Stacey Sher, 2021 Oscar Producer, Talks This Year’s Category Controversy: ‘There’s No Right Answer’
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Producer Stacey Sher, her daughter Maggie Brown and Ashley Greene hosted a benefit for The Pad Project at Veronica Beard’s West Hollywood store on Tuesday night.
Held in honor of International Women’s Day, attendees of the event were invited to shop at the luxury boutique, which donated 10% of the profits to The Pad Project and its international programs.
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Launched in 2013 by a group of students and educators at the Oakwood School in Los Angeles, The Pad Project has evolved from a documentary project following the efforts of a small village in India to destigmatize the conversation around menstruation, into an organization that works to end period poverty around the world.
Executive-produced by Sher and co-produced by Brown, the documentary short “Period. End of Sentence” won best documentary short at the 2019 Academy Awards.
At the event, Sher, who produced the 2021 Oscar ceremony alongside Steven Soderbergh and Jesse Collins, was hesitant to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the Academy’s decision to pre-record eight categories ahead of the show.
“I’m so not stepping into that,” Sher told Variety. “I love everybody in the Academy. It’s the hardest job in the entire world and it’s a show, but we are honoring everybody. There’s no right answer on this one. It’s challenging.’”
Sher expounded on the difficulties that she, Soderbergh and Collins faced when producing the show amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I don’t think people know what it took for us to even have the show last year,” she said. “Two days before, we were almost shut down by L.A. County Health. Thanks to the team that Soderbergh and I made ‘Contagion’ with and the rest of the incredible COVID events people that Jesse and the Academy also brought in, we had one of the most rigorous testing protocols and had to pivot when we could no longer have two hubs.”
Sher continued, “And it wasn’t safe when you had the variants from France mixed with the delta variant which had emerged in Australia and all over the world, so we had nine livestreams, nine satellite feeds operating globally, and not one person had a positive test result.”
“So people talk a lot about what we did or what we didn’t do, clips or not clips. I think the fact that we didn’t create a global super-spreader event that killed people, that was what kept me awake at night. And I think it was wonderful for all the nominees to be able to gather and not feel there was an asterisk by their year and their nomination. I think for people who love cinema, they loved last year’s awards, too.”
She went on to say, “I wish Will Packer all the luck in the world and anybody that gets to work with the team that makes the Oscars, they’re the best in the business, an absolute joy to work with, and they make everybody look good because to operate live with that many wild cards is challenging, and they pull it off every year.”
Sher said producing the Oscars is the most challenging thing she has done in her entire career: “Hats off to people who are in the live show and live television business, but this is an event that serves everyone in our industry, so I think it serves us well to all wish them the very best and root for their success.”
During the event, Brown described her reaction to winning the 2019 Oscar. “It’s super crazy. I never expected that. I actually went to the Oscars when I was 15, so I never expected that to happen freshman year.”
Brown continued, “I was struggling to get acclimated to high school life and I was simultaneously going to Seattle to speak at a film festival about our film. And I think what was more amazing was that people responded so well to it because it’s an issue that people were dying for it to be talked about, but because it was so stigmatized, it wasn’t being highlighted in the mainstream media. I’m just so happy that we were able to fill that gap a little bit.”
Greene, who co-founded the hormonal and reproductive health brand Hummingway with her sister-in-law, Olivia Khoury, told Variety that she believes there is still a stigma around menstruation on film sets.
Greene said, “Even though I am one of the co-founders of a reproductive health company, I still don’t feel the most comfortable whipping out a tampon, even though at other places, like at dinner, I could care less.”
The actress continued, “It’s not that anyone is shaming me for it, but I think it’s still predominantly — there’s a lot of men on set, there’s a lot of grips and I think they are still very hesitant to talk about the period or to understand the period.”
“And I think, in general, you don’t necessarily want to be the person that steps away, that delays filming. And, to be honest, that’s still kind of my own kind of insecurities in that act. So it’s not necessarily anyone telling me, ‘How dare you change your tampon,’ but it’s still a different atmosphere.”
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