Ryan Seacrest, the Oscars, and the Red Carpet’s Existential Crisis

Author: Kenzie Bryant / Source: Vanities

Seacrest on the Grammys red carpet on January 28, 2018.

Outside the Dolby Theatre Sunday night, Ryan Seacrest will be stationed in his usual prime position, wearing his usual pressed suit, and flashing his usual bright smile. But at the end of a red carpet season that has been anything but usual, even the unflappable Seacrest may seem off his game.

Accused in a Variety cover story Monday of prolonged sexual harassment by his former stylist, Seacrest—who vehemently denies the claims—is, for now, proceeding as the face of the biggest night of the year for his network, E! But with some stars reportedly planning to avoid him on the carpet, Seacrest may become living proof that the red carpet’s existential crisis is far from finished.

Even if the Olympics hadn’t pushed the Oscar broadcast into March, extending awards season by a week, it would have felt like the longest red carpet season in ages. The bubbly self-celebration that usual defines pre-shows for the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, Critics Choice Awards, and the like has been muted this year; in its place has been a sober reckoning around trenchant sexual harassment at all levels in the film and television industries. Time’s Up, the nonprofit initiative announced New Year’s Day that inspired an all-black dress code at the Globes, and the ongoing #MeToo movement challenged the red carpet protocol, which had been primed for a change already. It has been years since #AskHerMore and Elisabeth Moss’s mani cam middle finger suggested that the red carpet might become a blood-red battlefield, where messaging and progress is fought for and won.

In 2018, that suggestion became an imperative.

E!’s Live from the Red Carpet, hosted by Seacrest and Giuliana Rancic, has been the longtime standard bearer of pre-show telecasting, and the easiest place to watch all of this change happen in real time. The network has had a tough go of it from the beginning of the season, dutifully covering the Time’s Up and #MeToo movement when what it does best is froufrou and froth. The shifting cultural tides had also washed up on their shore; in late December, weeks before the Golden Globes, Catt Sadler quit because the network did not pay her as much as her male co-host. (Sadler will be hosting Vanity Fair’s Oscar party livestream with Mike Hogan on Sunday night.) Early on in the Globes red carpet, Debra Messing squared up to Rancic’s microphone to address Sadler’s story directly: “I miss Catt Sadler, and so we stand with her.”