Academy Awards will start 30 minutes earlier in 2018
The upcoming 90th Academy Awards ceremony will begin a half-hour earlier than usual, ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences jointly announced today.
The ceremony now will be at 3 p.m. when it airs live Sunday, March 4, from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Additionally, the 90-minute Oscars pre-show will begin at 1:30 p.m.
A one-minute promotional video released with the announcement displays quick shots from movies perhaps more populist than they are potential major-award winners, such as “Daddy’s Home 2,” “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” “The Fate of the Furious” and “Transformers: The Last Knight,” as well as five superhero movies. Other snippets include “American Made,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Dunkirk,” “Get Out,” “It,” “Last Flag Flying,” “Molly’s Game,” “Phantom Thread,” “The Post,” “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” “War for the Planet of the Apes” and “Baby Driver,” in which Jamie Foxx tells some criminal confederates, “That’s Oscar stuff right there!”
Poking fun at itself, the Academy also featured shots of the most recent awards ceremony, including the infamous flub in which presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty erroneously announced “La La Land” as Best Picture, quickly rectified to “Moonlight.” Throughout, an energetic female singer delivers a jingle with lyrics like “We do it better / We do it better / … We got platinum, we got gold / Our name in the envelope / Boom boom with a cherry on the top / … Whatever they do, we do it better / ….”
As announced in May, Jimmy Kimmel will return as host for a second consecutive year.