What to Expect From the Oscars Telecast and What We’d Change

It’s a wonderful week for Oscar with the 98th annual Academy Awards set to air on ABC and stream on Hulu this Sunday evening. Conan O’Brien is once again hosting, having won raves for his performance last year. His presence should ensure the telecast at least gets off to a good start, but it’s hardly a guarantee the show will work as a whole. Much will depend on which movies end up winning, what sorts of acceptance speeches are delivered, and whether producers have made the right choices about things like clip packages and musical interludes. To talk about what we should expect Sunday night, I connected with two of my Vulture colleagues who are intimately familiar with all things Academy Awards: Gold Rush columnist Nate Jones and movie critic Alison Wilmore. We discussed the show’s recent history, what we might do to make the event better, and the shock announcement that the Oscars will be leaving network TV and heading to Google-owned YouTube starting in 2029.

Just thinking about the past few years of Oscarcasts, what has been your general reaction? Do they feel like a good showcase for the industry or craft? Or … something else? Getting better, worse, or just treading water?

Alison Wilmore: My general reaction to the Oscars in recent years is that the speeches have tended toward too careful and the ceremony drags in certain stretches. But those are qualities I accept as part and parcel of awards shows! Celebs are going to thank their teams and loved ones regardless of how rote that starts to sound to the viewing public, and they’re going to be overly cautious because fear of social media has sanded the edges off so many famous people. There are also always going to be jokes that don’t land. What really doesn’t work for me, and what leads to an awards-show doom loop, is when fear guides choices about the ceremony itself. The Oscars should not feel apologetic, and they should not veer anywhere near what Nate Bargatze did with his running donation gag at the Emmys. The Oscars are where Hollywood bolsters its own mythology, and I feel like self-deprecation works in its context when it’s applied to the industry, not to the ceremony itself — a thing we viewers care enough about to tune into. These are professional entertainers, and they should not feel abashed about putting on a show.

The best thing from the Oscars in recent memory was, for me, when Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper performed “Shallow” at the 2019 awards. Not because the song slaps, though obviously it does, or because they did an especially good job of it, but because of the way it was staged: The camera came from the stage, aimed at the audience, and the two of them stood up from their seats as though suddenly dropping into character as they held hands and climbed the stairs to the piano that had just been rolled out. It was pure cinema, the pair of them larger than life and teasing an intimacy that was obviously entirely for our benefit but felt so delicious in the moment anyway. It was unfiltered Hollywood goodness, and I want more of that!

Nate Jones: I think they’ve had some ups and downs. The low point was 2022, the year of the Slap, which took place in an era when they were weirdly resistant to having traditional hosts. That was also the year they pretaped all the craft categories and then edited in abridged versions during the regular broadcast. (I was in the audience that year; it was a strange vibe.) It seemed they had an idea that the way to “fix” the Oscars was to make them less like the Oscars! But they’ve gone away from that recently. Replacing Jimmy Kimmel, who always seemed to take an attitude that the audience didn’t actually care about any of the nominated films, with Conan O’Brien helps since Conan has a bit of the old-fashioned showman in him and has been able to thread the needle of keeping things light without demeaning the movies themselves. And I think they’ve also been helped by the fact that the Academy’s tastes have opened up. You’re now seeing voters embrace big populist hits like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Barbie, and Sinners, which has quieted the usual grumblings about how they need to nominate, like, Avengers: Endgame to stay relevant.

Joe Adalian: So I actually enjoyed Kimmel as host because I think having some of that “Don’t take yourselves so seriously” energy is a good thing, and it worked coming from Kimmel because he really was friends with many of the people in the room. It didn’t feel angry or bitter, as with Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes years ago. That said, Nate, Conan was perfection personified last year, and I’m expecting and praying he’ll be great again Sunday. I don’t think we’ve had anyone host the Oscars three times in a row since Billy Crystal in the early 1990s, but — assuming no major disasters — I’d like to see Conan go for a three-peat.

What’s the one thing you would change first about the broadcast if you had complete creative control of the show?

AW: This would be impossible to enforce, but I would require that every winner limit their thank-you to a single person. They would have to choose the lone recipient of their gratitude, and they’d have to put so much agonizing thought into it. It would both matter more and be less taxing to the audience. Maybe we could come up with a compromise where there’s some kind of lower third, in which everyone else the speech giver wanted to give a shout-out to could get acknowledged in an onscreen scroll. This would have the added benefit of giving people enough time to make sure they don’t forget to thank their spouse while giving accolades to their agent and make-up artist.

NJ: I would bring back clips! For every category! I think that helps connect viewers with the craft on display and helps differentiate each category, which is useful when there are 24 trophies to hand out.

JA: Amen to clips, Nate. The Actor (née SAG) Awards this year was an exceptionally entertaining telecast in no small part due to the incredible selection of clips throughout. In addition to clips for every televised category, the show featured multiple montages of various aspects of film and TV history, and you could tell they were assembled by people who love entertainment.

And that’s the one thing I would change about the Oscars: I would make leaning into the history of the medium mandatory. There should be at least three well-curated clip packages exploring some part of film’s past (connecting it to the present when possible), and, most important, at least one (if not all) of the honorary awards handed out by the Academy should be presented during the actual Oscars. This used to be standard until around 15 years ago, but these days, the Academy’s version of lifetime achievement awards are handed out at a separate ceremony. The Academy moved them to save time and fit in more ad breaks, but taking these tributes out of the main show robs the telecast of, when done right, a ceremony’s emotional high points. Need proof? Watch Harrison Ford’s acceptance speech at the Actor Awards.

So ABC has three more years left as host of the Oscars, and then the show goes to YouTube. What was your reaction when you heard the news? And has your opinion changed as you’ve had more time to digest it all?

NJ: My first reaction was that Tony Soprano suspicion, You ever feel like you came in at the end of something? A little self-pitying, sure, but for me it felt like the Oscars acknowledging they were no longer at the center of the culture. They had become a niche product — because everything is a niche product nowadays. Since my initial reaction, I’ve encountered more optimistic takes, about how, freed from the shackles of broadcast television, the show can now be its full self without compromise. I see that, but there’s still something pretty bittersweet about the move to me.

JA: I have to admit my initial response to the deal was “Really?” Google obviously has the money to spend and absolutely huge ambitions in terms of capturing audience attention. And since they’re already spending a ton on select NFL games and events like Coachella, it does seem logical they’d go for an event of this size. But I was actually more surprised that an organization as small-c conservative as the Academy would risk taking their showcase off network TV, even circa 2030. Yet they need the money, and as I said, Google’s got plenty. After seeing what Netflix has done with the Actor Awards and how streaming opens the door to a show that’s not as obsessed with keeping staying short or worried about offending affiliates, I remain cautiously optimistic that this could be a good thing.

AW: I was definitely surprised by the YouTube announcement, if only because the Oscars have been so tied not just to the platform but also to the very idea of a network broadcast for most of their existence. The streaming services have been clear about their ambitions to move more into bigger live events for a while now — look at Netflix, which has been getting into everything from wrestling to an upcoming BTS concert. But while YouTube may have recently been crowned the largest media company in the world, and while it has enormous reach and potential viewership, as a platform it feels small in that something as glitzy as the Oscars will live right alongside all the other videos being touted on my home page, which currently include one of an otter being fed salmon, a fireplace white-noise offering, and someone decoding twists in Paradise season two. Like you said, Joe, the Academy needs the money, and some freedom from the restraints of a traditional broadcast, including runtime, content, and structure, could be good for the ceremony. But the Oscars remain Hollywood’s best ad for itself, and the Academy is going to have to do a lot of work and creative thinking to make the show not look like just more … content.

We’ve seen Hollywood celebs get a lot more careful about making political statements at big awards shows lately, in part because it seems folks are afraid of backlash from MAGA media, etc. This Oscars will be happening under a cloud of war. Do you have thoughts on whether celebs or Conan should use the platform to make statements? 

AW: It’s hard for me to imagine people aren’t going to say anything given the current state of the world. What I hope is that, if winners do opt to say something in their speeches, they go for more than vague statements intended to offend no one. I fully support more “Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine.”

JA: I think there’s a way to link the themes of many of this year’s nominated movies to what’s happening in the world today. Conan can do this in a broadly comedic way as Oscar hosts have done for decades. As for the nominees who win, I am basically agnostic. I don’t think celebs should feel obligated to use their minute or two in the spotlight to offer a political message, but if they do, their choice should be respected rather than turned into fodder for the right-wing outrage machine. If Kid Rock can fly his MAGA freak flag every time he goes out in public, an Oscar winner should be able to speak up on behalf of the refugees being hunted by ICE or transgender Americans worried about their future freedom.

As you’re two of Vulture’s Oscars experts, I need to ask about the race itself. Do you think there will be any overriding theme? And what’s your final pick for Best Picture?  

NJ: Everything’s coming down to One Battle After Another vs. Sinners. OBAA has been leading the pack since fall, but Sinners came on strong late in the race after breaking the record for most nominations for a single film. I believe OBAA will hold on in Best Picture, but the duel between WB’s twin contenders will be felt all night long. They’re up against each other in 11 categories, so by the time an aged Hollywood luminary is ripping open the final envelope, we should have a good idea of who’s in the lead.

AW: Like Nate, I’m betting on One Battle After Another for Best Picture, but Sinners has definitely made a surge in the past few weeks (and is the leader in overall noms, with a record-breaking 16). If there’s a through-line on Oscar night, it’s going to be which of these big auteurist studio movies gets judged to best sum up the year, but also probably a celebration of big auteurist studio movies in general. We’re coming off years of industry destabilization and consolidation, most recently with Warner Bros., the company behind both those front-runners, being fought over by two bidders who represent two different grim scenarios for the future of filmgoing. Whichever movie ends up being the winner of the big prize or in overall numbers, I feel like the running theme will be that Hollywood has coughed up the kind of movies the Oscars have been hoping for, ones that feature singular creative voices and that audiences came out to watch, and the reward is terrifying uncertainty.