Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Oscars Producers Will Return in 2014 Despite Seth MacFarlane Debacle

Oscar organizers are bringing back Craig Zadan and Neil Meron to produced the Academy Awards telecast for a second year, despite a mauling by media critics for their first effort in February.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the most coveted awards in the movie industry, said on Tuesday that Zadan and Meron had been chosen to produce the 2014 Oscar show.

“Family Guy” comedian Seth MacFarlane hosted this year’s event but the Academy on Tuesday did not announce a host for the 2014 ceremony.

“Craig and Neil have the overwhelming support of the Academy’s Governors to produce the Oscars again in 2014,” Academy President Hawk Koch said in a statement.

“In order to establish continuity with this year’s enormously successful show, we felt it was important to give these consummate professionals the green light now to begin creating another great evening,” Koch added.

Zadan and Meron, who put on a song and dance-heavy ceremony in February, said they were honored to be asked to return.

February’s Oscar ceremony scored the biggest TV audience in three years, with some 40.3 million Americans watching, and boosted the 18-to-49-year-old audience most coveted by advertisers by 11 percent over 2012.

But MacFarlane got mixed reviews for his edgy mix of sexist and Jewish jokes, and many TV critics disliked the variety show feel of the ceremony packed with song and dance numbers and performances by singers like Barbra Streisand and Adele.

The 2014 Oscar ceremony will take place in Hollywood on March 2 – a week later than normal, in order to avoid clashing with TV coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.