Why this year’s Oscars could be the weirdest yet ... and that’s saying something.

2021 could be the weirdest Oscar year in history Chris Knight

Every year since 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has gathered its members to hand out awards. And almost since that first year, people have been obsessed with Oscar trivia and superlatives.

Longest speech? That would be Greer Garson, winning best actress for Mrs. Miniver in 1943, and going on for around six minutes. Even the Academy doesn’t have a complete record of the speech; newsreel cameras kept cutting away.

Shortest speech? Alfred Hitchcock won the Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1968 and said: “Thank you.”

Biggest blunder? It’s a tie between 2017, when Faye dunaway and Warren Beatty got the wrong envelope and mistakenly announced La La Land instead of Moonlight for best picture, and that time they let James Franco and Anne Hathaway host.

But the 2021 edition of the Oscars will almost certainly take the prize for weirdest ever — and yes, that includes when John Travolta introduced “the wickedly talented, one and only Adele dazeem.” (He meant Idina Menzel.)

First, it’ll be the latest ceremony ever, taking place this year on April

25. This, after last year’s event became the earlier in history, on Feb.

9. (To be fair, the very first awards ceremony was in May 1929, and in the early ’30s they had a few in November before settling on a spring timeline.)

The new date also means that the standard dec. 31 deadline is pushed to Feb. 28, making 2020 a 14-month year for Oscar consideration. Nominations will be released March 15. (They were out already by this time last year, on Jan. 13.)

Then there’s the fact that movies that didn’t even open in cinemas are eligible for Oscars. Back in April, with the first wave of COVID-19 in full swing, the Academy announced that any film that had planned on a theatrical release but was forced into streaming or video-on-demand could qualify for an award. “This year Only,” it added forcefully.

As a result, a host of movies that went straight to streaming services are now Oscar contenders. This includes such high-profile Netflix titles as Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, david Fincher’s Mank, Spike Lee’s da 5 Bloods and Ma rainey’s Black Bottom by George C. Wolfe. The last two also feature the final performances of Chadwick Boseman, who died of cancer in August.

There are also some traditional studio offerings in the Oscar-hopefuls mix this year. Sony Pictures has The Father, an Alzheimer’s themed drama directed by Florian Zeller and starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, with a planned opening in Canada in February. Searchlight Pictures also plans a February release of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, starring Frances Mcdormand. (The director also made the Marvel movie Eternals, opening in November.) And universal Pictures released News of the World starring Tom Hanks in december, but it’s coming to VOD in Canada on Jan. 15.

Netflix is also in contention for best animated picture with Over the Moon, though facing stiff competition from disney+ (Soul) and Appletv+ (Wolfwalkers). Onward, a Pixar disappointment that opened a week and a half before the spring lockdown, has an outside chance at the prize.

The Academy made a few non-covid-related changes this year as well. Sound mixing and sound editing, two little-understood categories, have been collapsed into one. The shorthand distinction is that sound editing is akin to gathering the ingredients for a dish, while sound mixing is the process of cooking the food. From here on out, only the final meal will be judged.

There have also been some procedural changes to voting for the best international feature film, which until last year was called foreign-language film. The “foreign-language” (i.e., non-english) requirement remains as strong as ever though, as evidenced when the Academy this year rejected deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy as Canada’s submission because it contained too much English, in addition to Tamil and Sinhalese. Canada then submitted 14 days, 12 Nights, a French-language film by Jean-philippe duval.

But the biggest surprise of the Oscar season has been the Academy’s announcement that it’s still planning a live, in-person ceremony at the dolby Theatre in Los Angeles — though it’s unclear how many celebrities could safety gather in the 3,400-seat venue, or how many would want to. When the Emmys delivered a live show in September, they had a limited in-person cast including host Jimmy Kimmel, and a lot of nominees attending through video calls, piped in when they won. It’s likely the Oscars will try something similar.

Oh, and one more oddity for the record books. Last month the Academy announced that Steven Soderbergh was being brought on as a producer for the awards show. He’s easily the biggest name in that position in many years — most Oscar producers are not well known directors. “The upcoming Oscars is the perfect occasion for innovation and for re-envisioning the possibilities for the awards show,” the Academy said in making the announcement.

That much is true. And Soderbergh might be perfectly positioned to carry out such a mission. His newest movie, Let Them All Talk, is generating awards buzz for many of the cast that includes Meryl Streep, Candace Bergen and dianne Wiest. And his pandemic thriller Contagion, which turns 10 this year, proved to be one of the hits of 2020 for the way it seemed to predict much about the current outbreak. Art imitates life, after all. And sometimes the reverse is true as well.