Rihanna to perform at 2023 Oscars
The Academy will also bring back airing all 23 award categories live during the telecast.
Pop juggernaut Rihanna has been announced as the first musical performer at the 2023 Oscars, where she will perform her Black Panther: Wakanda Forever song Lift Me Up.
The song was nominated for the 2023 Academy Award for best original song alongside Lady Gaga’s Hold My Hand for Top Gun: Maverick, David Byrne and Mitski’s This Is A Life for Everything Everywhere All at Once, and others.
It’s Rihanna’s first Oscar nomination, and her second performance in a month, following her Super Bowl halftime performance, after a seven year live hiatus.
After demoting eight categories – original score, makeup and hairstyling, documentary short, film editing, production design, animated short, live-action short, and sound – to a presentation during the red carpet last year, the Oscars will bring back airing all 23 award categories live during the telecast.
And for the first time in the ceremony’s 95-year history, a “crisis team” has been introduced to manage any unexpected events, following last year’s infamous slap.
“We have a whole crisis team, something we’ve never had before, and many plans in place,” Academy chief executive Bill Kramer told Time. “We’ve run many scenarios. So it is our hope that we will be prepared for anything that we may not anticipate right now but that we’re planning for just in case it does happen.”
At the 2022 awards, Will Smith stormed the stage and planted a slap on comedian Chris Rock, after a joke Rock made at the expense of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who shaved her hair off following an alopecia diagnosis. Minutes later, Smith won the best actor gong for King Richard. He has been banned from attending the awards show for the next 10 years.
“Because of (the slap) last year, we’ve opened our minds to the many things that can happen at the Oscars,” Kramer said. “Let’s hope something doesn’t happen and we never have to use these, but we already have frameworks in place that we can modify.”
The 95th Academy Awards ceremony will air on Channel 7 on Monday, March 13.
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