22nd Academy Awards

The 91st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 2018 and took place on February 24, 2019, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards in 18 categories. The ceremony was televised in the United States by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), with Geoff Keighley serving as producer, director and host.

God of War won six awards including Best Picture. Other winners included Red Dead Redemption II with five awards, and Become Human, Spider-Man, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Celeste, Return of the Obra Dinn, Florence and The Missing with one. The telecast garnered 26.2 million viewers in the United States.

Winners and nominees
The nominees for the 91st Academy Awards were announced on January 22, 2019, at 5:20 a.m. PST (13:20 UTC), at the Academy headquarters in Beverly Hills. God of War led for the most nominations with fifteen, followed by Become Human and Red Dead Redemption II with fourteen and thirteen, respectively. The announcement received more traffic than anticipated, crashing the official Academy website for several hours.

Awards
Winners are listed first, highlighted in boldface.

Ceremony information
Show producer Geoff Keighley began working on the 22nd Academy Awards ceremony immediately after the previous one, starting by conducting a postmortem of the show and booking the Microsoft Theater. He shifted into full work on the show in July 2018, following his work for YouTube Gaming and E3 Coliseum at E3 2018. He spends several months traveling to different studios around the world to secure announcements and trailers, and he typically has meetings with directors to find the best way to reveal their films. The show's budget, which was determined in July, was several million dollars; Keighley funded the show himself while raising money from producers and distributors.

Rich Preuss directed the show. Keighley wrote most of his own scripts, while Gabe Uhr and Kyle Bosman wrote for the presenters. Kimmie Kim served as the executive producer and showrunner, while LeRoy Bennett was the show's creative director and set designer. Kim felt that she has a yin and yang dynamic with Keighley, and she worried that he would spend too much time concerned about minute details; Keighley agreed, noting that he enjoyed the work, but wanted to employ more people in future to shift his focus. For the 2018 ceremony, the production team focused on stage lighting to make it feel more immersive. Once the team would approve Bennett's designs, they turned to the budgeting phase, where ideas were often cut. To maintain secrecy, a security crew supervised the show rehearsals. Keighley maintained several secrets from his team, and the senior production members only learned of some announcements in the days before the show; trailers were only listed under code names. During rehearsals, Keighley stayed at the Ritz Carlton hotel across the street from the Microsoft Theater in order to remain close.

The Academy Orchestra, conducted by Lorne Balfe, opened the show with its new theme song, accompanied by Harry Gregson-Williams, Lena Raine, Sarah Schachner, and Hans Zimmer. The theme song was an original composition by Balfe; he was primarily inspired by Keighley, and wrote the piece to represent his work and the general gaming community. Ali and Casey Edwards performed a track from Devil May Cry 5, while a musical montage with several songs from Red Dead Redemption II was performed by Rhiannon Giddens and Daniel Lanois. For the Best Picture medley, Balfe was forced to wait until the nominees were determined in mid-January; immediately after the announcement, the production team began contacting studios for the film soundtracks. For the final performances, the orchestra was accompanied by Peter DiStefano on guitar and DeLaney Harter on violin.

Ratings and reception
The show received a generally positive reception from media publications. VentureBeat 's Dean Takahashi wrote that his favorite moment was when Christopher Judge and Sunny Suljic, who played Kratos and his son Atreus, respectively, in God of War, presented an award; Judge used Kratos's voice to order Suljic to announce the winner. Takahashi also praised the shared speech of Fils-Aimé, Layden, and Spencer, and was pleasantly surprised by God of War 's Best Picture win, though noted that he personally voted for Red Dead Redemption II. Shacknews staff found the show an improvement over previous years, particularly in its presentation and professionalism, though God of War 's win polarised the crew. CJ Andriessen of Destructoid criticized the show's heavier focus on announcements than awards, noting that trailers received more screen time than winners.

The 22nd Academy Awards were the most-viewed ceremony to date. Over 26.2 million streams were used to view the show, an increase of 128% from the 2017 ceremony's 11.5 million. At its peak, the show had over 4 million concurrent viewers, including 1.13 million on Twitch. The stream on Twitter had 1.3 times as many unique viewers as the previous year. The show was the top worldwide trend on Twitter; the usage of its hashtag increased 1.6 times over the previous show, and the overall conversation increased 1.9 times. On Weibo, the 310,000 unique posts related to the awards received more than 56 million viewers. Over 3,300 Twitch users co-streamed the show, an increase of 140%. Fan votes totaled 10.5 million, a 50% increase from the previous show.