By Jake Coyle | Related Press
NEW YORK — To fight slumping rankings, the Academy Awards are present process a radical slimming down, with eight awards to be introduced off-air throughout subsequent month’s telecast.
In a letter despatched Tuesday to members of the Academy of Movement Footage Arts and Sciences, the group’s president, David Rubin, mentioned that the awards for movie enhancing, manufacturing design, sound, make-up and hairstyling, music (unique rating) and the three quick movie awards for documentary, live-action and animated quick will probably be introduced on the ceremony earlier than the reside broadcast begins on ABC.
Now, as an alternative of beginning the ceremony and broadcast unexpectedly, the Dolby Theatre ceremony will start an hour earlier than the telecast does. The presentation and speeches of these early, eight winners will probably be edited and featured in the course of the three-hour reside broadcast, which Rubin emphasised would nonetheless present every winner their “Oscar second.”
Rubin mentioned the change was vital for the longer term well being of the Academy Awards.
“When deciding learn how to produce the Oscars, we acknowledge it’s a reside occasion tv present and we should prioritize the tv viewers to extend viewer engagement and preserve the present important, kinetic, and related,” wrote Rubin. “This has been an essential focus of debate for fairly a while. We do that whereas additionally remembering the significance of getting our nominees relish a once-in-a-lifetime expertise.”
The potential for pulling a few of the Oscars’ 23 classes from the published has lengthy been a matter of debate. In 2019, the academy initially sought to air 4 classes — cinematography, enhancing, make-up and hairstyling and live-action quick — in a shortened, taped phase. However after a backlash ensued, the academy reversed itself 9 days earlier than the present.
However rankings have continued to fall. Final 12 months’s broadcast, severely altered by COVID-19 protocols, plummeted to an all-time low of 9.85 million viewers. Stress has mounted not solely with the Oscars’ longtime broadcast accomplice, ABC, however throughout the academy. This 12 months, after a number of host-less Oscars, producers are turning to the trio of Amy Schumer, Regina Corridor and Wanda Sykes to emcee.