Now that Anora beat early-season front-runner Emilia Pérez for Best Picture, a new Oscars villain has emerged, and its name is Hulu. This year, for the first time, the Academy Awards streamed live on Hulu for all subscribers, not just for those with the Hulu + Live TV plan. So many, many, many viewers were disappointed when, at approximately 10:32 p.m. ET, the Oscars live feed abruptly cut out, with no way to keep watching the events unfolding on the ABC broadcast. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time: Mikey Madison was just announced as the winner of the Oscar for Best Actress for her title role in Anora, beating category front-runner Demi Moore. Just as she got out of her chair and made her way through the aisle, the feed grayed out, with a message stating that the video feed was no longer available. Back on the Hulu homepage, the Oscars had disappeared as an option to even click on. This continued through to the end of the broadcast, so Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal’s presentation of Best Picture to Anora, as well as the acceptance speech and host Conan O’Brien’s closing remarks, weren’t viewable to many. Writing now, as of 11:11 p.m. ET (okay, portentous …) the 97th annual Academy Awards stream still isn’t available for playback.
This glitch followed one that occurred toward the beginning of the broadcast, when many viewers were booted out after the red-carpet livestream or found themselves unable to log in to Hulu to watch the awards show. According to Deadline, Hulu resolved the “technical issue with a login system” and told viewers they’d be able to log back in after rebooting their devices. The ABC broadcast continued to stream normally on ABC.com (both Hulu and ABC are under the Disney umbrella).
On Twitter, thousands of viewers voiced their troubles with the streaming service. Many humorously drew connections between Sean Baker’s acceptance speech for Best Director (also for Anora), in which he advocated for distributors to prioritize theatrical runs over going straight to streaming, and Hulu seemingly “pulling the plug.”
Vulture reached out to Hulu for comment about the outage. “This evening, we experienced technical and live stream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers,” the streamer said in a statement. “We apologize for the experience and will make a full replay of the event available as soon as possible.”
This post has been updated to include a statement from Hulu.