BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Final preparations are underway for the 98th Academy Awards, scheduled for Sunday, March 15, 2026, with the organization’s leadership describing a show built to serve both the room inside the ceremony and viewers watching at home.
In a recent interview, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Lynette Howell Taylor and Academy CEO Bill Kramer framed this year’s telecast as a deliberate attempt to keep the Oscars warm in tone, disciplined in pacing, and legible to audiences consuming the event across platforms. The show will again be hosted by Conan O’Brien, returning after last year’s ceremony.
The immediate stakes are familiar-ratings, cultural reach, sponsor value, and the Academy’s mandate to represent a fast-changing global film business. But the longer-horizon stakes are structural: Kramer confirmed the Oscars’ direction beyond traditional broadcast, saying the ceremony will move to YouTube in 2029, as part of a broader year-round initiative to create a cinema-focused presence on the platform that extends to Academy programming beyond the Oscars. That strategy sits alongside the Academy’s broader governance role as the body that oversees the Oscars under its own bylaws and the formal rules of the Academy Awards, which function as a de facto regulatory framework for how the industry’s highest-profile prizes are awarded.
Leadership perspective: a new president managing an old institution’s modern pressures
Taylor arrives at the job with experience across multiple points of the Academy’s ecosystem. She has been inside the Oscars as a nominee-recognized in 2019 for “A Star is Born”-and has also helped build the show itself, serving as a producer of the broadcast in 2020. She has sat on the Academy’s board of governors and, for the past three years, has served as awards chair, working closely with committees that interpret and apply the formal Academy Awards rules and eligibility standards that govern everything from campaign conduct to category definitions.
That mix of creative and governance experience informs how Taylor describes the annual problem the Oscars must solve: honoring the achievements of the people in the room while producing an entertainment program with enough narrative clarity to hold a mass audience.
“Every year is different,” Taylor said. “Every season is different. Every set of movies is different. And so, the show is always different every year.”
Kramer, for his part, described the balancing act as a design challenge that has been actively tuned in recent seasons, aligning the show’s tone and pacing with the Academy’s long-term strategy for membership, diversity, and international reach.
“I think we, in the past couple of years, have really hit that balance right,” Kramer said.
For the Academy, those comments are not simply artistic positioning. The telecast is also a key institutional asset: a high-visibility annual event that anchors relationships with partners, supports the organization’s public mission, and shapes how the Academy is perceived by filmmakers, studios, and audiences. It is also the most public expression of internal decisions that play out quietly all year on the Academy’s committees and in its boardroom.
Audience growth: incremental gains and the platform question
The Oscars’ recent audience trajectory is central to how the Academy is selling the show internally and externally. The telecast’s ratings have risen since collapsing to an all-time low in 2021 during the pandemic, restoring some-but not all-of the reach the show once commanded as a near-universal live TV event.
The Academy points to a modest but meaningful year-over-year increase:
- 2024: 19.5 million viewers
- 2025: 19.7 million viewers
The organization also highlighted a more strategic metric: a lift among viewers ages 18 to 49, attributed to younger audiences watching on mobile devices and laptops. The format shift to live streaming was part of that story. The 2025 ceremony was the first time the Oscars were available to stream live on Hulu, broadening access beyond the linear ABC broadcast and testing how far the Academy can push its rights partners toward a more flexible distribution model.
Kramer also pointed to outreach efforts aimed at audiences that consume entertainment coverage and celebrity access through internet-native formats, citing collaborations with popular internet personalities such as Amelia Dimoldenberg, while emphasizing that such partnerships must still feel “Academy appropriate.”
“Our audiences are growing,” Kramer said. “And young people are watching the show in ways that we’ve not seen before and that’s really great.”
For the wider entertainment economy, the Oscars’ platform strategy is not a cosmetic decision. Audience composition affects advertising demand, the valuation of sponsorship inventory, and downstream value for clips, performances, and speech moments that increasingly live as short-form digital media after the live event ends. It also shapes the Oscars’ leverage in negotiating distribution, exposure, and access with partners, who use the telecast as both a media buy and a soft power tool within the global film trade.
Earlier planning, tighter execution: treating the telecast like a large-scale production pipeline
Kramer and Taylor described an operational shift behind the scenes: planning earlier than in prior eras, with the goal of reducing last-minute scrambling once nominations lock and shortening the feedback loop between the Academy’s awards committees and the show’s producers.
“It gives us time to talk through so many things pre-nominations. So once the nominations happen, we can start focusing on what that means for the show,” Kramer said.
For a live broadcast that must integrate tributes, performances, presenter handoffs, acceptance speeches, and production resets, earlier planning is also a risk-control tool. It gives producers more time to test the order of awards, evaluate pacing, and coordinate the practical mechanics of transitions that are invisible when executed well and glaring when they break. It also allows standards-and-practices, legal, and security teams to map potential flashpoints-political speeches, labor tensions, or live-mic moments-before they play out on stage.
Taylor said the design approach for 2026 has been developed for months, spanning the set and the red carpet, and is intended to land with a different emotional temperature.
