Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who won the Best Director Academy Award in 2000 for Traffic, is producing the next Oscars telecast, along with Emmy-nominated producer Jesse Collins and Oscar-nominated producer Stacey Sher.
This year’s event will be held at Los Angeles’ Union Station, as well as two venues in Europe, all adhering to COVID safety protocols.
Sher, who produced the Oscar winning films Erin Brockovich and Django Unchained, says of this year’s telecast, “Well, because of COVID, it’s certainly a much more intimate affair…”
Collins, who is a veteran of shows like the BET Awards, and produced the last Super Bowl Halftime Show with The Weeknd, explains this year’s Academy Awards theme, “Bring Your Movie Love,” is “about community.”
He adds, “It’s about everybody coming together for the love of cinema…Think about when movies come out. We all go to the theaters. We don’t ask anybody what their political views are with this…We are focused on the story and we laugh. We cry, we clap at the end. That’s what we want.”
He adds, with a smile considering the Oscars’ propensity to run long, “Three hours, exactly three hours of escape.”
Sher adds, “I think what we’re saying is leave your cynicism at the door, come in…remembering what it is to gather and debate what your favorite scenes were or the lines you quote…because of the movies that you loved and what you can’t wait for. And that’s what I think we’re leaning into.”
Collins says he hopes the show makes people “feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to go back to the theater…I want to get back to that. I want to sit next to a stranger and watch a movie.'”
The Oscars air Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC.
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