The 2022 film and music award season promises to be once again shaken up by the health crisis. The Grammy Awards ceremony has been postponed indefinitely due to “Uncertainties surrounding the Omicron variant”, while the Sundance Film Festival has decided to be completely virtual again this year, the organizers of the two events announced on Wednesday 5 January.
“Organizing the show on January 31 simply involves too many risks”, explains in a press release the Academy of the American disc, adding that a new date for the evening of the Grammy Awards planned in Los Angeles will be announced ” shortly “. The day before, the organizers of the Golden Globes decided to keep their awards ceremony scheduled for Sunday, January 9, but without an audience or television broadcast.
Omicron has become the ultra-majority variant of Covid-19 in the United States, where more than a million new cases of contamination were recorded in twenty-four hours last Monday, the highest level ever recorded.
Citing “Surprisingly high transmission rates of the Omicron variant”, the organizers of the Sundance Film Festival, which was to open on January 20 in Utah (west), for their part had to resolve to abandon the planned events in the flesh. The festival will therefore take place again “This year online”, they deplore, regretting not being able to implement “The hybrid experience” that they had prepared.