“In a world filled with award shows, what if an award show was actually a movie?†It is a sentence that will break your brain. It is a sentence too dumb to understand, like a parody commercial from a lost episode of All That. It is the voiceover for the “trailer†to the 93rd Academy Awards, airing on Sunday, April 25 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. This trailer hypes this year’s Oscars presenters, including Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Bong Joon Ho, Don Cheadle, Bryan Cranston, Laura Dern, Harrison Ford, Regina King, Marlee Matlin, Rita Moreno, Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Reese Witherspoon, Renée Zellweger and Zendaya.
“In keeping with our awards-show-as-a-movie approach, we’ve assembled a truly stellar cast of stars,†said producers Jesse Collins, Stacey Sher and Steven Soderbergh in a statement. “There’s so much wattage here, sunglasses may be required.†We can’t tell if that’s a reference to the good old days of Jack Nicholson wearing sunglasses indoors in the front row of the ceremony, or if it’s just the first possible Hollywood lingo cliche they thought of. Soderbergh previously said that these host-less Oscars will “feel like a film,†and that every “nominee, every person that gives an award, will feel like characters in a film,†with the awards being part of some sort of over-arching plotline that connects everyone. The trailer even calls the presenters a “cast.†It sounds so crazy it just might work.