The shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic may lead to some curious and unprecedented circumstances for Hollywood at large during awards season, and especially for the 2021 San Diego Comic-Con and South by South West have been canceled or postponed indefinitely.
The global box office dropped by billions of dollars and some of the biggest and most anticipated U.S. box office stopped reporting numbers. Suffice to say, things have been intense for Hollywood. The Summer box office was meant to kick off soon and help to bolster studio profits for the long-term. Now, the impact this drop may have on cinema as a whole could be stratospheric and take years, if not decades, to recover from.
We currently live in a period of precarity and speculation. There are no sure answers to many queries and all movie fans can do is imagine the possibilities. For Hollywood, it's clear that the lack of blockbuster prowess in 2020 could be disastrous for business, but what about the other half of the year and its biggest focus, the awards season cycle and the Oscars?
What’s Happening to the 2020 Awards Season?
2020 was a historic year for the Academy Awards thanks to the success of Bong Joon-ho’s Theater chains may be keen to reopen by July, but that hope seems increasingly naïve as the days and the death toll increases. There is the unprecedented and all-too-feasible possibility that cinemas may not open for the majority of 2020, if they reopen at all. That places a lot of pressure on the Oscars to make drastic and inevitably controversial changes to survive.
A few weeks ago, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced that they would be changing their eligibility rules for the Netflix finally break through at the Oscars to the top prize.
Streaming Movies Could Do Well At The Oscars 2021
Netflix certainly has a hotly hyped line-up of potential awards bait for the 2020 season: Spike Lee's Vietnam war drama premieres on VOD or gets pushed back to next year). They already have a business structure in place to the current climate.
Right now, the most anticipated films of awards season are in one of three situations: One, they are either completed and awaiting a release date (or, for bigger titles like Dune, they have one towards the end of the year); two, they have completed shooting and their post-production status is unknown; or three, their The French Dispatch have been given new release dates and are still committed to the theatrical model. Many films that were presumed to be ready for fall festival season (Taika Waititi's Next Goal Wins, Aaron Sorkin's Trial of the Chicago 7, Andrew Dominik's Blonde) are in limbo right now as the fate of events like the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals hang in the balance.
And then there are the hyped titles whose releases have been removed from 2020 entirely. father of tennis legends Venus and Serena, has Will Smith in the lead role and was set for a cushy November 2020 release. Now, audiences won't see King Richard until November 2021, with the studio clearly deciding that next year's awards season is a much safer bet all round. How many films will choose to save their biggest bets for next year rather than risk the uncertainty of 2020? It remains to be seen.
How Will The Oscars React to Coronavirus?
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has yet to make any announcements regarding their response to the coronavirus, so it must be assumed that, for now, it's business as usual for the Oscars. Still, as studios start to make changes to their schedules and fall plans, leading to obvious impacts with their awards season plans, the Academy cannot sit by and take no action. If they refuse to change any of their rules then we will be left with an Oscars focused entirely on the first three months of 2020's theatrical releases, and it seems unlikely that anyone will be jumping through hoops to hands out awards to Bad Boys for Life.
The Oscars have never been canceled so it remains unlikely that they will do so for 2021. They may choose to postpone it and roll all of 2020 and 2021's films into one year, as they used to do in the 1930s, but that could cause some major backlash in the industry. The smartest move would be to allow films with at-home and streaming service premieres to qualify without needing a theatrical release. That may be a necessity if theaters don't reopen this year. The problem is that the Academy is hesitant to let that genie out of the bottle and doing so, even just for one year under special circumstances, will lead to a whole host of conundrums they aren't ready to face about Hollywood's future. The Oscars are already notoriously behind the times, but if they don't act now, then they may become further irrelevant as the entertainment industry faces unprecedented times.
