And the award goes …
It's time to face reality and cancel 2021 Oscars, Alyssa Rosenberg writes.
James Bond has packed away his tuxedo for another year. Judging by what's happened to movies during the pandemic, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ought to emulate him. It's time to face up to reality and cancel the 93rd Oscars.
The entertainment industry is in the business of selling fantasy and escapism. That's been harder to do both literally, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down theatres and halted movie production, and metaphorically, as the crisis has stretched on. Keeping the Oscar ceremony on the calendar — and with it, the promise that crowds would be back at movie theatres well before the show — sustains the hope that normal isn't far off.
But viruses are harder to beat into submission than supervillains. As the pandemic has worn on, Hollywood has begun to face the prospect of not just a reshuffled calendar of cinematic releases but also an existential threat to movie-going.
Tenet, Christopher Nolan's much-hyped time-travelling heist movie, the lone blockbuster scheduled for this summer to actually make it to multiplexes, was supposed to lure nervous cinephiles back to theatres. Its performance was wobbly enough that savvy industry observer Richard Rushfield wondered, “In the face of this disaster, who in their right mind would risk their half a billion-dollar tentpole as the next test case?” Disney tried to sell Mulan as a pricey add-on to its streaming service, hoping it would prove that home rentals could replace the box office. The gambit didn't work. Disney is now sending Pixar's Soul direct to streaming, no extra fees required.
Now the scheduled release of No Time to Die, the latest Bond film, was pushed to 2021. Hot off a buzzy trailer, Warner Bros. gave up its Christmas release date for Dune, the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic. This flurry of activity suggests some writing is reliably on the wall.
Certainly, some worthy films have been released in 2020. And more contenders are likely to come, thanks to changes to the Oscar rules that extend the eligibility period through February online screenings to compete.
Still, the list of Oscar-eligible movies is bound to be slim compared to a normal year.
And Oscar night is also about more than the movies it honours. It's a runway for dresses and jewels, a real-life Hollywood soap opera and gossip fest, and a highwire opportunity for the host.
Conversely, no one wants to risk a superspreader event, and stars might reasonably decide it's safer not to go. Making the whole production socially distanced would defeat the point: If the Oscar show, of all events, is reduced to Zoom, then glamour truly is dead.
The pandemic is a serious threat, perhaps the biggest Hollywood has ever faced. But if movie-going is to survive as a theatrical experience, the pictures can't let themselves get small. The best way to avoid that is to wait until it's possible to throw a real, in-person celebration, rather than offer up a fantasy that goes sour as soon as the show is over.