Fun, festivity, and frolic is typically the year-end flavor of the day for the entertainment industry. Behind the froth, of course, we see the year’s last screenings and premieres put under scrutiny, and delicate courting of academy voters for carefully shaped Oscar campaigns becomes the name of the game. 2020 gave us a wholly different landscape of quarantine, shut theaters, and Box Office slumps where most scheduled blockbusters weren’t even made, let alone released. BLAKE & WANG P.A take a closer look at the different beast that is this year’s Oscar season.
It’s certainly a world-first for the usually buzzing Awards season, with COVID-19, theatre closures, and quarantine far more on people’s minds than glitzy cocktail parties. The red carpets are rolled up, the glamour is missing, and people are more worried about the severe economic impacts on the industry than whose film is doing what. The ‘wow’ factor is definitely absent, and many voters have proved fonder of a night on the couch with a streaming service than any thought towards Oscar fare.
That said, the Oscars will be going forward for this year despite the difficulties of the global health crisis. They’ve shifted themselves 2 months forward, with a newly scheduled date of April 25th, 2021. In a world-first, they will also be Zoomed, making them perhaps the biggest ceremony to-date to opt for a definite digital-only production. It’s a bold move, for sure!
No doubt this will not be a mere sweatpants-only event, of course. We’ve already seen many events find greater and greater ways to bring back a sense of glamour to Zoom events, notably the sleek black-and-white launch of “Mank” on Netflix. The IFP Gotham Awards- scheduled to be the first big party of the new year- is using digital trickery to create virtual tables and a sense of excitement. More are certain to follow. Yet it will, without doubt, be a very different Oscar season to that we are used to. It will be interesting indeed to see what effect these digital award ceremonies have on the industry -and the results- overall. As always, we’ll be here to keep you in the loop.
