91st Academy Awards

The 91st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 2018, and took place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. The ceremony was held on February 24, 2019. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonly referred to as Oscars) in 24 categories. The ceremony was televised in the United States by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), produced by Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss, with Weiss also serving as director. It was the first ceremony in three decades, since the 61st Academy Awards in 1989, to be conducted with no host.

In related events, the Academy held its 10th Annual Governors Awards ceremony at the Grand Ballroom of the Hollywood and Highland Center on November 18, 2018. The Academy Scientific and Technical Awards were presented by host actor David Oyelowo on February 9, 2019, in a ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Green Book won three awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali's portrayal of Don Shirley, and Bohemian Rhapsody led the ceremony with four awards, including Best Actor for Rami Malek's portrayal of Freddie Mercury. Roma and Black Panther also received three awards apiece, with the former winning Best Director for Alfonso Cuarón and becoming the first Mexican submission to win Best Foreign Language Film. Olivia Colman was awarded Best Actress for portraying Anne, Queen of Great Britain in The Favourite. With a U.S. viewership of 29.6 million, it marked a 12% increase over the 2018 ceremony.

Winners and nominees


The nominees for the 91st Academy Awards were announced on January 22, 2019, at 5:20 a.m. PST (13:20 UTC), at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, by actors Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross.

Awards
Winners are listed first, highlighted in boldface, and indicated with a double dagger (‡).

Governors Awards
The Academy held its 10th annual Governors Awards ceremony on November 18, 2018, where the following awards were presented:

Academy Honorary Awards

 * Cicely Tyson – American actress
 * Lalo Schifrin – Argentine-American composer
 * Marvin Levy – American publicist

Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award

 * Kathleen Kennedy – American producer
 * Frank Marshall – American producer

Presenters and performers
The following individuals, listed in order of appearance, presented awards or performed musical performances.

Ceremony information
Due to the last two ceremonies' mixed receptions and declining ratings (with the previous ceremony being the least viewed in the history of the Academy Awards), producers Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd declined to helm the 2019 awards, and were replaced by Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss.

In August 2018, the Academy announced plans to add a new category honoring achievement in "Popular Film". The proposal was met with wide criticism, as the award's implied focus on blockbuster films was considered to be demeaning towards artistic films and other non-mainstream pictures (with the award's title suggesting that such films were not "popular"), that it could diminish the chance for critically successful mainstream films to also be nominated for Best Picture (such as, in particular, Black Panther, although the Academy stated that a single film could be nominated in both categories), and for being a ploy to boost ratings. The Academy announced the following month that it would postpone the new category in order to seek additional input. Academy president John Bailey admitted that the proposed category was intended to help improve viewership, and noted that the concept of a separate award for commercial film dates back to the 1st Academy Awards (which had separate categories for "Outstanding Picture" and "Best Unique and Artistic Picture").

In January 2019, it was reported that as part of an effort to shorten the ceremony, only two of the nominees for Best Original Song ("All the Stars" and "Shallow") would be performed live. After a negative reaction from audiences and industry musicians, including Lin-Manuel Miranda and members of the music branch, the Academy backtracked and announced that all five songs would be performed (although Variety later reported that "All the Stars" would not be performed due to "logistics and timing" issues with the song's performers).

The following month, the Academy announced that the presentation of the awards for Best Cinematography, Best Live Action Short Film, Best Film Editing, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling—would occur during commercial breaks. They said that these presentations would be streamed so viewers could watch them live online, and that the winners' acceptance speeches would be replayed later in the broadcast. The decision received extensive backlash from audiences, and from filmmakers including Guillermo del Toro, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Damien Chazelle, Spike Lee, Joe Dante and Alfonso Cuarón (the latter of whom was nominated and won in one of the aforementioned categories). Four days later, the Academy reversed the decision and announced that all 24 categories would be presented live.

ABC scheduled a "sneak peak" of its new dramedy Whiskey Cavalier after the ceremony and late local news, ahead of its premiere the following Wednesday.

Box office performance of Best Picture nominees
At the time of the nominations announcement on January 22, 2019, the combined North American box office gross of seven of the eight Best Picture nominees was $1.261 billion, the highest total for Best Picture nominees since the 83rd Academy Awards in 2011. The average per-film gross was $157 million, although only three films (Black Panther, A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody) had actually made over $50 million before the announcement.

