The New Yorker:

The L.A. wildfires have resurfaced an old question: Are times too dark for a glitzy awards ceremony?

By Michael Schulman

Until two weeks ago, Oscar pundits were describing this awards season as “weird.” Unlike last year’s slate, dominated by Barbenheimer, the new crop of contenders had been thinned out by the actors’ and writers’ strikes, leaving room for such polarizing oddities as “Emilia Pérez” and “The Substance.” “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s shoestring epic, seemed like a potential front-runner—but would voters really sit through its three and a half hours, or could the crowd-pleasers “Anora” and “Conclave” squeak ahead? Other questions loomed: How would Trump’s reëlection change the race? Weren’t Ariana Grande (“Wicked”), Kieran Culkin (“A Real Pain”), and Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez”) committing category fraud by running in the supporting categories? On January 5th, the Golden Globes upended the crowded Best Actress race, with surprise wins for Demi Moore (“The Substance”) and Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”). Usually, the race coalesces around a few dominant narratives, some of them hand-crafted by awards consultants. But the season still felt unsettled, and a little random—what were this year’s Oscars even about?

Then the wildfires struck, incinerating swaths of Los Angeles and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents, including many who work in the movie business. (Among those who lost their homes were four members of the Academy’s board of governors.) Campaigning abruptly halted, and the usual calendar of awards-season events evaporated. To give preoccupied—or evacuated—members more time to catch up on screeners, the Academy extended the voting window and postponed the nomination announcement, then postponed it again (until this Thursday morning), but it held firm on the ceremony date of March 2nd.

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