Oscars 2019: winners, nominations, and biggest moments

The 2019 Academy Awards will take place on Sunday, February 24, and will air live on ABC at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific. The awards show is searching for a new host after Kevin Hart stepped down — just two days after he was announced for the gig — amid controversy over homophobic jokes he’d made in the past.

The 2019 Oscar nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 22. They may yield a Best Picture race that includes several big, crowd-pleasing hits — and possibly the first superhero movie ever nominated in the category. The year’s frontrunners include big hits like A Star Is Born and Black Panther as well as arthouse fare like The Favourite and If Beale Street Could Talk. It could also be the year that Netflix earns its first Best Picture nomination, for the critical favorite Roma.

The Academy Awards — known to most people as the “Oscars,” for the nickname of the statuette given to winners — are awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 24 categories designed to recognize the year’s technical and artistic achievements. The Academy is an invitation-only organization made up of members who have worked in the film industry, and its members vote on both the nominees and the eventual winners. In the recent past, the organization has been criticized for its overwhelming lack of gender and racial diversity; in response, it has been inviting more diverse groups of film professionals, including 928 people in 2018, to join its ranks.

This fall, the Academy killed its plans to launch a controversial Oscar for achievement in “Popular Film” — at least for the 2018 awards cycle. The category was announced in early August, largely out of nowhere, but prompted extensive criticism from film writers and Oscar watchers.

Source: vox.com