Oscars 2021: The Best Picture/Best Actor Switch Was This Year’s Strangest Innovation

In the weeks leading up to the 93rd Academy Awards, much was made about the way the pandemic-era ceremony was going to innovate on the traditional awards-show format. And with a producing team that included Steven Soderbergh, who won the Best Director in 2001 for Traffic, it seemed fair to be cautiously optimistic that the 2021 Oscars would finally figure out how to make a pandemic-era awards show work. Yet, while there were a number of changes made to the typical Oscar broadcast format, the most noteworthy had nothing to do with COVID-19 protocols. Producers rearranged the order of the final three categories of the night, handing out the award for Best Picture ahead of those for Best Actress and Actor — a move that ultimately fell flat, causing the show to end with a whimper instead of the bang that was surely hoped for.

Producers’ decision this year to place Best Actress and especially Best Actor last seemed to be based on a very specific expectation: Chadwick Boseman’s anticipated posthumous win for Best Actor for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Boseman seemed as close to a sure thing as there was going into the evening, not only because of the wins he’d scored at other awards shows but because he was the sentimental favorite. Boseman’s death in August from colon cancer at the age of 43 was a tragedy that was deeply felt by both the film industry and the actor’s fans alike. This year’s Oscars producers likely believed that a Best Actor triumph for Boseman would be a poignant way to conclude the show.

And maybe it would have been had it happened. Instead, in the biggest surprise of the night, Anthony Hopkins took home the award for The Father, and because he wasn’t in attendance — a sign that even he didn’t think he would win — presenter Joaquin Phoenix was saddled with accepting the trophy on his behalf, ending the ceremony with an abrupt thud.

The outcome speaks to the unpredictable nature of the Oscars and the trouble with assuming anything. But perhaps more importantly, it speaks to the problem of trying to exploit a sentimental moment. While a Boseman win surely would have been memorable and moving, placing it last was a strategic gamble by the producers that they could save the most emotionally uplifting and wistful moment of the night for last. It’s hard to imagine the producers would have decided on this logic-defying reordering of the categories if Boseman’s posthumous win wasn’t a strong possibility.

Oscar producers often discuss shaking up the familiar awards-show format, and one of the things they frequently try is rearranging the order of categories. Rarely has this made the impact producers seem to believe it could, but this year, it actually took away something from the ceremony. Between the Boseman snub and Hopkins’ absence, the show ended on the equivalent of a needle scratching on a record. On the other hand, while Nomadland‘s win for Best Picture wasn’t a surprise, at least there were several people there to accept the award and celebrate the win, something that will always be the case for Best Picture. Taken together, the results of this change send a clear message to future Academy Award ceremony producers: the show should always end with Best Picture.

Cynthia Vinney is a Film and TV Features editor and writer who also interviews talent and reviews movies and TV shows for CBR. She has degrees (some might say too many) in film and media psychology. She’s also co-authored the books Mad Men Unzipped and Finding Truth in Fiction, about audience’s positive responses to fictional stories.