Emmy Awards 2020: No red carpet, virtual ceremony with LIVE from 140 locations

New Delhi: The Covid-19 pandemic fallout is felt and experienced everywhere. The award shows, which used to be extravagant and glitzy will miss all those ingredients this year.

Emmy Awards, scheduled to be held next month, has planned to go virtual and no presence of guests at the Red carpet. It is also looking a formidable task of going LIVE from 140 locations.

Executive producers of the upcoming 72nd Emmy Awards have revealed their plans on how to make the prestigious award ceremony as live and as safe as possible amid COVID-19.

Reginald Hudlin and Ian Stewart, during an interaction with Variety, revealed for the first time how this year’s glamorous ceremony will look. Jimmy Kimmel, who will be anchoring the virtual show, will host Emmys from a stage in the Staples Center, but there will be no audience and no red carpet. Unlike previous years, where the event normally takes place across the street at the Microsoft Theatre, 2020 Emmys have been planned to do at Staples, because of the facility’s tremendous size.

“One is that it’s so large that the crew can work safely under COVID-safe protocols and be at the appropriate distance from each other. Because obviously the most important thing is safety first,” Variety quoted Hudlin as saying.

The producers require that capacity as they are planning to have professional camera operators stationed where every nominee is located. That’s as many as 140 live feeds coming into the control room at Staples.

This time, the producers are planning to ask all nominees to send over a pre-taped acceptance speech, but only the winner’s thanks will be aired.

The decision to cancel the red carpet, and the traditional arrivals pre-show, came after they nixed bringing nominees to the Staples Center.

The 72nd Emmy Awards will be held in September.