Oscars 2021: Who Is Hosting This Year’s Awards?

The Academy Awards will once again be without a host for the third consecutive year, as producers Steven Soderbergh, Jesse Collins, and Stacey Sher hope to bring a different feeling to the 93rd edition of the ceremony. Like many awards shows during the coronavirus pandemic, it will look and feel very different from past ceremonies. Soderberg said he hopes audiences at home will feel like they “watched a movie” once it is all over. The ceremony starts at 8 p.m. ET Sunday on ABC.

The Oscars began its recent trend of going without a host in 2019, and that ceremony earned good reviews from critics. Last year, the Academy went without a host again, but it was the least-watched ceremony since Nielsen started keeping track of viewership in 1974. Soderbergh is hoping the ceremony will be far more entertaining than those two efforts, but it will not really be clear how that is going to work out until the ceremony starts.

“The most exciting thing about this show is that it is going to feel like a film, in the sense that, at the end, we hope it’ll feel like you watched a movie,” Soderbergh recently explained to Vanity Fair. He went on to say that everyone involved will be “feel like characters in a film.” The audience will “have a connection to everyone in this show,” the Traffic filmmaker said. “What we want to do is have this three-hour movie in which some awards are given out.” Even the graphics will have a “cinematic aspect” to them, Soderbergh said, stopping short before he revealed too much.

The producers also tried to take what was good and bad about the Emmys, Grammys, and other COVID-era awards shows and better them. They even said using Zoom to participate in the show from home would not be allowed. They originally said that everyone who wanted to participate had to go to Los Angeles’ Union Station and the Dolby Theatre, the two venues being used for this year’s ceremony will be hosted. After backlash, they eventually walked that back and agreed to create European “outposts” for overseas talent who can’t make it to California.

“Our hope was to get everybody in when things seemed they were getting better, and then it changed again,” Sher explained. “Our goal in setting out to have a show where everyone matters and every category matters was certainly not to say, ‘and only if you’re in the U.S. and you can get here.’ There was never, ever, for a second a moment where there wasn’t going to be a way to include everybody.”

One preview of the “cinematic” aspect of the show was the decision to announce presenters as “cast” members. The roster includes Steven Yeun, Riz Ahmed, Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Bong Joon Ho, Don Cheadle, Bryan Cranston, Viola Davis, Laura Dern, Harrison Ford, Regina King, Marlee Matlin, Rita Moreno, Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Reese Witherspoon, Renée Zellweger, and Zendaya. ABC’s coverage of the show starts with Oscars: Into the Spotlight at 6:30 p.m. ET, before the ceremony starts at 8 p.m. ET. ABC is also planning to air Oscars: After Dark once the show is over.