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The Oscars

Every year at the Academy Awards, you hear about some winners and/or presenters making use of their time at the podium to express their opinions about politics or social issues. This year, that issue is just as likely to be the Oscars themselves, as it is the ongoing war in Ukraine. And a letter to the Academy signed this week by more than 80 sound artists, including 16 Oscar winners, formally protests the decision to exclude some of Sunday’s awards from the live telecast on ABC.

But it doesn’t just stop with the letter… Some of them plan to wear their guild badges upside down in a silent protest. And to take things a step further, in a show of solidarity, Oscar winners may wind up flipping the actual Oscar trophies, too.

Karol Urban, President of the Cinema Audio Society, said: “This weekend, the Oscars may be turned upside down as we may see winners from all categories accept their Oscars upside down in a silent show of solidarity with the eight affected categories. We are all filmmakers of equal importance.”

The Academy and the show’s producers for 2022 previously announced that eight categories would be cut from the live telecast to tighten up the proceedings for the global TV audience. Instead, the awards for sound, original score, production design, film editing, makeup and hairstyling, documentary short, animated short and live-action short would be handed out an hour earlier, when many of the biggest Hollywood stars were still on the red carpet. Clips from the winning acceptance speeches would be edited and rebroadcast later during the telecast.

At the time, Academy President Dave Rubin said: “We realize these kinds of changes can prompt concern about equity, and we ask you to understand our goal has been to find a balance in which nominees, winners, members, and viewing audience all have a rewarding show experience. Moving forward we will assess this change and will continue to look for additional ways to make our show more entertaining and more thrilling for all involved, inside the Dolby Theatre and watching from home.”

Three of the letter’s signers are among this year’s nominees for best sound:

Belfast (Denise Yarde, Simon Chase, James Mather and Niv Adiri); Dune (Mac Ruth, Mark Mangini, Theo Green, Doug Hemphill and Ron Bartlett); No Time to Die (Simon Hayes, Oliver Tarney, James Harrison, Paul Massey and Mark Taylor); The Power of the Dog (Richard Flynn, Robert Mackenzie and Tara Webb); and West Side Story (Tod A. Maitland, Gary Rydstrom, Brian Chumney, Andy Nelson and Shawn Murphy).

From: Sound Artists from around the world.
To: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and ABC.

We are very saddened by the current world events and the troubled times we live in. The decisions that people, businesses, corporations and world leaders have to make are really challenging.

We have to regroup and reevaluate all of our actions every day and every second.

As a community of Sound Artists we respectfully disagree and are opposed to the changes that are being made for the Broadcast of the 94th Oscars ceremony.

Every film is greater than the sum of all of the parts and it only gets made by the joint effort and contribution of all the people involved in creating movies.

We all make films together, we need to focus on what we contribute in common, not what divides us.

The eight categories not presented live are Documentary Short, Film Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Music Score, Production Design, Live Action Short, Animated Short and Sound.

We have lost many great artists in our times. Let’s not put these categories in the “In Memoriam” edited section of the broadcast show.

Sincerely yours, Sound Artists