Thirty-two nominations went to twelve of the year's fifty top-grossing movies. Of those, only seven films—Black Panther (1st), Incredibles 2 (3rd), Bohemian Rhapsody (12th), A Star Is Born (13th), Ralph Breaks the Internet (14th), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (18th) and Green Book (46th)—were nominated for Best Picture, Best Animated Feature or any of the directing, acting or screenwriting awards. The other top 50 box-office hits that earned nominations were Avengers: Infinity War (2nd), Solo: A Star Wars Story (10th), A Quiet Place (15th), Mary Poppins Returns (19th), Ready Player One (24th), and Christopher Robin (34th).

Host selection
The 90th Academy Awards in 2018 had the lowest Nielsen ratings of all time, with less than half of the 57.25 million viewers of the 70th in 1998. In October 2018, the Academy asked Dwayne Johnson to host the 91st ceremony, believing that the popularity of Hollywood's highest-paid actor would help increase the audience. Johnson immediately began planning what he described as an "audience first" show, but could not change his schedule of filming Hobbs & Shaw and a Jumanji sequel.

After considering using one host for each of the three hours, on December 4, 2018, the Academy announced that Kevin Hart would host the ceremony. Hart expressed that it was truly an honor and a thrill to be asked to host the Academy Awards. A controversy emerged when past jokes and comments made by Hart were found to contain anti-gay slurs and language; Hart withdrew from hosting duties on December 6, saying he did not want to be a "distraction" to the ceremony. Previous Oscar hosts such as Seth MacFarlane, Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, Chris Rock, and Jimmy Kimmel expressed no interest in hosting the show.

On January 9, 2019, it was reported that the Academy planned to hold the ceremony without a host, and instead have selected presenters introduce segments and awards. No replacement host was announced, and it became the first ceremony without a designated host since the 61st Academy Awards in 1989.

Ratings and reception
Media publications responded more positively to the show than those in recent years, with many praising the no-host approach. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the show holds an approval rating of 70% based on 40 critics, and summarized, "Strong musical performances, a steady, somewhat sluggish pace, and a few genuinely surprising moments helped the hostless 91st Oscars create an entertainingly efficient -- if not entirely satisfying -- ceremony."

The American telecast drew 29.6 million U.S. viewers, a 12% increase in viewership over the 2018 ceremony (which were the lowest-rated Academy Awards to date). The show also drew a 7.7 rating for the 18–49 demographic.

In Memoriam
The annual In Memoriam segment was introduced by the President of the Academy John Bailey with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the notes of the "Leaving Home" theme from Superman by John Williams.

The segment paid tribute to the following 50 artists:


 * Susan Anspach – actress
 * Ermanno Olmi – director, writer
 * Richard Greenberg – title designer, visual effects
 * John N. Carter – film editor
 * John Morris – composer
 * Bernardo Bertolucci – director, writer
 * Michel Legrand – composer
 * Margot Kidder – actress
 * Alixe Gordin – casting director
 * Neil Simon – writer
 * Richard H. Kline – cinematographer
 * Vittorio Taviani – director, writer
 * Elizabeth Sung – actress
 * Françoise Bonnot – film editor
 * Burt Reynolds – actor, director
 * Kitty O'Neil – stunt performer
 * Pablo Ferro – title designer, graphic artist
 * Samuel Hadida – producer, distributor, executive
 * Raymond Chow – producer, executive
 * Pierre Rissient – festival selector, publicist, distributor, producer
 * Anne V. Coates – film editor
 * Paul Bloch – publicist
 * Shinobu Hashimoto – writer
 * Richard Marks – film editor
 * Stéphane Audran – actress
 * Robby Müller – cinematographer
 * Craig Zadan – producer
 * Barbara Harris – actress
 * Claude Lanzmann – documentarian, director
 * Martin Bregman – producer, manager
 * Nelson Pereira dos Santos – director
 * Will Vinton – animator
 * Miloš Forman – director
 * Witold Sobociński – cinematographer
 * Daniel C. Striepeke – make-up artist
 * Penny Marshall – director, producer, actress
 * Isao Takahata – animation director
 * Stephen Vaughan – still photographer
 * Stan Lee – comic book writer, executive producer
 * William Goldman – writer
 * John M. Dwyer – set decorator
 * Tab Hunter – actor
 * Yvonne Blake – costume designer
 * Nicolas Roeg – director, cinematographer
 * James Karen – actor
 * Gregg Rudloff – sound mixer
 * Gloria Katz – writer, producer
 * Bruno Ganz – actor
 * Audrey Wells – writer, director
 * Albert Finney – actor