- This year's Academy Awards ceremony will be live and won't include any virtual options for the show.
- In an email to nominees, the show's producers outlined details about the
Oscars ceremony on April 25. - There will be no Zoom link, and only nominees, their guests, and presenters will attend the show.
The Academy has released details for the 2021 Oscars ceremony in April, and all nominees and guests have been told that there will be no option to join the show virtually.
On Thursday, the producers of the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony - Steven Soderbergh, Stacey Sher, and Jesse Collins, sent out an emailed letter to those who received Oscar nominations this year.
The letter detailed the three producers' vision for the night of April 25, hosted at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, and they wrote that they will be "treating the event as an active movie set."
The event, they wrote, will include "specially designed testing cadences to ensure up-to-the-minute results, including an on-site COVID safety team with PCR testing capability." The producers aim to have "a safe, carefree evening," they added.
However, while all other awards ceremonies have been virtual or at least part-virtual, like the Golden Globes, this year's Academy Awards will not be virtual in any way.
"There will not be an option to Zoom in for the show," the email reads. "We are going to great lengths to provide a safe and ENJOYABLE evening for all of you in person, as well as for all the millions of film fans around the world, and we feel the virtual thing will diminish those efforts."
The Emmys, Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, and the Grammys were all virtual or part-virtual, with winners accepting their awards from the comfort of their living rooms, sometimes in pajamas.
At this year's Oscars, however, the nominees will be in the auditorium of the Dolby Theatre. The nominees and their guests, plus the presenters of the awards, will be the only people attending the ceremony.
And that means that pajamas are absolutely not allowed. The email stated that the dress code for the ceremony is "a fusion of Inspirational and Aspirational, which in actual words means formal is totally cool if you want to go there, but casual is really not."
This year's diverse slate of nominees features eight movies nominated for best picture: "The Father," "Judas and the Black Messiah," "Mank," "Minari," "Nomadland," "Promising Young Woman," "Sound of Metal," and "The Trial of the Chicago 7."
"Mank" leads the way with 10 nominations, while expected winners of the night include Chadwick Boseman, who is nominated posthumously for "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," and Chloé Zhao, who could become just the second woman to win best director in Academy Awards history.