The Oscars have decided to not telecast the presenting of 8 awards in its live ceremony this year. These eight categories are documentary short, film editing, makeup/hairstyling, original score, production design, animated short, live-action short and sound.
The presenting of the awards for the above-mentioned categories will take place approximately an hour before the actual ceremony begins, at the Dolby Theatre, and will subsequently be edited into the live broadcast.
The 94th Academy Awards is supposed to air on 27th March, 2022 on ABC. The ceremony recorded the lowest viewership last year, with less than 10 million viewers. This year, they are focusing on making the ceremony more tight-packed and fitting it within 3 hours.
The decision to not broadcast the awards in eight categories is not a new attempt for the Academy. Earlier in 2018, this was announced but cancelled due to backlash from the industry. This is the second time the Academy is all set to test it out.
According to the Academy itself, this is being done to keep the live telecast more crisp and tight-packed, specifically under 3 hours. In other words, they are hell bent on gaining higher ratings and viewership this time.
Another decision by the Academy that also faced criticism is the idea of introducing a Fan-Favorite Award. Moreover, it turned out to give completely opposite results than what the Academy expected.
The forerunner in this category turned out to be Camila Cabello’s Cinderella, instead of Spiderman: No Way Home, which many anticipated would be the frontrunner.
While keeping the live telecast short and under a certain time limit would probably help with better ratings, it also shows ignorance and disrespect to certain categories which are deemed not important enough compared to the bigger award categories.
For instance, makeup or best background score may not be the categories viewers would be the most interested in but it is still a celebration of various aspects of cinema.
The Academy Awards are supposed to be celebrating all aspects of cinema and thus, people who remain behind the limelight also deserve to come to the forefront during such awards.
Thus, this controversial decision by the Academy to cast aside certain ‘less important’ categories from the live telecast is not being taken too favorably by people.
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