Tom Fleischman Resigns From Academy Over Televised Plans

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed over the weekend that Academy Award Winner Tom Fleischman has resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His resignation comes over their plans to skip the telecast of eight awards during the 94th Oscars, set to be presented on March 27th on ABC.

The Academy plans to present Best Documentary Short, Film Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Original Score, Production Design, Animated Short, Live-Action Short, and Sound an hour before the telecast starts, to edit the strongest moments of the acceptance speeches inside the actual show.

The move was met with criticism, from not only film fans and critics, but filmmakers, including Guillermo del Toro, who, while accepting an award at the Hollywood Critics Association Film Awards, urged the Academy to reconsider.

He stated that “Most of the movies that are here tonight were done against many, many difficult odds and with a lot of people — we don’t do them alone. We do them together, and the people that made them with us did it risking everything in a pandemic, showing up. I must say, this — if any year was the year to think about it, this was not the year to not hear their names live at the Oscars. This is the year to say it and say it loud. I have to advocate for all of us, as many of you that have a voice and that can say we should not do that. We should not do it here, we shouldn’t do it ever, but not this year. We are together in this.”

Fleischman is the first one to have resigned from the Academy over the decision. The sound engineer and re-recording mixer has won an Oscar in 2012 for his work on Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo, and was nominated four other times, for Warren Beatty‘s Reds, Jonathan Demme‘s The Silence of the Lambs, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, and The Aviator respectively.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter