A GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD’S BIGGEST RACES
JULY 23, 2021
Why This Oscar Season Is So Deeply Mysterious
With the 2022 Golden Globes officially canceled, just about every Oscars precursor is looking for a little more attention these days. Next year’s Independent Spirit Awards have ditched their long-standing Oscars-weekend tradition by moving the ceremony up three weeks, an attempt to (hopefully) more directly impact the Academy Awards. The Screen Actors Guild Awards, meanwhile, pushed their broadcast to later in the season for similar reasons—returning to the star-studded, live, in-person party that had to be put on pause in 2021.
But no one has been more obvious about exploiting the Globes’ absence than the Critics Choice Awards. Put simply, this show wants to become the Golden Globes. The Critics Choice Association wanted the Globes’ vacated early-January air date, and got it. They wanted the Globes’ famed venue, the Beverly Hilton, but failed to secure it. They wanted their own international branch of journalists, to favorably contrast with the Globes’ controversy-plagued Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and swiftly assembled one. What’s next—comedies and musicals splitting off from drama? A best-picture nomination for Sia? More booze?
I’m David Canfield, and sources in the Hollywood awards orbit tell me that they believe the Critics Choice Association has the credibility to replace the HFPA as the preeminent journalist-backed awards body—if only it can secure a network at the level of the Globes’ NBC home. (The Critics Choice Awards typically air on The CW; next year’s Golden Globes broadcast, lest you forgot, was canceled by NBC.) It needs the fanfare too—the packed parties, the breathless media coverage, the red-carpet frenzy.
My in-depth analysis of the CCA’s expansion efforts—and just how successful they might be—can be found in this week’s Awards Insider report. All this maneuvering is playing out in a bit of a bubble, though, at a distance from the fall-winter campaigns finally getting off the ground.
For those preparing such launches, other topics are proving more top of mind: an uncertain fall festival season, promising the mingling of press and talent in Telluride and Toronto and Venice after a year (mostly) off, and a return to old ways of getting voters to watch new movies. I hear, even for a movie like Venice-premiere Dune, slated (for now) to stream on HBO Max simultaneously with its theatrical release, the expectation for guilds and other industry groups is that screenings will go off the laptop and back into the theater—exclusively.
This is all somewhat fluid, given our ever-evolving pandemic times. Indeed, we may be headed into an even messier Oscars season than last year’s (if that’s possible), teetering toward normality but not quite there yet—and with a gaping, Globes-size opening where front-runners and underdogs can be born.
As this edition of Awards Insider makes clear, anything is still possible.
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