The Oscars Could Be Cancelled! But, Do You Care? - Page 2
However, the complacent attitude of the studios might come back to bite them in the behind, because most ad spots for the telecast have already been sold, most for upwards of a million dollars each, and advertisers are starting to get antsy about whether or not their ads will even air. Millions of dollars in ad revenue are on the line, and I have a feeling that is what it is taking to make the head honchos sit up and take notice. The faithful employee of the studio might be freezing on the picket line, wondering if he can afford to eat this month, but there’s ad money at stake! Cancel the champagne lunch, we’ve got a crisis on our hands!
To actors who have waited years for an Oscar moment, the news that the show could be cancelled must be a blow. I mean, I know that acting is not curing cancer, but it would suck to put in years, even decades, of work, only to be told that what could be your big night might be reduced to a nameless announcer reading your name off a card at a press conference. To think that you could join the ranks of famous winners such as Clark Gable, Audrey Hepburn, James Stewart, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Julie Andrews, Jack Lemmon, Katharine Hepburn, and Anthony Hopkins, then learn that your moment in the spotlight has been stolen because the writers and studio honchos can’t seem to sit at a table with some coffee and donuts and come to a decent agreement over an honest day's wages for an honest day's work.
However, if the ceremony is cancelled, winners this year could take heart in knowing that the very first Academy Awards, held back in 1929, was the only one (thus far) not to be broadcast in some way; and the entire ceremony, not including dinner, took about five minutes to complete. In fact, the very first person to receive an Academy Award didn’t even show up to collect it; Emil Jannings, winner of Best Actor, had decided to return to Germany before the ceremony. Plus, the ceremony was held in May, but the winners had been announced back in February, so he already knew that he had won and collected his statuette beforehand. Douglas Fairbanks and William C. deMille handed out all the awards after dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel, and the whole thing was a very low-key affair. And another bit of information...in 1935, writer Dudley Nichols refused his screenplay award for The Insider because, you guessed it, the Writer’s Guild was on strike at the time (of course, back then, I don't think television writers were included in the guild, and it was still the Screen Writers Guild at the time, not becoming the WGA until 1954).
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