As the oldest and most legendary entertainment awards show, the Oscars always cast a shadow, but this year that shadow may make it harder for the Grammys to get momentum going.
The Academy Awards will air Sunday, March 27, on ABC — just one week before the Grammys air on CBS. It’s the first time the two shows have aired so close together since the Grammys became a live telecast in 1971.
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Because the Oscars are a national obsession – at least in entertainment-focused households – it may be hard for the Grammys to make a serious bid for attention until the Oscars are over. And day-after Oscar recaps in print and digital media and on TV entertainment programs will likely encroach even on that scant seven days between the two shows.
If the Grammys had been able to keep their original airdate of Jan. 31, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But the Omicron variant was running rampant in the Los Angeles area at the time, forcing a postponement.
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And so here we are, with the Recording Academy and CBS hoping audiences can sit through two three-hour-plus, EGOT-level shows just one week apart.
The two shows have usually aired about a month apart, but the gap shrunk in 2005, as the Oscars moved up their show date so they wouldn’t air long after rival shows (the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, etc.) often made the eventual Oscar winners entirely predictable.
Twelve times between 2005 and 2020, the Grammys and the Oscars aired just two weeks apart, with the Grammys always going first in those years. The closest the two shows have come to each other before this year was in 2016, when they aired 13 days apart (due to the Grammys falling on a Monday that year.)
But even in those years, with the Grammys going first, they were out of the way before serious attention turned to the Oscars. Here, the more attention-grabbing show, the Oscars, will go first. That could make it hard for updates about the Grammy telecast to break through.
Billie Eilish, FINNEAS and Questlove are nominees at both the Oscars and the Grammys this year, so they could pick up multiple EGOT-level awards in the space of seven days.
Eilish and Finneas are Oscar-nominated for best original song for “No Time to Die” (which won a Grammy at the 2021 show). They’re Grammy-nominated for record, album and song of the year, among other awards, for Eilish’s Happier Than Ever and its title track.
Questlove and his production partners David Dinerstein, Robert Fyvolent and Joseph Patel are Oscar-nominated for best documentary feature for the widely-admired documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). They’re Grammy-nominated for best music film for the same work (though the Grammys shortened the title to Summer of Soul).