The Academy Awards may have to add a new category to this year's ceremony: fastest writing of an award show.
Oscar planners went to work Monday with an apparent end of the screenwriters walkout at hand, meaning they could scrap provisional plans for a celebrity-free Academy Awards broadcast. But since the 15-week-long strike is not expected to end until Wednesday, writers for the Feb. 24 broadcast will have just 11 days to create the entire script for the three-hour-plus ceremony.
"We're in scramble mode right now," Bruce Davis, the executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said Monday.
As the strike entered the new year with no end in sight, Oscar producer Gil Cates developed two parallel ABC broadcasts for the 80th annual ceremony: one contingent on the labor impasse still continuing, the other on the dispute being resolved.
The former broadcast was to rely on an assembly of film clips and pre-recorded packages, and assumed no stars would be on hand to pass out or receive statuettes, as the ceremony was subject to pickets by the Writers Guild of America, an action that torpedoed the Golden Globe awards. The latter would be a traditional Oscar show, with host Jon Stewart bantering at the start and some of the biggest names in show business hoisting their trophies on the Kodak Theatre stage at the end.
"We have always prepared for two shows, and now we are going with the show we always wanted to do," Cates said.
It was not immediately clear if any of the film packages for the backup broadcast -- including an assembly of opening monologue riffs from hosts Stewart, Billy Crystal, Johnny Carson, Chris Rock and others -- would be relegated to the academy vaults or be shown in this or some future broadcast.
Even during the screenwriters' strike, Cates and talent booker Danette Herman locked in about 85% of the show's celebrity presenters, with their participation dependent on not having to cross picket lines. On Thursday morning, Cates and academy officials will announce all of the confirmed celebrity presenters and musical performers for the year's nominated songs.
Oscar officials will have to race to book travel arrangements and rehearsal schedules for the presenters, many of whom are currently making movies or living far from Los Angeles. "It's just part of the unusualness of the year," academy President Sid Ganis said.
