10/03/26 · Awards

The seating chart is the only awards story worth reading

— Backlot Bex

Frocks are a story about a stylist. The table plan is a story about money, and it is put together over about three weeks by people who are extremely careful, which is why it is worth reading closely.

Four things I look for, in order:

1. Distance from the aisle. Anyone with a real chance of winning is within two seats of an aisle, because a long walk is dead air. Read the aisle seats as the producers’ shortlist, whatever the nominations say.
2. Who is at the front and not nominated. That is a commercial decision. Somebody is being kept warm.
3. Which studio has been split across tables. A studio that turns up with fourteen people and is seated as two sevens on opposite sides of the room is being managed, and normally it is because two of those fourteen are not speaking.
4. Empty seats near the front at the half. Seat fillers tell you who left early, and who left early tells you who knew.

This year the split-table signal is loud. Two production companies that have both spent the season insisting everything is fine have been arranged in a way that means their respective heads will not be in the same shot at any point in the broadcast.

One more, which is not a signal so much as a pleasure: look at who is seated near the crew categories. Every year one very senior person quietly asks to be put there, and every year it is somebody who came up through a craft department.