A Confusing, Experimental Oscars

The filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has always liked to veer left when you expect him to go right. He followed his own Academy Award win—in 2001, a year when he was a double nominee for directing, by the way—by making cerebral indies. He treated “retirement” as a euphemism for making television. He turned a movie about male strippers into an intimate character study. Soderbergh, in other words, delights in rejecting the conventional.

So it was a surprise when he announced he’d co-produce the 2021 Oscars, the 93rd entry of an extremely long-running, extremely conventional annual ode to the film industry. Talk about low stakes for one of the most dexterous filmmakers in Hollywood.

But in true Soderberghian form,.” There’d be no protagonist, but an ensemble cast of A-listers would perform as themselves, , and masks would play “a very important role in the story,” Soderbergh . It’d be called—drumroll, please—.