Steven Soderbergh Will Produce the 2021 Oscars

The Oscars will take place later than usual next year; late April instead of the typical late February or early March. We don’t know what the show will look like, or whether it will be in the Oscars’ normal home of the Dolby Theatre, or whether there will be attendees in person or if it will be done mostly remotely, the way the Emmys held their show earlier in the fall. We do know who’s producing the show, though, and it includes a surprising and interesting name.

According to an official press release from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, the trio of “Emmy®-nominated producer Jesse Collins, Oscar®-nominated producer Stacey Sher, and Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh will produce the 93rd Oscars®.” It’s the first time any of the trio have helped produce the annual awards show. (Also, you have to go read the full press release on the official Oscars website just to look at the picture of Soderbergh. It’s incredible.)

Here was Collins, Sher, and Soderbergh’s joint statement on the news:

We're thrilled and terrified in equal measure. Because of the extraordinary situation we're all in, there’s an opportunity to focus on the movies and the people who make them in a new way, and we hope to create a show that really FEELS like the movies we all love.

Soderbergh is among the more formally adventurous filmmakers working today. Even if you said “The Oscars are going to feel like a Soderbergh movie” there are at least three or four different kinds of Soderbergh movies that could describe. Will it be a glossy comic thriller? A low-fi zero-budget indie? A taut procedural? Then again, given that the awards will be celebrating the best movies of 2020, maybe the Soderbergh movie the Oscars will most look like is inevitably Contagion. The 2021 Academy Awards will air on Sunday, April 25 on ABC.

Gallery — Every Oscar Best Picture Winner in History: