The Motion Picture Academy's move to a speedier online voting system next year begs the question: Is it getting ready to move up the Oscar telecast as well?
In an exclusive interview with Academy president Tom Sherak and COO Ric Robertson, Sherak told TheWrap that any decision to speed up the date would come as early as March.
If it happens, it would only be the latest in a series of unexpected number of twists and turns Oscar has seen, with the Feb. 26 telecast less than a month away.
Brett Ratner was hired to produce the show, and then resigned; Eddie Murphy was going to host, but now Billy Crystal is returning instead; the Academy has exercised an escape clause that could allow it to leave the theater that was built for it, the Kodak; and this week, Eastman Kodak told a bankruptcy court that it wanted out of the $75 million naming deal.
Also read: Academy Exercises Kodak Theater Escape Clause
A few minutes after Oscar ballots were put in the mail for what could be the last time Sherak (left) and Robertson sat down with TheWrap in Sherak's office to discuss the possibility of moving the Oscar show earlier in the year, a move away from the Kodak Theater -- and why Sherak really wanted to use the announcement of Best Picture nominations to tweak Harvey Weinstein. (Robertson didn't let him.)
You've announced the move to online voting. Are you getting ready to pull the trigger and move the show?
RIC ROBERTSON: We couldn't announce the nominations very much earlier in January and keep the calendar year the eligibility period without electronic voting. But the decision about moving the show has not yet been made. It makes sense to do electronic voting for several reasons, one of them being the calendar, the other being relying on the postal service to deliver this precious cargo. But the decision about the date of the show hasn't been made yet.
TOM SHERAK: The 43 members of the Board of Governors will make that decision. And if you said to me, "Tom, how do you think it's going to go?" I really don't know. I really don't.
Is it scheduled to be taken up at a specific board meeting?
SHERAK: As soon as the people doing the work are ready to present, then it'll come up. There's a board meeting in March, and then there's another one in June, before the election in August. I would say, it's got to come up by June.
ROBERTSON: Oh yeah.
SHERAK: The board that's seated now is the board that will make that decision.
Is an expanded use of streaming to deliver films to the members in the works?
SHERAK: One of the things that we want more than anything is for our constituency who vote to see all the movies that they vote on: the movies, the shorts, the documentaries, the foreign language films.
