Until two weeks ago, Oscar critics were calling this awards season “weird.” Unlike last year’s list, which he dominated Barbenheimerthe new crop of contenders were weakened by actors’ and writers’ strikes, leaving room for such polarizing oddities as “Emilia Perez“and”Article“.”Brutal“,” Brady CorbettThe ‘slim’ epic looked like the favorite – but will voters really sit through its three-and-a-half hours, or can the audience be satisfied?Anora“and”concave“Squeak forward? And other questions loomed: How might Trump’s re-election change the race? It wasn’t Ariana Grande (“”evil“), Kieran Culkin (“Real pain“), and Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Perez”) commits category fraud by being nominated in supporting categories? On January 5, the Golden Globes upended the crowded Best Actress race, with a surprise win for Demi Moore (“The Substance “) and Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”). Typically, the race is clustered around a few dominant narratives, some of which are handcrafted by awards consultants. But the season is still a bit unstable and haphazard. What’s the Oscars Theme? for this year?
then forest fires The earthquake burned large areas of Los Angeles and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents, including many who work in the film industry. (Among those who lost their homes were four members of the Academy’s Board of Governors.) Campaigning came to an abrupt halt, and the usual calendar of awards season events evaporated. To give busy members – or those who evacuated – more time to continue the counting, the Academy extended the voting window and postponed the nomination announcement, then postponed it again (until Thursday morning), but stuck to the ceremony date of March 2. .
On Instagram, Isabella RosselliniA potential Oscar nominee for ‘Conclave’ shares a ‘heartbreaking’ clip image of a charred Oscar statuette lying in the rubble – an image generated by artificial intelligence, but which nonetheless summed up the industry’s bleak new mood. Some have suggested that the Oscars become simply a fundraiser. Others called for award ceremonies to be canceled completely. Jean Smartafter winning a Golden Globe for the movie “Hacks.” Instagram to appeal to the networks holding the celebrations to “seriously consider not televising them and donating the proceeds they would have generated to fire victims and firefighters.” Unlikely. As many commentators have pointed out, there is no revenue without televising the ceremonies, and thousands of working-class Angelenos depend on the awards industrial complex, including stagehands, designers, drivers and caterers. However, there is a burning cloud hanging over this year’s awards season. It is difficult to imagine it dissipating.
But this is not the first time the academy has had to adapt to disaster. The closest analogy might be 1938, when another natural disaster struck Los Angeles. The week before the party, scheduled for March 3, in the ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel — in those days, a banquet — heavy rains fell that brought nearly a year’s worth of rain to Southern California. The rivers overflowed their banks and flooded the low-lying parts of the city. Bridges collapsed. More than five thousand homes were destroyed. The storm caused seventy-eight million dollars in damage and killed about one hundred people, including a studio sound technician who was trying to salvage valuables from his hillside home in Glendale. “The water was so deep, my husband went out in a boat to rescue people who had broken into their roofs,” one woman recalled fifty years later. Los Angeles times The reporter surveyed the scene from an airplane, observing “destroyed farmland, destroyed roads, shattered communications, and shattered railway lines.” In Lincoln Park, the zoo’s two seven-foot alligators rode floodwaters to freedom.
“This column is written on a typewriter that could float out the window at any moment, and all anyone can talk about is the events of the storm,” gossip expert Louella Parsons wrote on March 2. It reported that the Scottish village in which Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kidnapped” was filmed had been destroyed, and that married stars Norma Talmadge and George Jessel were “surrounded by water in their mansion at the far end of Beverly Hills.” Republic Pictures lost three acres of its property in the San Fernando Valley, and Paramount’s emergency crews were barely able to save negatives of unreleased films when water threatened the studio’s storage vaults. At Warner Bros., a prop whale from the Anna May Wong murder mystery “When Was You Born?” He went on a cruise down the Los Angeles River (perhaps a ruse by an overzealous press agent). John Barrymore, Ernst Lubitsch, and Barbara Stanwyck all suffered damage to their homes, and Frank Capra, the academy’s president, was stranded in Malibu. The Oscars ceremony was postponed for a week.
On March 10, the astonished citizens of Tinseltown took out their gowns and tuxedos and filled the Biltmore Bowl, which was packed to capacity. It is difficult to know exactly how that night went, but none of the accounts I have read indicate a dismal evening. Master of ceremonies, comedian Bob (Bazooka) Burns – whose house was also damaged – opened with “I was chosen because I probably know less about motion pictures than anyone present, and if anything goes wrong I can be blamed.” For my ignorance.” Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen received a special statuette made of wood. Alice Brady, winner of the Best Supporting Actress award, was home with a broken ankle, and an unidentified man kissed on her behalf, then disappeared without a trace, with Her award: The film “The Life of Emile Zola” won the grand prize diverse She reported that the crowd, “in festive attire and mood, wined and dined and listened to ballot tabulations and speeches of praise.”
