It’s a boiling day in downtown Los Angeles; crowds are milling about outside the Dolby theatre where Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony is to be held, selfie-ing the giant Oscar statuettes.
And this is where the man with whom the buck stops is looking at the set, going through the top-secret opening number and busy with a thousand admin details. Academy CEO, Bill Kramer, increasingly renowned as one of the most important people in Hollywood, meets me for a pre-ceremony chat in a suite in the next-door Hollywood Loews Hotel. “It’s so nice that we’re not on camera!” he says. “Yeah, so happy. Let myself relax!”
He is approachable and diplomatic, revered for his fundraising wizardry at the Academy museum, where he was managing director of external development in 2012 before ascending to his current job at the Academy 10 years later. Kramer has a business degree and came to Columbia after his first substantial job working for the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York.
It was at a party in the 90s that this policy and financial strategist met the man who changed his life: Robert Redford. “He couldn’t believe how much I knew about movies!” says Kramer. “And he said he wanted to decrease reliance on corporate sponsorships and bring someone on board at Sundance to help generate philanthropic gifts from individuals. Would I be interested in doing that? I said: ‘Sign me up!’”This can-do attitude is still evident in Kramer today. A few days out from showtime, he is, he says, “so incredibly excited. I’m an early riser, as my team will tell you, up at 4am. It’s a good moment to get my head together, to review our script. It’s a quiet moment where I can go through emails that have come in overnight.”Kramer was raised in Maryland, “very far away from Hollywood”, he says, but in a family of movie buffs who “were cultural consumers, and went to the movies constantly”. For them, Oscars night was “like New Year’s Eve or the Super Bowl. You gathered. You celebrated.”He speaks excitedly about the 1980 ceremony when Johnny Carson hosted and Kramer vs Kramer dominated – the young Bill thrilled by sharing not just a surname with the movie but a Christian name with the child at the heart of that drama.“I was 11 and went to see that and All That Jazz,” he says. “Looking back on it, I was probably a little young to be watching those movies. But my parents understood my interest and encouraged it.”Roy Schneider in All That Jazz, 1979. Photograph: Maximum Film/AlamySo how is this celebration tradition going to work in the new era he is ushering in – switching from the regular TV telecast to global livestreaming on YouTube in two years’ time? Given the movie industry’s streaming concerns, isn’t this like handing over another institution to the online behemoth?Kramer points that a huge number of people watch YouTube through their conventional TV screens anyway, the collective TV-watching experience will be enlarged by double-screening and the point in any case is YouTube’s colossal global reach.
