How to Campaign for an Oscar While L.A. Is on Fire
As the Los Angeles wildfires continue to burn, after having upended tens of thousands of lives and decimated any sense of security regarding the city’s coexistence with nature, thoughts around Hollywood are turning to what business after the fires can and should look like — especially as the industry’s annual awards season figures out how to carry on.
With remarkable speed — only hastened by Hacks star Jean Smart’s Instagram cri de coeur beseeching networks televising the Academy Awards to “seriously consider NOT televising them and donating the revenue they would have gathered to victims of the fire and firefighters” — some of the most reliable pre-Oscars events have become casualties of the tragedy. The Academy twice delayed announcing this year’s nominees (the noms will now be announced virtually on January 23) and canceled its glitzy luncheon in part to support relief efforts and honor frontline workers. The Screen Actors Guild Awards canceled its live nominations announcement. BAFTA pulled the plug on its schmoozy, campaign-y, Los Angeles-based Tea Party event. And the Critics Choice Awards log-rolled its broadcast date twice to now take place on February 7.
The biggest event, the Oscars broadcast itself, has shown no indication of budging from its March 2 air date or deviating from standard operating procedure. (At least four Academy board members lost their homes to the Palisades and Eaton fires.) “After consultation with ABC, our board, and other key stakeholders in the Los Angeles and film communities, we have made the carefully considered decision to proceed with the 97th Oscars ceremony as planned,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer explained in a statement.
According to a mix of Academy members, studio executives, and Oscars strategists, the chances of the Academy Awards being postponed at this point are slim to none, barring some cataclysmic escalation of the current force majeure. “The only thing that could delay the Oscars is if the winds are so bad it starts all over again,” says a studio marketing executive overseeing an Academy Awards campaign. “The internal conversation we are having is just don’t have parties. You can have a screening, a dedication. Just no Champagne. No party.”
A specious — and now debunked — report in the U.K. tabloid The Sun proclaimed a “secret ‘contingency strategy’” is in place for the ceremony to be called off. But over the ceremony’s 96-year history, the Academy Awards has never been canceled. Veteran Academy members point out the Oscars have been postponed only twice in recent memory: In 2021 at the height of the COVID epidemic (when a pared-down version of the broadcast aired in late April, around six weeks later than normal), and in 1981 when the awards were delayed by 24 hours due to an assassination attempt on president Ronald Reagan.
An awards-campaign strategist highlights the ruinous economics a cancellation would present to both the Academy and the myriad vendors, hair and makeup professionals, limo drivers, event planners, and caterers whose livelihoods are directly staked upon Oscars business as usual. ABC reportedly pays the Academy a $100 million annual licensing fee for rights to the Oscars broadcast with the potential for outside revenue sharing tied to the sale of commercials. Meanwhile, AMPAS is wheezing under $465 million in outstanding debt after having spent lavishly to open the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles’s Mid-City district in 2021. “If you really want to fuck the city of L.A., cancel the Oscars like some haters are saying,” this strategist says. “AMPAS is broke after years of slavish fealty to the museum. They owe a fortune in debt.”
And yet no less a creative eminence than Stephen King took to Bluesky to lobby Academy brass to call off the awards: “Not voting in the Oscars this year. IMHO they should cancel them. No glitz with Los Angeles on fire.” He followed up with a posting on Friday to address the groundswell of pro-Oscars sentiment flooding his timeline. “I hear what you guys are saying about the Oscars, and how they’re a celebration of life, and the show must go on, blah-blah-blah, so-on-and-so-forth,” King wrote. “It all makes a degree of sense, but to me it still feels like Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Or in this case, wearing fancy clothes while LA burns.”
As the wildfire-extended Academy Award voting period ended at 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 17, at least that much could be agreed upon by both those dead-set upon canceling the Oscars and those soldiering forward. “It’s really in poor taste to be celebrating while people are hurting,” our studio executive says. “You can do the voting. Just don’t do it right now. Extend everything so people aren’t pressured. You can’t have an Academy celebratory event; you can’t do that right now.”
“But,” the same executive notes, “the show does go on.”