This was the first of four times that the Oscars were postponed. Thirty years later, the Academy Awards ceremony was scheduled to be held on April 8, 1968. Four days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. The Oscars that year were already fraught with the racial politics of the moment, with two civil rights dramas starring Sidney Poitier– “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” – in competition for Best Picture. (Oddly, Poitier was not nominated for either.) As Mark Harris tells in his book,Pictures in the revolutionwhich unpacks the turbulent Oscars year, Poitier was one of several black stars, including Diahann Carroll, Louis Armstrong, and Sammy Davis Jr., who warned the academy’s president, Gregory Peck, that they would not participate if the ceremony went ahead as planned. – Now the day before King’s funeral.
“I find it morally inappropriate to sing ‘Talk to the Animals’ while the man who could make a better world for my children lies in state,” said Davis, who was scheduled to perform the nominated song from the Johnny Carson movie “Dr. Dolittle.” “And several white allies, including Mike Nichols, who was nominated for directing “The Graduate,” said they would stay home, too. Peck announced a two-day delay and canceled the governor’s party. (“Two days?” Nichols said later. “That was Everything?”) opened the television broadcast grandly address From Peck, who said: “The lasting memorial we in the film community can build to Dr. King is to continue to make films that celebrate the dignity of the human person, whatever their race, color or creed.”
In 1981, another act of political violence turned the party upside down. At 11:27 I am Pacific time, on awards day, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton. In a strange hall of mirrors, the would-be killer, John Hinckley, Jr., is trying to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he has become obsessed after seeing her Oscar-nominated performance in Taxi Driver. By 2 p.m. that afternoon, with uncertainty about Reagan’s condition, the Academy announced that it would postpone the ceremony by one day. “It’s not fair,” one onlooker complained once news came that Reagan’s condition had stabilized. “He’s not dead.”
And the next night, Carson, who was hosting, He started broadcast by telling the audience, “Because of the incredible events that occurred yesterday, that old adage ‘The show must go on’ seems relatively unimportant.” Oddly enough, the first movie president had pre-recorded a salute before the shooting, and Carson conveyed that it was Reagan’s “express desire” to play this salute. The screen showed the president sitting in the White House, cheerfully extolling “the world’s most enduring art form.” Later, Carson broke the tension with “The president has asked for severe cuts in aid to the arts and humanities. It’s Reagan’s strongest attack on the arts since he signed with Warner Bros. It might have been enough to normalize the mood had Robert De Niro not won Best Actor in a Motion Picture.” Raging Bull As the star of Taxi Driver, he was unwittingly associated with violence, and he ended his joke Acceptance letter With a reference to “all the terrible things that happen.”
The Oscars were last postponed in 2021, amid Coronavirus disease pandemic. Instead of trying to hold a scaled-down ceremony, as the Emmys and Golden Globes did, the Academy postponed the Oscars from February to April and, with the help of Steven Soderbergh, reimagined what it could look like. The awards were held at a makeshift nightclub in Los Angeles’ Union Station, with a limited group of attendees. It was innovative then An awkward ceremony sometimeswith Anthony Hopkins’ absentee victory over the late Chadwick Boseman providing the sad ending. Because Hollywood has delayed a lot of big releases, and small films like “Bedouin,” which won Best Picture, reigned supreme. But the most memorable moment of the evening was the first: a stunning moment Tracking shot of Regina King strolling through the station, overlaid with funky opening credits. “Welcome to the 93rd Academy Awards,” she said. The fact that it happened at all was a sort of triumph.
The issue of canceling the Oscars — and whether the competition is inappropriate in the face of a real-world catastrophe — goes back to the awards’ early years. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, the Academy announced that it would cancel its banquet and award awards in a “quiet” manner. Days later, the academy’s newly elected president, Bette Davis, angrily resigned from her position. As Davis said, she lobbied for the awards to continue in a theater open to members of the public, to raise funds for war relief, but the board rejected her decision. She later said in her memoirs: “I was not supposed to assume the presidency intelligently.”
Gossip columnist Hedda Hooper was among those who led the campaign to bring back the banquet, writing: “The more I think about canceling the Oscars, the crazier I get about it.” Once the US Army signaled its approval of the academy, in early 1942, the event materialized again – however, in Miscellaneous The words “no orchid sparkle”. Hopper even objected to the gaudy party, complaining: “Would it break anyone’s spirits to see our girls so beautifully dressed?” A military makeover was given to the Biltmore Ballroom, with Allied flags replacing bouquets, and the evening began with a hawkish speech from politician Wendell Willkie. “Let’s start hitting,” he repeated. “Let’s start winning.” James Stewart, in uniform on leave from Moffett Field, presented the best actor award to Gary Cooper, for his starring role in “Sergeant York.” The ceremony marked a turning point in Hollywood’s shift toward patriotic propaganda, coordinated by the War Department.
