Cate Blanchett went through the entire awards-season rigamarole in 2022 and 2023 with Tár. I was really rooting for her at the 2023 Oscars, but she lost to Michelle Yeoh. I was happy with Yeoh’s win, although I think people will look back on Tár and wonder how the hell Cate lost to anyone that season. In any case, Cate has eight Oscar nominations and two wins. She has eight BAFTA noms and four wins. Twelve Golden Globe noms and four wins. You get the idea – Cate has been to a lot of awards shows for many, many years, starting in the 1990s. She knows how to work an awards season, she knows how to walk a red carpet, and she knows that she’s really f–king tired of all of it, especially the televised awards shows. So she has an idea: stop televising the shows??? It will never happen, but hear her out:

Cate Blanchett would prefer awards shows not to be aired on television. The two-time Oscar-winning actress made a recent appearance on the Las Culturistas With Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang podcast, where she suggested that the Oscars should “go back to the day when it wasn’t televised.”

The conversation started when Blanchett noted that there are “so few spaces that you can go now, where you are private,” without phones and the risk of someone recording you. “That’s what I loved about the late ’80s [was] going to all of the dance parties in Sydney for Mardi Gras. People were just there. They were so present, you know, they were just together, collectively, having a great time. It was non-aggressive. No one was being recorded. No one cared what anyone did.”

Hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang proceeded to note how privacy is even more difficult in the era of TikTok, especially with the viral trend of lip readers analyzing celebrity moments during televised awards shows and other events.

“But now it feels like that chasm between that kind of event, that ideal, is widening from the thing that’s very common now at, like, an awards show where you’ve got lip readers, you’re being photographed,” Yang said before a confused Blanchett interjected, “Lip readers?”

The co-hosts explained the trend, which sees TikTokers trying to guess what celebrities are saying to each other at awards shows. “And it looks like it could be exactly what they’re saying, in a way that’s a little bit odd,” Rogers said. Yang added that the lip-reading trend makes Hollywood events feel more “treacherous,” to which the Black Bag actress agreed.

“I mean, I say, I know it’s blasphemy, go back to the day when it wasn’t televised,” Blanchett suggested. “Bring that back and just have a great party where people can just let go. I mean the industry is so scattered and at such a point…which I think potentially could be exciting or could really be depressing, but it’s at a pivot point, and so we need to gather together and celebrate what it is that we do, without it having to have any public-facing.”

She continued, “I mean, the fashion is great, and all of that stuff. We’ll find out in the end who won or who didn’t win. But it would be so nice that that happened behind closed doors. [It would be] absolutely a very different evening.”

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

I’ve been watching awards shows for so long, I remember a time when actors were regularly drunk off their asses at the Golden Globes, to the point where they would give hilarious, off-the-cuff sh-thoused acceptance speeches. I remember Jack Nicholson winning a Globe, stumbling up to the microphone and telling a long-winded story about how alcohol-infused the Globes USED TO BE. While I don’t think Cate’s suggestion will be considered seriously, I would like to see a conversation about the need to shake up the awards-show format in general. There are too many “shows” and Cate’s right, a couple of them could stand to be untelevised and ALL of them could be shorter.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.