Gabriel Bouys/AFP through Getty Photographs
The 2021 Grammy Awards ceremony has been postponed, as a consequence of issues concerning the unfold of the coronavirus. The Recording Academy introduced on Tuesday that the ceremony is not going to happen on Jan. 31, as beforehand scheduled, however is as a substitute being pushed off till March 14.
In most years, the awards ceremony takes place on the Staples Heart in Los Angeles, which can be the place the 2021 ceremony was scheduled to happen. The Los Angeles space, nonetheless, is experiencing a big improve of COVID-19 infections that’s anticipated to worsen, as NPR reported earlier Tuesday. The LA County director of well being companies, Dr. Christina Ghaly, mentioned at a briefing Monday that many regional hospitals “have reached a degree of disaster” and are being pressured to make “very robust selections about affected person care.”
The Recording Academy, its broadcast accomplice CBS, and the occasion’s govt producer, Ben Winston (who’s in his first yr in that position), issued a joint assertion Tuesday which learn: “After considerate conversations with well being consultants, our host and artists scheduled to look, we’re rescheduling the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards to be broadcast Sunday, March 14, 2021. The deteriorating COVID scenario in Los Angeles, with hospital companies being overwhelmed, ICUs having reached capability, and new steering from state and native governments have all led us to conclude that suspending our present was the appropriate factor to do. Nothing is extra vital than the well being and security of these in our music group and the tons of of people that work tirelessly on producing the present.”
The information of the Grammy Awards’ delay was first reported Tuesday afternoon by Rolling Stone and Selection, which cited nameless sources.
This yr was imagined to characterize one thing of a recent begin for the Grammys, which have been overshadowed final yr by quite a lot of bombshell accusations made by the Recording Academy’s now-ousted, short-lived former chief, Deborah Dugan, together with allegations of sexual misconduct towards her predecessor, Neil Portnow, and the Academy’s common counsel and former board chair, Joel Katz (who each denied the accusations). She additionally made accusations of monetary mismanagement, self-dealing and vote rigging. Dugan was changed by the Academy’s chairman and now interim chief govt, Harvey Mason Jr.
[Up until about a decade ago, I was a Grammy voter, and also served on one of the small “craft” committees that judges one of a handful of Grammy categories outside the “nomination review” process, and that are not voted on by the general membership. In addition, my husband, Joshua Sherman, is also a former Grammy voter and Grammy committee member; he was also part of teams that created several Grammy-winning recordings, and he produced several other Grammy-nominated albums.]