The Oscars should heed these 5 lessons from the Golden Globes and Emmys

“Could this whole night have been an email?” co-host Tina Fey requested a small, socially distanced viewers of first responders and important employees throughout the opening monologue to the 78th annual Golden Globe Awards Sunday night time.

“Yes,” she answered a second later.

The ceremony was crammed with technical hiccups and overshadowed by numerous scandals at present going through its host group, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Heading into the occasion, the HFPA was underneath fireplace for its lack of Black voters and over continued experiences of inside corruption.

That cloud by no means actually cleared throughout the three-hour broadcast, as award winners oscillated between thanking the HFPA for his or her award and lambasting it for its lack of inclusivity. Ultimately, it appeared these newly minted Golden Globe honorees have been torn between the pleasure of successful and the notion that their win would possibly simply be a bit bit hole.

This yr’s Golden Globes, which was a hybrid of in-person presenters and at-home nominees as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, supplies the upcoming Academy Awards telecast with a blueprint of do’s and don’ts. The producers prepping for the upcoming April 25 ceremony may also have the ability to retrace the steps taken by the Emmy Awards final September. The Emmys have been the first Hollywood award present to broadcast throughout the pandemic.

Here are 5 issues the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can be taught from different pandemic award reveals:

It turned manifestly clear early in Sunday’s ceremony that the 78th Golden Globes have been going to be riddled with technical difficulties.

During the first acceptance speech, Daniel Kaluuya was clearly talking through video, however viewers couldn’t hear him. Producers briefly shut down his speech, with presenter Laura Dern apologizing and wishing Kaluuya congratulations.

“You did me dirty, you doing me dirty, you doing me dirty,” Kaluuya may be heard saying as Dern leaves the stage, his audio lastly coming in. “Am I on? Is this on? Am I on?”

Kaluuya received the award for finest supporting actor in a movement image for his work in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

Similar technical mishaps occurred all through the night time, with Fey and co-host Amy Poehler sometimes speaking over one another whereas internet hosting from reverse coasts and the manufacturing crew making an attempt to play a number of winners off with loud music that the winners did not appear to have the ability to hear.

Additionally, sound and lighting high quality diversified enormously from nominee to nominee, with some having crisp and clear photographs whereas others have been grainy and shot at odd angles.

There was additionally the choice to finish each section earlier than a business break with a collection of video home windows showcasing the nominees up for the subsequent award.

It appears that producers hoped for the nominees to talk with one another like they have been on a non-public Zoom name. While some nominees performed alongside, others waited patiently — and silently — for the digicam to chop away.

For the Emmy Awards, producers opted to ship out 130 cameras to nominees in 20 cities and 10 international locations. Nominees have been despatched a hoop mild, a laptop computer, a increase mic and a digicam as a part of the package deal.

This made the particular person movies extra uniform and ensured that every nominee had the correct tools to look on the broadcast. Winners gave their acceptance speeches and then have been transferred over to a digital press room to conduct fast press conferences with reporters.

While the Emmys weren’t fully freed from technical glitches, any that occurred have been small and unmemorable. In reality, the greatest problem the Emmys confronted was when, throughout a bit on stage, Jimmy Kimmel and Jennifer Aniston unintentionally began a hearth.

Kimmel, as a joke, had doused the envelope with Lysol and set it on fireplace to poke enjoyable at the lengths the manufacturing had gone to to make sure that everybody who participated was secure. However, Aniston was unable to place out the flames with a hearth extinguisher at first, resulting in a small blaze. Ultimately, she was in a position to mood the fireplace.

Kimmel and Aniston remained level-headed about the incident, enhancing a bit whereas they snuffed out the fireplace and continued calmly with the remainder of the present.

Nobody “went home” with a Golden Globe trophy throughout Sunday’s occasion, primarily as a result of all of the nominees have been at house.

While the Emmys used this to its benefit by discovering distinctive methods to ship the awards to winners, the Globes opted to ship out the trophies at a later date.

Having nominees ready to see if the black field that had been delivered to their house would erupt with confetti and burst open with a golden prize inside was a intelligent and entertaining solution to preserve nominees and viewers at house locked in on the telecast.

Social media was flooded with images and movies of nominees watching as males and girls in blow-up tuxedo hazmat fits stood exterior their door with an Emmy Award solely to stroll away when one other winner was named throughout the broadcast.

