New Oscars producers open up the possibility of streaming

The Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences held a big meeting for its literal thousands of members today, announcing, among other things, the folks who’ll be handling next year’s Oscars broadcast: Veteran Academy Awards director Glenn Weiss, and long-time Tony and Super Bowl producer Ricky Kirshner. The pair will be tasked with making sure that the 2023 show runs smoothly, without any, y’know, incidents marring the production.

Per Deadline, the Academy’s meeting was all about reform and rehabilitation of its image—including trying to recover from an Oscars broadcast that nobody seemed to have liked much even before the fisticuffs broke out. And while the pair’s decision to issue a statement about their hiring that began with lines cribbed from The Godfather and Jerry Maguire doesn’t necessarily indicate an embrace of the hippest of trends, they did note that they’ll be considering a bold new frontier for Oscars broadcasts: “Exploring extensions of the show on streaming.”

That’s a big deal, since TV has held very jealously onto the broadcast rights for the show for years now, even as its ratings numbers have dropped steadily over the last decade. (2021 was the lowest point in recent memory, but this year’s show didn’t fare all that much better.) ABC currently has a handle on the Oscars broadcast rights for the next several years, but it sounds like the Academy might be looking to offload at least part of the show onto online viewership (Possibly those segments, for technical awards, that it got screamed at for cutting out of the show almost entirely this past year.)

Meanwhile, there’s also an apparent push to revamp the Oscars red carpet experience; the Met Gala was cited as a specific example, so don’t be shocked if we start seeing “themed” red carpets over the next few years. That’s in addition to reforms that were floated for the Academy as a whole, which is trying out this whole “transparency” thing after years of being criticized for its board of governors making decisions without any real responsibility to the thousands of professionals who make up the Academy.