Imagine if you were watching the 2017 Oscars and just as La La Land was announced for Best Picture, your feed was cut off. Or if you want to have a better window into what I just went through while eagerly watching the 2025 Oscar winners being chosen, imagine if you missed the last two categories of the night. due to a huge and seemingly easy-to-avoid streaming service mistake.
That’s exactly what just happened, as myself and every other Hulu subscription holder without the Live TV add-on missed the tail end of the ceremony, from Mikey Madison’s Best Actress win on. One moment, I’m watching James Cameron directing on-set during a Rolex commercial, and in the next was notified that the show had ended and I should start watching something else.
If it wasn’t for our Oscars 2025 live blog, as well as the various tweets celebrating and questioning Anora‘s late wins throughout the Internet, I wouldn’t have known that Sean Baker’s drama became the top winner of the night. And I’m not the only person who noticed this horrible twist of fate. Running through a bunch of social media reactions on X, I saw a bunch of hysterical reactions that caused Hulu to trend for all the wrong reasons:
- “hulu cutting the oscars because we were told to go back to theaters instead of streaming services” – @joyIuv
- “Adrian Brody’s Oscar speech was so long that it made the Oscar broadcast go past its viewing time on Hulu” – @Nikstrick
- “Them letting Adrien Brody ramble on for ten minutes and then Hulu cutting the feed? 😭 #Oscars” – @ricwatches
- “New rule: if a streaming version plans to stream a live event and botches it, all subscribers should get a free month of their current plan. Looking at you, @hulu” – @BenJamminAsh
- “#Hulu owes me a damn refund right about now. All that advertisement about streaming the #Oscars2025, only for the site to not work.” – @TranceRevolved
- “Hulu telling me the Oscars are over when they haven’t announced best picture” – @jordan_hcg
That last reaction is particularly brilliant, simply because its author was paying attention to one of the night’s running threads of humor. And it’s all thanks to a Conclave star’s scene stealing 97th Oscars appearances, as the image of Disappointed John Lithgow was included in that very post, and it appeared in tons of other messages decrying this pretty huge streaming faux pas.
Which means it’s time to cue Mr. Lithgow in this space, to kick us back to my disappointment about how Oscar history was made…just not in a good way.
Apparently, Hulu had only budgeted the 97th Academy Awards’ livestream its planned timeslot between 7 PM and 10:35 PM ET., allowing for only five minutes of wiggle room. So those complaints about Adrian Brody’s long-winded speech potentially being the catalyst aren’t totally off-base, though let’s not blame the second-time Oscar winner for an entertainment company’s lack of automation foresight.
Unfortunately, there probably wasn’t a live person at the metaphorical wheel when Hulu’s feed dropped, and that’s fair enough. But even with the early start time, the Oscars are notorious for stretching way deeper into the night than its annually allotted timeslots allow for. So you’d think the big streaming giant would have at least given itself some grace and extended the window to 11 p.m. ET, right?
Sadly, that was not the case. So unless you had a Hulu + Live TV plan, you probably learned about the final two victories through tweets or live blogs throughout the internet. Thankfully, even in the wake of this heartbreak, there is the silver lining of Anora winning Best Picture, as well as learning about Mikey Madison winning Best Actress.
Which only makes the fact that Sean Baker’s sex worker Cinderella story is part of everything new on Hulu in March 2025 a bittersweet fact for those who are among the upset fans shown above. Though at the very least, you know the movie ideally shouldn’t shut off before its conclusion…unless a new error rears its head.
Meanwhile, I love that Hulu has finally joined the Oscars livestream game. But after this incident, I do hope they consider some sort of future tweak to let every subscriber see this annual Hollywood ending, in real time. Then again, I’m no stranger to Oscar hot takes, so even if the show goes on as planned, I’ll probably find something new and exciting to get my bowtie in a knot about.