It’s Oct. 1. Give it a week. You can check the headlines and message boards for online gossip.
If the film awards and festival circuit hasn’t run smack into a Covid cluster by then, we can all breathe easier. Hollywood will have made it past the pandemic.
Unintentionally—because, let’s face it, show business has never been peopled by Florence Nightingales and Mother Teresas—the intrepid souls who chase film awards around the globe have turned the last month into a public health laboratory.
Singapore is growing rapidly. Israel is making breakthroughs. Harvard Business School is turning its back on the remote for heavily vaccinated students. HBO has This City is OursOn a Covid-pause. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh passes positive. The debate rages about boosters, waning immunity and the ongoing on-air infection by those who host. The View.
But the promotional side of Hollywood—as distinct from the production side, which has its own elaborate Covid protocols—dove headlong into the modified normalcy of a real-time, in-person, touchy-feely movie season. Plus masks.
It was a bravura performance.
Telluride was successful (minus the usual film Academy contingent that sat out). ‘an excess of caution’). Venice was, according to all reports, clunky, but functional. Toronto only reported one Covid case during its festival. The verdict is still out on late-month events—the New York festival, a series of Academy Museum parties a blow-out No Time To Die premiere at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
But another few days should tell whether nearly uniform precautions—vaccination, half-capacity in theaters, testing in advance—actually beat the virus. (And this would be despite elastic standards and lax enforcement at certain events.
It will be an extraordinary achievement if it is. It is a rare business that is mobile and tactile. The circuit’s stars, publicists as well as filmmakers, executives, and media professionals spend a lot time in tight-knit planes and airport lounges. They wait in long lines. They can sit for hours in darkened auditoriums. They try to not hug this year at least. However, cocktails, dinners, and smiling group photos are all part of the ritual. It takes more than just being a winner, but also intimacy with all those involved to win an Oscar.
As we learned from last season’s little-watched awards programs, Zoom doesn’t cut it. Voters want to mix. Viewers want to believe they have been invited to the party.
These Hollywood people had a great time, partying all month with the Emmys and Tonys.
It is a great experiment, a test of Pfizer, Moderna, and a Johnson & Johnson vaccine that seems to have let Chris Rock down. There were a few false positives. The View won’t mean much if we can clear the first week of October without a Hollywood surge.
I hope we do. The end is in sight if you are able to keep the virus away with shots, testing, and a velvet rope.