“They’ve done such beautiful work … and this year, they’ve just gone a whole step further with a different feel that’s very intimate and warm,” Taylor said. “It’s a bit of a departure.”
At the same time, leadership signaled that the production remains flexible enough to respond to events and cultural moments that emerge late in the season. Kramer noted the team’s willingness to adapt: “We’re open to pivoting, depending on what’s going on in the world,” he said, describing a broadcast architecture that aims to be highly scripted but not brittle.
Programming priorities: performances, tributes, and a new casting award
The Academy said this year’s telecast will include performances and tributes, alongside a special spotlight for its newest award for casting. Kramer said the category will be integrated as a meaningful on-show moment: “And casting’s going to get a gorgeous moment on the show,” he said.
The inclusion of a dedicated spotlight is a governance signal as much as a creative one. How the Academy presents categories on-air is an implicit statement about what labor is visible and valued in the industry. Giving casting a featured moment suggests an attempt to formalize recognition for a core part of production decision-making that studios and filmmakers already treat as essential to a film’s creative and commercial outcome, and to align the show’s priorities with the Academy’s own internal shift toward more inclusive representation of crafts and below-the-line work.
Taylor also pointed to the competitive strength of the top of the ballot, noting that “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” are the leading nominees and describing the slate as spanning commercial scale and more daring storytelling.
“It’s always about the movies and the movies this year? They’re all the things,” Taylor said, arguing that a strong field gives producers more raw material to work with when building narrative arcs across the night.
A “moving” In Memoriam, and the hard constraints of broadcast time
Kramer said the Academy is paying particular attention to the In Memoriam segment this year, after what leadership described as a painful year of losses across the film world. The list of deaths noted includes Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Rob Reiner, Catherine O’Hara, Robert Duvall, Val Kilmer, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, James Van Der Beek and Claudia Cardinale.
The In Memoriam segment has become one of the show’s most scrutinized institutional moments-both for who is included in the broadcast edit and for how the Academy frames legacy. Kramer acknowledged the heightened attention while keeping specifics under wraps, calling it “very, very moving.” Internally, the segment functions almost like a public ledger of remembrance decisions that have already played out in private among branches, families, and estates.
The Academy said a longer version of the In Memoriam will be available online, a practice that reflects a practical reality of the telecast: even a show designed around recognition must still operate within a fixed runtime and commercial grid.
Kramer and Taylor also referenced last year’s on-stage tribute by Morgan Freeman honoring Gene Hackman, who had been found dead just days earlier, along with others-an example of how quickly the show can be asked to absorb real-time grief and collective memory.
This year, organizers also addressed, without confirming, speculation that Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal could appear together for a tribute connected to Reiner. Leadership said they were neither confirming nor denying that reunion, using the persistent rumor to underscore the show’s appetite for moments that connect contemporary viewers with the Academy’s own canon.
Runtime discipline: the 3.5-hour target and a historic benchmark
The Oscars’ leaders said they are targeting a runtime of three-and-a-half hours or less, despite the complexity that comes with adding categories and building expanded moments for specific awards.
The benchmark they cited for what the Academy wants to avoid is the longest Oscars telecast on record: the 74th ceremony in 2002, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, which ran four hours and 23 minutes.
For the entertainment business, runtime is not merely a viewer-experience preference. It influences affiliate programming, ad inventory, and the likelihood that viewers-especially younger and more mobile audiences-stay through later categories. It also feeds into negotiations with domestic and international broadcasters, who must protect their own schedules and regulatory obligations around advertising loads and content windows.
Taylor described awards shows as films in their own right: some long runtimes feel laborious, while others can move quickly if the structure holds.
“We really focus on making the show as dynamic and emotionally connecting as possible and really celebrating movies in a way that audiences want to stay tuned for,” Taylor said.
Beyond the telecast: the Academy’s pivot to YouTube and institutional reach
The Academy’s most consequential long-range disclosure in the interview was Kramer’s statement that the Oscars will move from traditional broadcast television to YouTube in 2029, positioning the transition as part of a broader global strategy rather than a single-night distribution change.
“YouTube signals our desire to be a more global organization that reaches more audiences around the world,” Kramer said.
Kramer described the relationship as extending beyond the ceremony itself, saying the Oscars are “one part of a year-round deal” intended to build a cinema hub on YouTube that would include the Academy’s SciTech Awards and museum programming. He also said Google Arts and Culture will digitize components of the Academy’s collection and make them available to the public, effectively turning the Academy’s archives and museum holdings into a more accessible public resource.
Planning is also underway for a nearer milestone: the 100th Oscars in 2028, a centennial event that will test the institution’s ability to honor its own history while signaling where it expects the medium-and the business around it-to go next.
For the entertainment industry, the shift Kramer outlined signals an institutional bet that the Oscars’ future audience-especially internationally-will be reached more effectively through platform distribution than through legacy broadcast, and that the Academy’s broader portfolio of programming can be packaged as continuous cultural output rather than a single annual peak. It also raises longer-term questions about how future partnerships will balance commercial control, content moderation standards, and global access on a privately owned platform.
For now, the Academy says its immediate focus is execution: final preparations continue for the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 15, 2026.
