After learning that next year’s Oscars will be held — once again — in mid-March the professionals who make up Hollywood’s awards machine were up in arms on Tuesday.
Following the Oscars, reps from every major studio and publicity firm met with the Academy leaders and pleaded with them to shorten next year’s season, citing exhaustion and increased costs of an elongated FYC campaign. So you can imagine how the news that the 2027 show would be held on March 14, 2027 (with 2028 falling on March 5, 2028) was received.
“Okay so that ‘feedback’ meeting Oscars had was fake — all voting windows exactly the same,” one studio awards player griped in a group chat. “The illusion of feedback,” another responded.
Maintaining the March date also means the ceremony will likely conflict with Austin’s increasingly high-profile SXSW festival again. To boot, nominations will be announced on January 21, 2027 — the first day of the Sundance Film Festival’s brand new Boulder, Colo., iteration.
It would be one thing if the Oscars were coming off a banner year but the 98th Academy Awards drew just 17.9 million viewers on ABC and Hulu, representing a 9% decrease from the previous year’s 19.7 million viewers. This year marked the lowest viewership since 2022.
The festivals, junkets, screenings, podcasts, roundtables and galas are enough to make a seasoned publicist question their career choice. “By comparison, Sisyphus had a finite schedule,” one publicity exec quipped upon hearing the news.
Journalists are feeling the heat, too, with many newsrooms (especially at the trades) having to spread themselves thin during the already-packed trophy season. “I used to be the biggest supporter of long seasons, and this year just wiped me out. It was too long, and people were so over it,” one veteran film awards journalist says. “There was fatigue in the business.”
When YouTube takes over the Oscars in 2029 (and the show moves from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre to L.A. Live in DTLA), we can think of at least one way for the Google-owned company to start winning over a skeptical and exhausted Hollywood.
