The longest day: Critics Choice Awards same date as Oscar noms

"The Help" ensemble celebrates at this year's Critics Choice Awards. Next year's date, which coincides with Oscar nominations, will mean a long day for some in Hollywood.

By Glenn Whipp

Oct. 22, 2012 12 AM PT

“Maybe we should sign up 5-Hour Energy as a sponsor.”

That’s Broadcast Film Critics Assn. President Joey Berlin weighing in on his group’s decision to schedule its annual Critics Choice Awards show on the evening of Jan. 10, roughly 12 hours after Oscar nominations will have been announced.

Berlin says the choice was dictated by the CW television network, which is broadcasting the Critics Choice Awards for the first time.

“It’s a big night for them,” Berlin says of the Thursday date. “It’s when they have their most eyeballs. I did note to them that it’ll be a long day for a lot of people.”

Indeed. Anyone waking up for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s traditional crack-of-dawn (5:38 a.m. Pacific Time) announcement of Oscar nominees will then need to field congratulatory calls, do interviews and then regroup for the BFCA event, which will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. (The show will be televised live on the East Coast and tape-delayed elsewhere.)

“The academy wanted to shake things up and they have,” Berlin says, referring to the film academy’s recent decision to move up the Oscar nomination date by five days. “Since the world’s attention will be focused on movies that day, it is, in a lot of ways, a perfect night for the show.”

Unless, of course, you are a Critics Choice nominee forced to put on a happy face because you didn’t receive an Oscar nod that morning. Might that be just a little awkward?

“Maybe,” Berlin acknowledges. “Maybe we can take the sting away a little. Our way of thinking is there’s going to be a lot of celebrating that day. We’re assuming there’s going to be a ton of happy people in that room.”

And very few of them opting for decaf.

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