Academy Awards Ceremony Awarding Eight Prizes Before the Broadcast Begins
The Academy Awards are on their throw everything at the wall and see what sticks to fix the ratings grind again. Eight of the competitive categories at the Oscars will not be presented live during the telecast. These categories are: Film Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, Sound, Production Design, Animated Short, Live Action Short, and Documentary Short. Instead, these eight prizes will be announced at the start of the ceremony, which will officially begin in person one hour before the telecast.
The official excuse is prioritizing the Oscars telecast as an entertainment event for audiences and ensuring the production ends at the three hour mark. As explained in a letter from the Academy, every award will be recognized during the ceremony and every speech will still be shown. This is a creative choice to ensure a better flow to the ceremony and allow for more room for other entertainment during the broadcast.
I’m going to be honest. I don’t believe them. The Tony Awards employed a similar logic when they began handing out awards at an earlier ceremony or during commercial breaks and it’s a bad look no matter how it’s done. At the Tonys, for example, they show about 10 seconds of a winner’s speech if they’re deemed worthy of being heard at all. It’s disrespectful to the artists who worked hard to earn this recognition in their field.
At the most basic level, you’re saying these eight categories don’t really matter. They’re not worthy of being presented live because you think the audience doesn’t care about them. Meanwhile, these categories—especially Makeup & Hairstyling and Original Score—have led to some memorable and dynamic presentations in the past. I still think about the ceremony where a dance company performed to excerpts of each original score nominees.
Makeup & Hairstyling is literally a visual category where you can show off the designs on a grand scale. This is especially true when it’s one of the categories that submits a reel and portfolio for the voting members to evaluate for the preliminary ballot.
Production Design is also a visual category that works well on awards shows. The Tony Awards have done some great presentations for Set Design (their equivalent category) featuring footage of the sets in use, models, sketches, and even recreations of iconic set pieces onstage. That is a great way to show off what happens in the Production Design category.
Sound also works this way. Show off how the different sound effects are created. Put together footage of actors doing ADR or people chopping up the soundtrack at the mixing board. Show how the sound is made for explosive clips from each nominee. I know the Academy Awards gave up on the category when they combined Sound Mixing and Sound Editing into one giant category, but now they’re not even trying to hide their disinterest.
Editing could be dynamic, too. Even if they have to stage footage of how the editing process works, they can show off all the hard work through a lot of impressive looking machinery and software to piece together the final cut of the film. Or show off the editing process to create a montage of clips from the nominees. The segment builds itself. Not to play favorites, but we’re going to know the likely Best Picture winner before the telecast even begins because Best Editing often forecasts that winner. We either get an early crowning for The Power of the Dog or Don’t Look Up or we get a real mystery on our hands with a victory lap for tick, tick…BOOM!. This will now be revealed online from reporters before the broadcast even starts.
Diversion: why those two Best Picture nominees and not Dune or King Richard? Call it a hunch. You can also refer back to my massive breakdown of the categories against my own ballot here.
The short categories almost always get the worst treatment in the ceremony, which is a shame. The very nature of being short films lends them to an easier montage of narrated clips explaining what they’re about over big highlights from each. These filmmakers have a different perspective on the medium and can often give fascinating speeches championing their causes and showing off their excitement. They’re consistently more exciting than the grand producer speeches for Best Picture as the stage floods with everyone who spent a nickel or more to help finance the production.
If the presentation of the awards is boring for the general audience, that’s a failure of framing, perspective, and direction, not the actual awards themselves. The recent trend of not showing clips for the acting categories makes them pretty dry to watch, too. The Academy Awards would never consider ditching Best Actor or Best Actress as live categories for fear of backlash from the audience no matter how dull the announcement is (not the speeches).
Not that they care about the speeches. Remember, no one was allowed to call in during a global pandemic, leaving us with Anthony Hopkins not having the opportunity to deliver a speech for his award-winning turn in The Father. Those two minutes saved really trimmed down the broadcast last year. And they definitely don’t play favorites with letting bigger names ramble on however long they want while starting the music two sentences into a speech for International Film.
The best presentations always showcase the films as much as the individually nominated artists. My favorite presentation ever at the Academy Awards was the 2009 broadcast of the Original and Adapted Screenplay categories. The presenters read excerpts of the screenplays over selected clips of the films. The pages were shown with the scene so the audience could see and appreciate all the hard work that goes into scripting a screenplay. Even with the unusual decision to showcase the fried chicken scene from Precious, showing the detail in the screenplay as juxtaposed against more readily seen nominees made it easier for audiences to see how that film came out on top for Adapted Screenplay.
We want the Best Original Song performances, obviously, and we’d prefer the original performers sing them. We want the celebrity presenters with clever quips guiding us through the various categories. We want the hosts to show their personalities and get the audience of nominees to loosen up and have fun. We also want to see the awards be presented. It’s an awards show. It’s right in the title.
The Academy Awards are not going to fix their ratings issues by dumping categories to quick cuts before or after commercials. They need to make their program entertaining, informative, and accessible to an audience that will likely not have seen The Power of the Dog before it sweeps. Give the viewers at home a reason to care about what was actually nominated rather than distract them with padding that will never make for a shorter ceremony.
You can’t make the ceremony three hours long when you present 23 categories; how are you going to make it three hours long with 23 categories and multiple additional performances, montages, skits, and another attempt at the audience-voted popular film Oscar? The math doesn’t add up. If this ceremony is less than four hours long, I’ll be shocked.
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