Oscars producer Steven Soderbergh alllmost says they assumed Chadwick Boseman was going to win
Film Features Chadwick Boseman
The end of the 2021 Oscars ceremony was bizarre for a number of reasons, mostly because of the fact that Best Actor In A Leading Role was presented after Best Picture. Anthony Hopkins won that final Academy Award for his work in The Father, but since he wasn’t in attendance and the Oscars had outlawed Zoom call-ins, the show just… stopped. Now, 2021 Oscars producer Steven Soderbergh has offered some insight into what happened there, and it at least partially revolves around something that a lot of Oscar viewers guessed that night: They assumed Chadwick Boseman was going to win Best Actor, and they wanted to end on that.
Now, Soderbergh doesn’t come right out and say that in this new Los Angeles Times piece, but he does say that they first thought of moving Best Actor to the final spot after the nominations came out “and there was even the possibility that Chadwick could win posthumously.” Soderbergh says he knew that if Boseman’s widow, Taylor Simone Ledward (who gave a touching speech when Boseman posthumously won a Golden Globe), had gone onstage and accepted on his behalf, “there would be nowhere to go after that.”
In other words, the producers knew there was a chance Boseman would win, and if he did win it would be a huge moment, so they didn’t want to have to put anything on after that. The risk in that is exactly what happened: If Boseman doesn’t win, the show ends with a thud (no offense to Tony Hopkins). Elsewhere in the L.A. Times piece, Soderbergh explains that a lot of the structural changes he came up with for this year’s Oscars ceremony were there just to shake things up and force the Academy to figure out what did and did not work for future shows. He just did his thing and then washed his hands of it, going so far as to not even read any reactions to the ceremony after it aired. It’s unclear, then, how many of his changes will be kept for the 2022 Oscars, but we’re going to guess that it’ll be very few of them.
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He said that they assumed that ze claimed that zirself mentioned to her that thon might say to zir that he/she/themself might not never win over them, zem or zom. Or some other fucking woke shit. Roll out the welcome mat for the fucking commies while you’re at it.
Wait, Steven Soderbergh produced the Oscars?
He was one of the producers this year, yes.
He did. And it was pretty terrible. Not in a kitschy terrible Rob Lowe sings with Snow White way either. Just bad.
I only watched snippets of it so maybe I didn’t catch the worst qualities of it. The opening tracking shot was really neat, it helped establish the aesthetic of the venue (which I thought looked great… though it apparently was a pain for local commuters and homeless people, and for audience participants it apparently sounded like low rent Golden Globes— sitting at a bunch of tables but not being allowed to eat or drink).Not playing people off stage let some people charismatically make speeches circle around to being engaging and not just endless lists of agents/managers. And I thought the in memoriam segment being more of an upbeat song and that shimmering visual effect were reasonable enough choices to try and celebrate people rather than wallow in sadness. However, but I think the lack of clips throughout the show made it harder to contextualize some of the attachments people would have had to the passed artists. Also some names definitely got the short shrift blipping across the screen, even as they continued to omit some high profile deaths (including past nominee Adam Schlesinger.)Really though, the lack of clips gets to me though, since I vaguely follow award season and I still haven’t had the chance to see a bunch of these movies. With very few blockbusters in contention nearly all the nominees were on a smaller scale so they really should have used it as more of an opportunity to sell whatever components of the movies nominated this year that weren’t just “homework.” Also while I get trying to make it more for the in person audience, I think Ocean’s 11 style split screen montages would have been technically difficult hell but a way to have those intimate faces alongside actual footage.Then again I also get that’d make it essentially impossible to put clips on YouTube, the main way I consumed it.
I knew everybody called that that’s what had happened but I did not expect them to come out and admit it (in a roundabout way).
I would love someone prominent, like a Tom Hanks or on that level, to just say the quiet part everyone knows out loud: the Academy put the cart before the horse thinking Chadwick was a lock. Which isn’t unjustified! He was a heavy favorite! But never count out the Academy to make a bad decision collectively on what should be a lock (for example, Hoop Dreams being left off a Best Doc field)
Or to push back on what is seen as a lock based on not liking pressure, especially after years of Oscars So White, etc. It’s unfortunate that Chadwick’s nomination and legacy had to get caught up in all the usual posturing with the voter base and outside forces.
Eh, the voter base just got this wrong. I haven’t seen The Father, I’m never going to see The Father, but even without seeing it it’s clear that 10 years from now nobody is even going to remember that film while everyone will remember that Chadwick Boseman got posthumously screwed on Oscar night.This was a case where the voters got too cute when they should have just given it to the Black screen icon who died a few decades too early.
Hoop Dreams didn’t win Best Documentary? It wasn’t even nominated?!
The Academy editors branch nominated it for Editing at least, but such a terrible oversight from the Documentary branch members.
Because the ‘process’ of nominating a doc back then was EXTREMELY suspect:“The controversy over Hoop Dreams’ exclusion was enough to have the Academy Awards begin the process to change its documentary voting system.[32] Roger Ebert, who had declared it to be the best 1994 movie of any kind, looked into its failure to receive a nomination: “We learned, through very reliable sources, that the members of the committee had a system. They carried little flashlights. When one gave up on a film, he waved a light on the screen. When a majority of flashlights had voted, the film was switched off. Hoop Dreams was stopped after 15 minutes.”[33]The Academy’s executive director, Bruce Davis, took the unprecedented step of asking accounting firm Price Waterhouse to turn over the complete results of that year’s voting, in which members of the committee had rated each of the 63 eligible documentaries on a scale of six to ten. “What I found,” said Davis, “is that a small group of members gave zeros (actually low scores) to every single film except the five they wanted to see nominated. And they gave tens to those five, which completely skewed the voting. There was one film that received more scores of ten than any other, but it wasn’t nominated. It also got zeros (low scores) from those few voters, and that was enough to push it to sixth place.”[34]
Wooooooooow
Well, the Academy didn’t necessarily make a “bad decision” since Boseman’s performance really shouldn’t have won anyway. The bad decision was the anticlimactic way the Oscars were sequenced
Nobody watched, because this year they wanted happy, cheerful movies to get awarded. You know, like every other Oscars ceremony in the past. That Moonlight and 12 Years A Slave—how hilarious! Go back to nominating nothing but comedies, Academy. Why you gotta pick downer movies?