Without the trophies, the Globes felt flat, with winners reciting their speeches to the digicam with out the thrill of hoisting their shiny prize.

The Academy Awards is a way more critical event than the Emmys, so it is unlikely that the manufacturing staff will choose to have trophies burst out of packing containers in a hail of confetti or through a costumed supply individual.

Still, the ceremony may gain advantage from discovering a solution to get trophies into the fingers of its winners.

In hiring Fey and Poehler to host the Golden Globes, the HFPA acquired seasoned awards ceremony comedians, but additionally a hitch — Fey lives in New York and Poehler lives in California.

As a compromise, the manufacturing determined to have Fey seem reside from the Rainbow Room in New York City and Poehler from The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California. The thought was that this could permit each girls to host with out having to endure journey throughout the pandemic. It additionally expanded the checklist of presenters obtainable to the broadcast.

In fact, the Globes did not should be bicoastal. Instead of offering tools to nominees, the HFPA opted to separate its manufacturing, hiring two separate crews to do a job that, in the previous, has been carried out by one.

Some of the banter between Fey and Poehler appeared natural. But the try and match their backgrounds so it appeared like they have been standing subsequent to one another did not at all times work. The consequence was numerous bizarre timing mishaps.

“One could make allowances if it seemed like the Globes were attempting new or innovative things within the format,” Daniel Fienberg wrote in his evaluate of the occasion for The Hollywood Reporter. “But nothing in this show was appreciably more innovative than what the Emmys did five-plus months ago, and the Emmys nailed almost every challenge and avoided almost every disaster.”

In latest years, a lot of the criticism of awards reveals has centered round the size of the telecasts. In some instances, reveals have been in a position to preserve tempo, permitting winners ample time for his or her speeches and offering some skits or prerecorded sketches to interrupt up the monotony.

Sunday’s Globes failed on this regard. Many of the comedic bits the present tried to incorporate fell flat, seeming to pull on for for much longer than they should.

“Oh, you are taking so much time with this,” Poehler appears to half-joke throughout a virtually four-minute skit between Maya Rudolph and Kenan Thompson, who play Beverly Jackfruit and Francois Jean-Rudy, winners of a faux award for Least Original Song.

Yet, award winners have been constantly pressed for time whereas delivering their speeches, with the manufacturing taking part in more and more loud music to power them to wrap up. Only it appeared that the winners could not hear this musical cue.

For years, Hollywood has been suffering from considerations about its variety and inclusion initiatives. The Golden Globes is simply the newest award present to be criticized for its lack of nonwhite nominees.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has labored to introduce main modifications to its voting and recruitment guidelines however nonetheless struggles to domesticate a extra various set of nominees.

In 2016, the group set a aim of doubling the variety of various members by 2020 following outrage over an absence of Oscar nominees who have been feminine or folks of shade. The Academy has made strides. It has added a historic variety of new members that symbolize minorities.

Still, final yr, solely two of the 20 actors and actresses nominated have been folks of shade and no feminine administrators have been nominated. Of the 9 movies nominated for finest image, solely the South Korean film “Parasite” featured a predominantly nonwhite solid and just one, “Little Women,” was centered round quite a few feminine characters.

The 2021 Oscar nominations are due out on March 15, so we must wait two weeks to see if the nominees are extra inclusive this yr.

If the Academy takes any cues from the Golden Globes, the significance of variety should definitely be one in every of them.

The HFPA was pummeled with criticism forward of Sunday’s ceremony and all through the broadcast from its hosts, presenters and honorees.

Jane Fonda, who accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award throughout the Golden Globes ceremony, used her speech to clarify how tales can change folks’s perceptions of various cultures and that Hollywood has been afraid of its personal story for too lengthy.

“There’s a story we have been afraid to see and hear about ourselves and this industry,” she mentioned. “The story about which voices we respect and elevate and which we tune out. A story of who is offered a seat at the table and who is kept out of the room where decisions are made. Let’s all of us, including all the groups that decide who gets hired and what gets made and who wins awards, let’s all of us make an effort to expand that tent.”

Despite nominations for Black actors and filmmakers being sparse, winners weren’t briefly provide. Kaluuya, John Boyega, Andra Day and the late Chadwick Boseman have been all honored for his or her work throughout Sunday’s ceremony.

Disclosure: Comcast is the mum or dad firm of NBCUniversal and CNBC. The 2021 Golden Globes aired on NBC.