them off the live broadcast.
“Look, it would be a shame that somebody would use that moment to complain,” says the awards-committee member. “It would be sad to me that somebody would do that. I would hope that the person would use the time wisely.”
But the complaints are still being heard, whether or not they make it on the air. “It’s really a serious snub because the Academy’s function has always been to educate people about the various crafts in the movies,” says Alan Heim, who won an Oscar as the editor of All That Jazz and is the president of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700. “I don’t think there’s an art form that is more collaborative than filmmaking.” Heim remains “dubious” about how the edited clips will play in the live show, and more importantly adds that there’s an intangible magic to taking to the stage in front of a full house and on live TV. “It’s a whole different experience,” he says. “This will be, at best, vanilla compared to a good chocolate sundae.”
Heim is in good company. Before this week’s open letter was published, Academy governor and nominee this year Steven Spielberg spoke out against the decision, as did Dune director Denis Villeneuve. Oscar-winning sound engineer Tom Fleischman resigned from the Academy in protest, and music-branch governor Laura Karpman said in a statement, “This is literally a wound in the heart of the music community. Thank you to the many members of the music branch who have spoken out. I hear you loud and clear. I stand with you.”
Academy insiders make it clear that the decision was not made lightly. The awards committee was asked to cut around 45 minutes from the show, while finding a way to add in some new entertainment elements to attract more viewers. Different solutions were brought up—“some of the ideas were a little horrifying to me,” says the awards-committee member—but this version was the one that seemed most fair to all the departments, while also creating more space for other content in the show.
“It’s just kind of a seesaw effect in how to maintain that perfect balance,” an Academy board member, who supports the current plan, tells Vanity Fair. “Everybody has different ideas. There’s just no solution that makes everyone happy.”
The plan, which is to give out the awards for the first eight categories an hour before the telecast—but with the audience already in their seats—and still have each winner give their full acceptance speech from the stage, is the latest effort by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to find a way to make a tighter and more entertaining show after years of dwindling ratings and pressure from its broadcast partner, ABC, to trim the telecast down from its three-plus hours. The Academy’s deal with ABC, which was renewed in 2016 to run until 2028, is a vital part of the organization’s ability to exist and fund its programs (it earned $117 million from the Oscars in 2021, according to The Hollywood Reporter). Sources say that in recent years, as all awards shows and broadcasts in general have lost viewers to streaming, ABC has been increasing the pressure on the Academy to make significant changes to the show to save it from a ratings free fall. Though the Oscars still sell out ads every year, the previous year’s ratings can dictate how much ABC can charge for those ad spots.
Academy board members who spoke to Vanity Fair say that there’s been a great deal of misunderstanding and mixed messaging that has made this tweak seem like a bigger change than it is. “The winners get to go up onstage, and they get to stand there. They get to look out in front of the Academy and thank the Academy and have their moment,” says the awards-committee member.
He argues that putting these categories before the telecast actually gives the winner more time to enjoy their moment without the production rushing through the category live on TV. It also makes more space for additional elements in the show. “Hopefully, it’ll give the little extra breathing room to put in more entertainment, make the show more fun, and make it move a little quicker, which is, by the way, what everybody’s been screaming about for us to do for many years.”
Much of the frustration seems to be over a sense of not having a voice in the room. The awards committee, which is made up of around 12 members from various departments in the Academy, came up with the new format for this year, which was then relayed to the rest of the board and the voters. A source inside the Academy points out that a year ago the board voted to confirm that creative decisions for the show would be left to the CEO, president, awards committee, and producers of the show, and even back then there were ongoing discussions about how to tighten the show, so it’s not as if the Academy was blindsided by this change.
But another Academy member wonders if there were other solutions that could have made more sense to appease ABC but still treat the categories equally. He says, “The Academy had options available to it. They chose not to. And by ‘they,’ I mean a very small select committee plus [CEO] Dawn [Hudson] and [president] David Rubin. They didn’t have to do it.”
The Academy has been attempting to make a shorter show for years, even decades. Back in 1992, the Academy planned to cut the documentary and live-action-short categories from the competition, but eventually reversed that decision. In 2005, they made some of the winners give their acceptance speeches from the aisle next to their seats, rather than allowing them to take a few moments to walk up onstage. Bill Corso, now a board member of the Academy, won that year for best makeup and was forced to accept his statue from just beside his seat. “Going through what I went through and being so personally affected by it, it very much altered my experience, unfortunately, and I didn’t want that to happen [to anyone else],” says Corso, who is supportive of this year’s plan and says it allows the winners—including those in his category—to still get to go to the stage and have their moment in front of the audience. “I very much stood up for making sure that the experience stayed pure for the winners, and it is.”
And in the not too distant past, in 2019, the Academy planned on moving four categories—cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, and live-action short—into the commercial breaks, with edited versions of the wins appearing during the telecast. The outcry was immediate and fierce, and after an open letter signed by some of Hollywood’s most powerful talent was sent to the leadership, the decision was reversed about 10 days before the telecast.
But this time this decision seems likely to stick, according to those involved, despite the tension that it’s created in the industry. This messy experiment will at least take place this year, no matter how many open letters come in over the next two weeks. Says the Academy board member, “I know there is pressure, but I guess I feel like if we don’t try it, we’ll never know.”
And when the cameras finally roll on March 27, everyone will be watching closely. As one Academy voter and previous board member points out, any misstep with this new plan will be catastrophic, so he believes the nominees won’t feel robbed of their moment in any way. “Presentation of those eight awards is going to be stellar,” he says. “They’ll go the extra mile. If there weren’t people protesting this way it might be less of the extra mile, but now everybody’s watching, everybody is watching out.”
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