The Shape of Water wasn’t a downer to be fair…
That movie was a calculated attempt to curry favor with fish fetishists, who comprise a shockingly large percentage of the Academy’s membership.
Have you ever noticed that if you take “et” out of “fetish” you get “fish”?
Somebody’s really gotta remove Troy McLure’s Academy membership…
It was really more of an ‘upper’ if you ask me.
Yeah its blindingly clear that was the intention. Goes to show don’t assume anything when planning an event, it merely makes an ass out of you. At least this confirms that the Academy doesn’t actually know who won until the envelope is opened, although that was pretty clear during the great mix up moment.
When you assume it makes an ass out of Uma Thurman. I think that was a Stuart Smalley joke. That reminds me: “Uma…Oprah…Uma…Oprah…”
Ugh that was the worst: “your names are funny! laugh good-naturedly!”
I remember one really good joke from that night, Letterman quipped that Eat Drink Man Woman was how Arnold Schwarzenegger asked Maria Shriver out on a date.
Don’t go saying bad things about Uma’s ass.
The only people who know ahead of time are a couple of accountants from the firm who tally the votes and apparently have never leaked. They also know the actual vote totals (obviously) and those to date have never gotten out either as far as I know.
Yes, Price Waterhouse Cooper does know the details, but they don’t tell the Academy or anyone else.
“there would be nowhere to go after that.”You mean like when there was nowhere to go after Peter Finch’s posthumous win? Or Heath Ledger’s?What garbage justification.
Peter Finch is the first thing I thought of. Yes, there was added tragedy with Chadwick, as he was seen as still being in the prime of life, but it’s not that different. They wanted to emotionally manipulate viewers and it backfired. They should learn from this.
In other words, they decided to risk it all and go for what was behind the curtain.
“But… but this is a bag of shit!”“But it’s really great shit, Mrs. Presky!”
The Oscars keep fucking up. It’s almost like a reverse Moonlight situation: everybody thought the other one is gonna win, and then he didn’t and everyone was sad. I feel bad for Hopkins, he wasn’t even there to accept it.
And apparently he was willing to appear via Zoom but they refused to let nominees do that. Instead they just caused a mess that led to Hopkins, Joaquin Phoenix, etc. getting backlash for nothing that was their fault.
The nominees in the UK were allowed to use Zoom but it was only from a designated site in London and Anthony Hopkins was in Wales, I believe.
I mean the man is 83 years old and there’s a pandemic, just let him use it from home.
Is this how they’re explaining the fungible…thing?
There is a simple answer they should have been smart enough to see. If he doesn’t win, end on giving him an Honorary Oscar. There. Simple. Anthony Hopkins wouldn’t have minded, everyone would have felt the same catharsis. Hell, for posthumous nominees maybe it ought to be just standard policy to do that. But they used to give out honorary ones like rain and the only reason they don’t any more is to stop the ceremony running longer. Yes, the sheer randomness of the voting system blindsided them. That’s going to happen. It’s voting. It does that. Why on earth leave it up to chance when they have a system in place that absolutely COULD be used to prevent this happening, morally ought to be, and is only going to come up once a decade?
Here’s what Soderbergh didn’t account for, and I’m only speaking for me and a few in my circle personally, but I’m willing to guess it applies to others.
We remember the Actor/Actress categories more. I remember Daniel Day-Lewis kneeling before Helen Mirren. I remember Halle Berry losing it on stage. I remember Julia Roberts making a complete donkey penis out of herself – and it all about herself – when giving the Best Actor to Denzel. I remember Jennifer Lawrence tripping and Chris Evans keeping Regina King from tripping.I remember the graciousness of Chris Cooper, giving the first major speech of the night the Awards coincided with the Iraq War launch, or the joy/relief of Robin Williams, Morgan Freeman and Al Pacino. I remember Bill Murray being legit pissed at losing.I remember the controversial stuff too, like Adrien Brody manhandling Halle Berry and then making a joke out of it the next year (to be fair, Charlize Theron, who was the sure winner, seemed amused when Brody used breath spray before announcing the name), or Brie Larson refusing to acknowledge Casey Affleck beyond handing him the trophy.Other than the Moonlight/La La Land moment, I remember very little about the actual Best Picture award being given.Chadwick winning would have been remembered forever, whether it took place in the first, second or third hour of the telecast.
A distracting thing about the Oscars for me this year was that the screen changed from film stock to soap opera stock… Like during the Regina King intro, and throughout the telecast. I guess they were using different cameras or something?
I didn’t watch the Oscars this year, but that sounds like something Soderbergh would do. Dude loves messing around with cameras (and he’s usually great at it).
The dumbest part of all is that even if Boseman had won, it would just get a bunch of people calling it proof that the Oscars are rigged.
first time i’ve watched the entire show in forever, and yeah, they got more wrong than right, but damn that opening was amazing. The walk, the titles – it’s felt like Soderbergh wanted to do another Oceans but with Regina.Which, do i have to say… *insert take my money gif here*
I don’t understand why some people are making a big deal about this. Yeah, they obviously thought it would be Chadwick, they bet on that and it didn’t work out, so what?