How the Academy Awards Have Adapted to Catastrophe

Until two weeks ago, Oscar pundits were describing this awards season as “weird.” Unlike last year’s slate, dominated by Barbenheimer, the new crop of contenders had been thinned out by the actors’ and writers’ strikes, leaving room for such polarizing oddities as “Emilia Pérez” and “The Substance.” “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s shoestring epic, seemed like a potential front-runner—but would voters really sit through its three and a half hours, or could the crowd-pleasers “Anora” and “Conclave” squeak ahead? Other questions loomed: How would Trump’s reëlection change the race? Weren’t Ariana Grande (“Wicked”), Kieran Culkin (“A Real Pain”), and Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez”) committing category fraud by running in the supporting categories? On January 5th, the Golden Globes upended the crowded Best Actress race, with surprise wins for Demi Moore (“The Substance”) and Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”). Usually, the race coalesces around a few dominant narratives, some of them hand-crafted by awards consultants. But the season still felt unsettled, and a little random—what were this year’s Oscars even about?

Then the wildfires struck, incinerating swaths of Los Angeles and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents, including many who work in the movie business. (Among those who lost their homes were four members of the Academy’s board of governors.) Campaigning abruptly halted, and the usual calendar of awards-season events evaporated. To give preoccupied—or evacuated—members more time to catch up on screeners, the Academy extended the voting window and postponed the nomination announcement, then postponed it again (until this Thursday morning), but it held firm on the ceremony date of March 2nd.

On Instagram, Isabella Rossellini, a possible Oscar contender for “Conclave,” shared a “heartbreaking” photo of a charred Oscar statuette lying in rubble—an image that was generated by A.I., but nonetheless encapsulated the industry’s dire new mood. Some suggested that the Oscars become a fund-raiser. Others called for scrapping awards shows altogether. Jean Smart, fresh off her Golden Globes win for “Hacks,” took to Instagram to plead with the networks carrying ceremonies to “seriously consider NOT televising them and donating the revenue they would have garnered to victims of the fires and the firefighters.” Unlikely. As many commenters pointed out, there is no revenue without televising the ceremonies, and thousands of working-class Angelenos depend on the awards-industrial complex, among them stagehands, stylists, drivers, and caterers. Nevertheless, a smoldering cloud hangs over this year’s awards season. It’s hard to imagine it dissipating.

But this is far from the first time that the Academy has had to adapt to calamity. The closest analogy may be 1938, when another natural disaster hit L.A. In the week before the ceremony, scheduled for March 3rd, at the Biltmore Hotel ballroom—in those days, it was a banquet—a torrential downpour dumped nearly a year’s worth of rain on Southern California. Rivers overwhelmed their banks and flooded low-lying parts of the city. Bridges collapsed. More than five thousand homes were destroyed. The storm caused seventy-eight million dollars of destruction and killed around a hundred people, including a studio sound technician who was trying to rescue valuables from his hillside home in Glendale. “The water was so deep, my husband went out on a rowboat to rescue people who had broken through their rooftops,” one woman recalled, fifty years later. A Los Angeles Times reporter surveyed the scene from a plane, observing “gutted farmlands, ruined roads, shattered communications, wrecked railroad lines.” At Lincoln Park, two seven-foot alligators at a zoo rode the floodwaters to freedom.

“This column is being written on a typewriter that may float out the window any moment,” the gossip maven Louella O. Parsons wrote, on March 2nd, “and all anyone can talk of is the happenings of the storm.” She reported that a Scottish-village set for Twentieth Century Fox’s “Kidnapped” had been destroyed, and the married stars Norma Talmadge and George Jessel were “surrounded by water in their mansion at the far end of Beverly Hills.” Republic Pictures lost three acres of its San Fernando Valley property, and an emergency crew at Paramount barely saved the negatives of unreleased movies when the water threatened the studio’s storage vaults. At Warner Bros., a prop whale from the Anna May Wong murder mystery “When Were You Born?” went cruising down the Los Angeles River (possibly a stunt staged by an overeager press agent). John Barrymore, Ernst Lubitsch, and Barbara Stanwyck all had damage to their homes, and Frank Capra, the Academy’s president, was marooned in Malibu. The Oscars were delayed a week.

On March 10th, the dazed citizens of Tinseltown reached for their gowns and tuxedos and filled the Biltmore Bowl, which was packed to capacity. It’s hard to know exactly how the night played out, but none of the accounts I’ve read indicate a sombre evening. The master of ceremonies, the comedian Bob (Bazooka) Burns—whose home was also damaged—opened with the crack “I’ve been selected because I probably know less about motion pictures than anyone present, and if anything goes wrong it can be blamed on my ignorance.” The ventriloquist Edgar Bergen received a special statuette made of wood. The Best Supporting Actress winner, Alice Brady, was home with a broken ankle, and an unidentified man accepted on her behalf—then vanished without a trace, along with her award. “The Life of Emile Zola” won the top prize, and Variety reported that the crowd, “in gala dress and mood, wined, dined and listened to ballot tabulations and laudatory speeches.”

