When Will the Bet Awards Air Again
Last night's BET Awards made it immediately clear, with its first performance, that it wouldn't exist a regular awards bear witness—and not just because it had to be put together remotely. Rather than opening with a nominated star debuting a new song or having its host, the comedian Amanda Seales, kick things off with a monologue, the three-hour ceremony began with the 12-year-old gospel vocaliser Keedron Bryant belting out his viral carol, "I Just Wanna Live." When he finished singing, images of the recent protests against police brutality and systemic racism flooded the screen, and the rappers Nas, Rapsody, YG, and Black Thought joined Public Enemy to perform their rousing 1989 anthem, "Fight the Power." By the fourth dimension the vocal ended, awards show felt like the wrong way to describe the dark. This yr's production was pointedly aiming to televise a revolution.
This was already a high-stakes yr for the BET Awards. The annual commemoration honoring black artists in entertainment needed to marking several milestones in 2020: the network's 40th anniversary, the awards evidence'southward 20th, and the presentation's simulcasting debut on the broadcast network CBS, which would help it reach its widest audience still. Producers had planned an all-out, star-studded bash commemorating the occasions.
Things plain changed in the months leading up to the ceremony, every bit the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellations of live performances, and the killing of George Floyd sparked protests. The show's executive producer Connie Orlando told me that the team backside the awards testify had decided past April to endeavor a completely virtual show, but when the protests began, it understood that the anniversary had to go far to air. "This was going to be our biggest show ever," she told me over Zoom, "not because of the anniversaries, but considering of what's going on."
And so in the weeks before final night's bear witness, rather than overseeing a staff of hundreds to be assembled within the Microsoft Theater, in Los Angeles, Orlando was attending twenty-to-30-person Zoom meetings, conceiving and polishing ideas for artists' performances, planning logistics for shoots so they followed health and rubber guidelines, and keeping in affect with the COVID-nineteen job force for BET'due south parent company, ViacomCBS. Artists had to record their performances with their own teams, rather than work with the usual fifty-to-lx-fellow member crews provided past the evidence's production companies. When nosotros spoke four days before the broadcast, Orlando pointed out that she'd unremarkably exist at the theater already, keeping an eye on rehearsals; instead, she was supervising postproduction on what the performers submitted. "It was challenging, and I'm non going to pretend that it wasn't, but it was challenging in a good way," she said. "It's an development … Our goal was just to ready out and create a bear witness where if yous are home watching it, you yet go the aforementioned feeling."
The BET Awards thus had a difficult residuum to attain: It had to entertain and celebrate the biggest stars in black culture from a distance, while also reflecting on the reckoning with racism and inequality happening nationwide and around the world.
The evidence hasn't shied abroad from social and political commentary in the past, only the executive producer Jeannae Rouzan-Clay admitted that tone-deafness could take been a potential hazard. Still, she wasn't nervous nearly what the artists would exercise for their performances; many requested to incorporate social-justice messaging into their sets, afterwards all. "We've ever institute a way to continue to celebrate our culture, and as well make certain that in the middle of the performances that are fun and celebratory, we remind you of the things that are going on inside our community that we demand to exist aware of and that we demand to brand certain that people take seriously," she told me over the phone before the circulate. "You're going to see a fun performance from Megan Thee Stallion, but you're also going to be reminded that it'due south an ballot twelvemonth, and that it'south time to vote."
Indeed, for every performance, there was a segment devoted to encouraging viewers to use their vocalization, a presenter prompting the audition to act, or an artist using their credence oral communication to deliver a call to action. "We have to vote like our life depends on information technology," Beyoncé said subsequently accepting the Humanitarian Award. "Because it does."
The producers had also become familiar with navigating the "virtual" show infinite after putting together the "Saving Our Selves" special, which raised funds for communities of colour affected by the pandemic. Back and so, they'd been fine with artists submitting whatever they came up with from their living rooms, "considering no 1 had seen anything like it," Rouzan-Clay said. For the awards, though, they looked to make the issue less of a glimpse inside the stars' lives, and more of a dive into their creative minds: "We told them, 'Think most this equally an opportunity for y'all to do all those things you lot wanted to do onstage, that the stage confines yous to,'" she explained. "We want information technology to experience live, and we don't want information technology to feel similar a music video. No one wants to tune in to a show full of music videos."
While some artists, such as Summer Walker and Usher, relied on dramatic lighting and staging to give their segment a alive feel, others took advantage of filmmaking wizardry and high product values: Megan Thee Stallion's desert-set, Mad Max–inspired act, for case, couldn't have been achieved the same way inside an indoor arena, and Chloe 10 Halle's functioning ended with a visual-effects play a trick on that would've been hard to do on a physical stage. "Information technology'south a dissimilar kind of worry … When you produce a show this way, information technology takes y'all a infinitesimal to get there," Orlando said. "You're non seeing [what's beingness done], you're giving a lot of meetings, yous're giving a lot of instructions, y'all're seeing some stuff, some pieces." But then again, she quipped, "I'm always nervous until the evidence is done."
Technically speaking, the show ran seamlessly. Sure, Seales's audio at times sounded like she'd recorded underwater, and aye, some presenters chose to film in front of more aesthetically interesting backdrops than others—Naomi Campbell must have missed the memo most keeping the camera horizontal. But every performance, even with socially distanced band members and mask-wearing fill-in dancers, arrived meticulously crafted, making the show experience cohesive.
It helped that almost every artist, across multiple genres, delivered a straight message well-nigh the black experience in this moment: The rapper DaBaby began with a reenactment of George Floyd's decease, on the ground, with a police officer's genu on his cervix. Jennifer Hudson eschewed the visuals, opting instead for a rendition of the soulful, ofttimes-covered Nina Simone archetype "Young, Gifted and Black." Alicia Keys performed her R&B track "Perfect Way to Die," a tribute to the blackness victims of police killings, and ended her set by kneeling on a downtown–Los Angeles street covered with their names.
The words Black Lives Matter appeared throughout the night: on artists' shirts, on backdrops, and at i point behind Seales, who'd filmed all of her segments in forepart of a greenish screen in her living room. If the lines between music videos and live performances wound up blurred, the message of the testify's honorees was clear: Blackness entertainers should be celebrated not only for their success, only also for the role they play as interpreters of social change.
Withal, "this show is celebratory, bottom line," Rouzan-Clay told me. "We are celebrating everything that is great and wonderful about being black, and about sharing our culture with the residual of the world." For everything else, whether reminders to vote or calls to action, she said, "there's a fine line and a balance"—a balance that the prove'southward performers knew how to strike.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/how-bet-pulled-off-awards-show-during-pandemic/613606/