Some might be dreading the homogeneous quality of this year’s Oscar winners, but there’s a detail about the awards ceremony that’s brand new, and it’s going to make it an absolute game changer.
In a new round table with nominees at New York, Pete Docter, the writer and director of Inside Out, reveals that this year, nominees have the option of submitting a list of names of people they want to thank. If they win, that list will then run across the bottom of the screen like a ticker.
Docter: This year, apparently, they’re doing a thing where you can ahead of time give a list of names so you don’t have to read them. They’ll scroll along the bottom.
Berloff: Is that true?
Nagy: Yes, it is true. It was in my package from the Academy. It’s 80 words. If you email them a list by some point in February — my mother, my sister, my agent — they will scroll it across the screen as you speak.
Deadline has further details from producer David Hill at the Academy’s nominees lunch:
At the luncheon and by email, all nominees have been given a card on which to name everyone they want, need, and plan to thank. When they win, those names will then scroll at the bottom of the screen much like a ticker tape. The example shown said: “Kate Winslet wishes to thank…” followed by several names (by the way, Winslet was one of only four acting nominees not present today).
Hill explained this idea came about after they saw what happened when the music began to play off producer Dana Perry, a winner last year for the Live Action Short Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1. Unfortunately, that happened just as she began to talk about the suicide of her own son and why the film was so important to her.
This change has obviously been done in order to cut down on the length of speeches, which is always a concern for award show producers, who are constantly battling with chatty, overly-excited celebs ready to thank every Tom, Dick and Harry. But no matter: think of the drama this will produce! Some possible outcomes:
- So-and-so is named in ticker but not in the speech
- The amount of time nominees will have to spend thinking of people to name beforehand
- How many of friends and family will be mad their friend or family member HAD the opportunity to put them in and didn’t
- Which nominees will do it and which won’t, which is similar to which write their speeches and which don’t, but even more planned
- The multiple ways the ticker is likely to get fucked up in some way
- The celebs who actually have a sense of humor and will have a little fun with it
Pete Docter, imagine me saying this out loud and not writing it down so it will flash across your television set for two seconds: thank you for your beautiful film and thank you for this intel.
Contact the author at dries@jezebel.com.
Image via Getty.