That was the first of four times that the Oscars have been postponed. Thirty years later, the Oscars were scheduled for April 8, 1968. Four days before, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. That year’s Oscars were already freighted with the racial politics of the moment, with two civil-rights dramas starring Sidney Poitier—“In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”—in the running for Best Picture. (Curiously, Poitier wasn’t nominated for either.) As Mark Harris recounts in his book “Pictures at a Revolution,” which deconstructs that tumultuous Oscar year, Poitier was one of several Black stars, including Diahann Carroll, Louis Armstrong, and Sammy Davis, Jr., who warned the Academy president, Gregory Peck, that they would not participate if the ceremony continued as planned—now the day before King’s funeral.

Davis, who was set to perform the nominated song from “Doctor Dolittle,” told Johnny Carson, “I find it morally incongruous to sing ‘Talk to the Animals’ while the man who could make a better world for my children is lying in state.” Several white allies, including Mike Nichols, who was nominated for directing “The Graduate,” said that they would stay home, too. Peck announced a delay of two days and cancelled the Governor’s Ball. (“Two days?” Nichols said later. “That was all?”) The telecast opened with a stately address from Peck, who said, “The lasting memorial that we of the motion-picture community can build to Dr. King is to continue making films which celebrate the dignity of man, whatever his race or color or creed.”

In 1981, another act of political violence upended the ceremony. At 11:27 A.M. , Pacific time, on the day of the awards, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton. In a strange hall of mirrors, the would-be assassin, John Hinckley, Jr., had been trying to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he’d become obsessed after seeing her Oscar-nominated performance in “Taxi Driver.” By two that afternoon, with Reagan’s condition uncertain, the Academy announced that it would push the ceremony back a day. “It isn’t fair,” one spectator complained, once Reagan was reported to have stabilized. “He didn’t die.”

The next night, Carson, who was hosting, began the broadcast by telling the audience, “Because of the incredible events of yesterday, that old adage ‘The show must go on’ seemed relatively unimportant.” Eerily enough, the first movie-star President had prerecorded a greeting before the shooting, and Carson relayed that it was Reagan’s “express wishes” that it be played. A screen projected the President sitting in the White House, cheerily extolling “the world’s most enduring art form.” Later, Carson broke the tension with the line “The President has asked for severe cuts in aid to the arts and humanities. It’s Reagan’s strongest attack on the arts since he signed with Warner Bros.” That may have been enough to normalize the mood, were it not for Robert De Niro’s Best Actor win, for “Raging Bull.” As the star of “Taxi Driver,” he was unwittingly linked to the violence, and he ended his otherwise jokey acceptance speech with a nod to “all the terrible things that are happening.”

The most recent Oscar postponement was in 2021, amid the COVID pandemic. Instead of attempting a Zoomed-in ceremony, as the Emmys and Golden Globes had done, the Academy put off the Oscars from February to April and reimagined what they could look like, with the help of Steven Soderbergh. The awards were staged in a makeshift night club in L.A.’s Union Station, with a limited group of attendees. It was an inventive if sometimes awkward ceremony, with Anthony Hopkins’s absentee win over the late Chadwick Boseman providing the cringeworthy finale. Because Hollywood had delayed so many big releases, small films like “Nomadland,” which won Best Picture, were dominant. But the evening’s most memorable moment was its first: a stunning tracking shot of Regina King sauntering into the station, overlaid with funky opening credits. “Welcome to the Ninety-third Oscars,” she said; the fact that they were happening at all was a kind of triumph.

The question of cancelling the Oscars—of whether the pageantry is unseemly in the face of real-world catastrophe—is one that dates back to the early years of the awards. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941, the Academy announced that it would cancel its banquet and hand out the awards in “quiet” fashion. Days later, the newly elected Academy president, Bette Davis, quit her post in a fury. As Davis told it, she had pushed for the awards to go on in a theatre, open to members of the public, as a war-relief fund-raiser, but she had been overruled by the board. “I was not supposed to preside intelligently,” she later griped in her memoir.

The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was among those leading the charge for reinstating the banquet, writing, “The more I think of our Academy award dinner being called off, the madder I get about it.” Once the U.S. military indicated its approval to the Academy, in early 1942, the event rematerialized—but, in Variety’s words, “sans orchidaceous glitter.” Hopper objected even to the deglamorized ceremony, moaning, “Would it break down anyone’s morale to see our girls beautifully dressed?” The Biltmore ballroom was given a military makeover, with Allied flags replacing bouquets, and the evening began with a hawkish address from the politician Wendell Willkie. “Let’s begin to strike,” he intoned. “Let’s begin to win.” James Stewart, who came in uniform, on a furlough from Moffett Field, presented the Best Actor award to Gary Cooper, for playing the title role in the jingoistic “Sergeant York.” The ceremony marked a turning point in Hollywood’s pivot toward patriotic propaganda, in concert with the Department of War.