It’s a boiling day in downtown Los Angeles; crowds are milling about outside the Dolby theatre where Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony is to be held, selfie-ing the giant Oscar statuettes.
And this is where the man with whom the buck stops is looking at the set, going through the top-secret opening number and busy with a thousand admin details. Academy CEO, Bill Kramer, increasingly renowned as one of the most important people in Hollywood, meets me for a pre-ceremony chat in a suite in the next-door Hollywood Loews Hotel. “It’s so nice that we’re not on camera!” he says. “Yeah, so happy. Let myself relax!”
He is approachable and diplomatic, revered for his fundraising wizardry at the Academy museum, where he was managing director of external development in 2012 before ascending to his current job at the Academy 10 years later. Kramer has a business degree and came to Columbia after his first substantial job working for the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York.
It was at a party in the 90s that this policy and financial strategist met the man who changed his life: Robert Redford. “He couldn’t believe how much I knew about movies!” says Kramer. “And he said he wanted to decrease reliance on corporate sponsorships and bring someone on board at Sundance to help generate philanthropic gifts from individuals. Would I be interested in doing that? I said: ‘Sign me up!’”
This can-do attitude is still evident in Kramer today. A few days out from showtime, he is, he says, “so incredibly excited. I’m an early riser, as my team will tell you, up at 4am. It’s a good moment to get my head together, to review our script. It’s a quiet moment where I can go through emails that have come in overnight.”
Kramer was raised in Maryland, “very far away from Hollywood”, he says, but in a family of movie buffs who “were cultural consumers, and went to the movies constantly”. For them, Oscars night was “like New Year’s Eve or the Super Bowl. You gathered. You celebrated.”
He speaks excitedly about the 1980 ceremony when Johnny Carson hosted and Kramer vs Kramer dominated – the young Bill thrilled by sharing not just a surname with the movie but a Christian name with the child at the heart of that drama.
“I was 11 and went to see that and All That Jazz,” he says. “Looking back on it, I was probably a little young to be watching those movies. But my parents understood my interest and encouraged it.”
So how is this celebration tradition going to work in the new era he is ushering in – switching from the regular TV telecast to global livestreaming on YouTube in two years’ time? Given the movie industry’s streaming concerns, isn’t this like handing over another institution to the online behemoth?
Kramer points that a huge number of people watch YouTube through their conventional TV screens anyway, the collective TV-watching experience will be enlarged by double-screening and the point in any case is YouTube’s colossal global reach.
He says: “When we thought about a distribution deal, we wanted to reach the largest global audience possible. YouTube provides that for us. We can reach 2.5 billion people around the world at one time.”
And how about AI? If there is a consensus in the industry that AI is a worry, shouldn’t the Academy be bringing in tougher eligibility restrictions against movies using AI?
But Kramer’s view is that there is no such consensus: “It’s evolving quickly, and it’s something we’re constantly monitoring. We’re an academy of 11,000 members and different disciplines feel differently about AI. Our visual effects branch feels very differently than our writers’ branch.
“We added language to our awards rules around AI. I’m paraphrasing, but it says AI is a tool. It neither helps nor harms your ability to be nominated for an Oscar. Of course, we hope this tool is used ethically. We only give Oscars out to humans, so there needs to be human authorship.”
And to protect the value of theatrical release, Kramer is quite clear that the Academy is standing firm on using eligibility requirements, in terms of the release window and the number of cities necessary to play.
But here is where I have to stand up for Timothée Chalamet, now reviled all over the world for his capriciously worded comments about the theatrical movie-going experience becoming a specialist taste like opera and ballet. I myself have heard a distinguished French movie director say exactly the same thing. Hasn’t Chalamet got a point?
Again, Kramer is diplomatically wary. “I think that the Academy is deeply committed to the theatrical experience,” he says, “and our work celebrates movies that have theatrical runs. We’re a big part of holding up the theatrical industry and that’s something that we will continue to do.”
His personal favourite moments of the ceremonies over which he’s so far presided are Ryan Gosling singing I’m Just Ken and last year’s opening number with the stars of Wicked. “We’re just thrilled that people still love this show and care about these awards,” he says.
We leave his suite together and Kramer turns to me. “Have you seen the design of our set? It’s stunning. You’ll see it Sunday. You’ll see it Sunday!” And he is gone.
