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76th Oscars Schedule Announced

© Jason O'Brien

Can it be time to already start talking about the 76th Annual Academy Awards? We just started the summer movies! But yes indeed, with the time table moved up a month for next year's Oscars, the Academy already went ahead and released the official voting schedule and event schedule for the next Academy Awards, and has already begun discussing various rule changes, etc.

First up, let's take a look at that official schedule of events for the next Academy Awards film season:

August 1, 2003: Scientific and Technical Award entry deadline.

September 2, 2003: Documentary categories entry deadline.

October 1, 2003: Foreign Language Film and Short Films categories entry deadline.

November 3, 2003: Animated Feature film category entry deadline.

December 1, 2003: Deadline for receipt of official screen credit forms to qualify feature films for award consideration. Music categories submission deadline.

December 31, 2003: Awards year ends at midnight.

January 2, 2004: Nominations ballots mailed.

January 17, 2004: Nominations polls close 5 p.m. PST.

January 27, 2004: Nominations announced 5:30 a.m. PST, Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

February 4, 2004: Final ballots mailed.

February 9, 2004: Nominees Luncheon, Beverly Hilton Hotel.

February 14, 2004: Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation, 6 p.m. PST, location to be determined.

February 24, 2004: Final polls close 5 p.m. PST.

February 29, 2004: 76th Annual Academy Awards Presentation from the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland® will be televised live by the ABC Television Network beginning at 5:30 p.m. (PST), with a half-hour arrivals program preceding the presentation ceremony

It should be very interesting to see how the revised schedule affects the entire film awards season, and I'm excited to see how the change ends up working. I think the best thing is that the film awards season will come to a conclusion much closer to the film year that it is honoring. So we'll see how this latest experiment ends up working.

The Academy is also expressing its concern again this year over the intense pre-Oscar promotional campaigns, which seem to get bigger and worse every year. Academy President Frank Piersen stated last week that the Academy will be putting together tighter guidelines in the next couple of months concerning promotions of Oscar-eligible films. In fact, the Academy formed a new committee consisting of about 10 members of the Board of Governors to tackle the task of coming up with the guidelines to be enforced for the next Oscar season.

Piersen said "If the Oscar begins to be regarded as something that can be bought and sold, it loses whatever value it has. Many people in the industry feel that the campaigns for the Oscars have gotten so strident and so out of hand that we really should try to do something about it to modulate the level of competition."