Steven Soderbergh on producing the Oscars: "My attitude coming in was, you have to surrender to the fact you’re just going to be a human piñata"

Los Angeles Times

Soderbergh and his fellow Oscar producers Jesse Collins and Stacey Sher -- all of whom are brand-new to Oscar-producing -- are feeling good about the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony in 12 days that is intended to leave viewers feeling like they're watching a movie. “My attitude coming in was, you have to surrender to the fact you’re just going to be a human piñata,” says Soderbergh. “And if you do surrender to that, you’re kind of free to do what you want. We don’t read the comments section, because that way lies madness.” Soderbergh adds: "People are working seven days a week, long hours. The good news is it feels like it’s coalescing. There are times in a project of this complexity when things feel like they’re flying apart. But that’s not our sensation right now. It’s been tricky. Everything we’re trying to do we’re trying to lead with a strong creative idea. We don’t want COVID being an excuse for anything in terms of the creativity of the show. It’s still got to be an entertaining show." Collins, meanwhile, promised an unprecedented ceremony for unprecedented times. "I think one of the biggest mistakes that you can make in a situation like this is to try to figure out how to do the same show in a COVID environment," he says. "If you just say, 'We’re going to do the exact same Oscars but just with no audience,' I think you will have missed an opportunity to try something different. When we all got together, I was really excited that we were all on that same page, and we came up with an organizing principle for the show that has not been seen before in terms of Oscars past." As for the anti-Zoom Oscars controversy, Soderbergh says: "For us, it was just frustrating to imagine this stunning set that David Rockwell is building at Union Station and then, for a high point, you cut to somebody sitting on their couch with a laptop in front of them. It’s the f*cking Oscars. It’s not a webinar. So we’re just trying to get people somewhere where we can really make it look great. We want everybody to participate. It is our desire to hook up the people who can’t come to Los Angeles through satellites and not through Zoom." Sher adds: "We were between a rock and a hard place, and there were things we could say and things we couldn’t, because we didn’t have all the information. It’s completely fluid. As the doctors like to say, we may be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us. So we erred on the side of not giving all the information until we had real information, and people didn’t respond too well to that. But that’s the situation we’re in — hence Steven’s human piñata."