The Oscars are coming on March 27th.
Today ABC announced the first presenters. They are Kevin Costner, Zoë Kravitz, Lady Gaga, Rosie Perez, Chris Rock and last year’s Best Supporting Actress from “Minari,” Yuh-Jung Youn.
Lady Gaga is a really good sport. This is very gracious of her after not being nominated for Best Actress in “House of Gucci.” She’s a team player!
The list of more presenters will dribble out over the next couple of weeks, but expect last year’s other winners — Frances McDormand and Daniel Kaluuya and director Chloe Zhao — to be on the list. A real coup would be getting last year’s Best Actor winner, Sir Anthony Hopkins, to make an appearance.
The Oscars are having a bit of a kerfuffle right now since they announced that the show would be different this year. The audience at the Dolby Theater will be seated at 4pm, an hour earlier than usual. During the first hour 8 awards will be given. The winners’ speeches will be taped and spliced into the main show, starting at 5 Pacific, 8 Eastern. The idea is to make the show just three hours.
There’s no word yet whether that first hour will be live streamed or shown on Disney Plus.
The guilds for the nominees in the 8 categories are furious, and the nominees are disappointed. There have been calls for boycotts.
There are two schools of thought here. One is that it’s the Oscars, who cares how long it runs, and the ratings won’t improve either way.
The other school says, Let’s try something different, if it doesn’t work, there’s always next year.
Additionally. seating at the Dolby is being cut back by 800 people because of COVID restrictions. So the front part of the orchestra will seat just nominees, maybe at tables, and everyone will be pushed up a section from their prior arrangements. Something tells me that will be a bigger problem than the 8 nominees.
But it’s a crazy year, and things are different everywhere. And we’re contemplating World War III. So maybe a deep breath is needed about all of this.
