Don’t erase Hamilton from the Oscar narrative just yet. While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said on Monday that the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s epic Broadway musical, which recently premiered on Disney+, is ineligible for the 2021 ceremony, a source close to the film told Vanity Fair this week that Disney still plans to submit Hamilton to various Hollywood guilds and the Academy for awards consideration. The studio would then allow those groups to decide whether Hamilton is eligible for the awards they bestow, as each guild has a different set of qualifications.
Disney has not yet made any public comment on its awards plans for Hamilton.
According to a source close to the Academy, the Hamilton movie is not eligible to compete in the Oscars’ documentary categories due to a rule, instituted in 1997, that excludes “works that are essentially promotional or instructional” as well as “works that are essentially unfiltered records of performances” from contention. The source indicated that if Hamilton cannot compete as a documentary, it cannot compete in other Oscar categories either, including best picture.
But as pointed out on Twitter, the Academy’s rule eliminating “records of performances” has been challenged in the past. In 2000, three years after the Academy added that language to its eligibility requirements, the Spike Lee documentary The Original Kings of Comedy, a stand-up special featuring Bernie Mac, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Steve Harvey, was included on a list of Oscar-eligible films. Martin Lawrence’s 2002 stand-up film, Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat, and Kevin Hart’s 2013 concert movie, Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, also appeared on long lists of potential Academy Award nominees in their respective release years.
A source close to the Academy indicated that there’s a difference between those examples and Hamilton: Specifically, the source said, those three projects included creative contributions from their respective directors, making them more than mere reproductions of stage shows. But in theory the same could be argued for Hamilton. Thomas Kail directed both the stage production and the film, which combines scenes from separate live performances with sequences that were recorded specifically for the movie (and which allowed for close-ups of the cast that could not have been captured during regular Broadway performances).
Hamilton was initially set to debut in theaters next year. After the coronavirus pandemic upended Hollywood—and closed Broadway theaters until at least January 2021—Disney decided to fast-track its debut on Disney+. That move put Hamilton—which won 11 Tony Awards in 2016, including best musical, as well as the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama—into the nascent awards conversation, thanks to a tweak in the Academy’s rules that allows streaming movies that had previously planned theatrical runs to be eligible for Oscar consideration.
But even if Hamilton is ultimately permitted to compete at next year’s ceremony, the question of whether it should be in the running for Oscars is an open debate. “To me it reads as a little disrespectful of the Tony Awards and the Pulitzer,” awards expert Nathaniel Rogers, who runs the website the Film Experience, told Vanity Fair of a potential Oscar push for Hamilton. “Like, ‘those weren’t enough, this stage play also needs an Oscar!’ Maybe some of it is that people just don’t have all that many new movies to be excited about right now.” That sentiment was echoed by an Academy member who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, and noted that Oscar voters might not necessarily be keen on awarding a property that has already received so much recognition and acclaim.
Regardless of what happens at the Oscars, the Hamilton film will have some kind of footprint during awards season. The Oscar ceremony—which was bumped from February to April of 2021, on account of the global health crisis—airs on ABC, Walt Disney Television’s flagship property. “I cannot imagine that they won’t invite the Hamilton cast to present an award at least,” said Rogers. As he noted, the Academy Awards once mounted a starry tribute to John Hughes, even though the awards never nominated a film from his incredibly popular body of work; coming off a year when Oscar ratings hit an all-time low and the future of moviegoing itself was on precarious footing, it’s hard to believe ABC won’t try to leverage its Disney corporate synergy to goose viewership.
And even if Disney can’t get the Academy to change its mind, there are always the 2021 Emmys, where Hamilton would become an instant favorite in the outstanding-variety-special-(pre-recorded) category—where projects such as Beyoncé’s Netflix documentary, Homecoming, and the Bruce Springsteen Broadway performance, Springsteen on Broadway, landed nods last year. For the record, that’s where Rogers thinks the Hamilton movie should be recognized. “It’s a great, great filmed production of a show,” he said. “Let things be the things that they are. Hamilton is a really great stage musical, so we don’t need to call it a movie.”
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