The most recent Academy Awards ceremony took place on 9 February, the earliest date in the institution’s 92-year history, as a calendar-shifting experiment that was largely not embraced by the industry. If everyone was happy enough with the outcome – which saw Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite make history as the first non-English-language film ever to win best picture – complaints were rife in Hollywood about the compressed season leading to it. Voters grumbled about not having enough time to see the films, publicists were run ragged juggling a concentrated schedule of red carpet events and interviews, and even Bong admitted to being “a shell of a human” at the end of his triumphant but intense campaign trail.
Well, be careful what you wish for. Next year’s Oscar ceremony will indeed take place later: a full two-and-a-half months later, in fact, as the Academy announced yesterday that, to accommodate a cinema release schedule stopped short by the Covid-19 pandemic, the whole shindig has been shifted to 25 April 2021. Whereas eligibility for the Oscars is usually determined by the calendar year, this season will make a one-off exception: titles released in the US between 1 January 2020 and 28 February 2021 will be able to compete for the next awards, giving voters a 14-month window of films to choose from.
This is not the first concession the Academy has made to a uniquely disrupted year in film: in April, they announced that for this year only, films released directly to commercial streaming or video-on-demand (VOD) services would be deemed eligible, as long as they had initially been slated for theatrical distribution prior to the lockdown. It was a well-received move, even if the Academy’s old guard has previously shown resistance to Netflix releases and the like: who could reasonably argue for films as strong as Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always or Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods to be discounted for daring to reach audiences in a time of crisis?
If anything, it was a change that pointed to an exciting alternative direction for the Oscars, continuing the bold work they did in crowning Parasite. If Hollywood’s mainstream prize ponies couldn’t all reach cinemas by the end of the year, perhaps this would be the year of increased opportunities for underdog indies – not to mention traditionally underrepresented minorities. If studio cinema remains a predominantly white, male realm, films by and about women and people of colour tend to get a fairer shake on VOD and streaming platforms; in turn, Academy members might have to diversify their viewing and voting.
That possibility has been dampened a bit by the expanded calendar, reducing as it does the pressure on major studios to hasten the completion and release of their big-name attractions. Instead of a bottlenecked explosion of delayed Oscar hopefuls into the already traditionally crowded months of November and December, distributors have an extra two months to pace themselves and their priority films – ensuring that the eventual slate of nominees will look a little more like the usual balance of high-end studio products, selected arthouse favourites and the odd crossover blockbuster than the VOD-heavy alternative.
That’s good news for studio bosses, but less so for films we’ve already seen and singled out as worthy of notice, who now have to work far harder to stay in voters’ already short memories. A couple of months ago, pundits were proposing Elisabeth Moss’s fierce performance in February hit The Invisible Man as a viable best actress frontrunner in a compromised Oscar season: with the nominations now set to be unveiled more than a year after the film’s release, with a glut of delayed, eagerly anticipated attractions to come, Moss’s team – and many others in an equivalent position – have their work cut out for them.
On the one hand, in a year of upsetting uncertainty, one understands the Academy’s willingness to extend the calendar in order to form a pool of contenders that more closely resembles a comforting status quo. Yet in doing so, they’re defeating the ultimate, albeit flawed, purpose of the Oscars: to reflect the year in film, for better or worse. An Oscar slate shaped by coronavirus – short on big-ticket cinema, but heavier on smaller-name, smaller-screen standouts – might have been a one-off aberration, but it could have been a fascinating snapshot of an industry that was in a state of questioning and transition even before the shutters came down.
