Annie Awards Move to March for Virtual Ceremony Amid Omicron Surge

The Annie Awards for 2022 have been delayed and for the second year in a row will host a virtual ceremony, the board for ASIFA-Hollywood announced Thursday.

The awards, now in their 49th year celebrating the best in animation, will now be held in a live-streamed event on March 12 at 7 p.m. PT, pushed back from their original date on February 26.

The event will now be on the same night as the DGA Awards but will move off a spot currently held by three other awards shows in the PGA Awards, the NAACP Image Awards and the Scripter Awards.

“When we announced that the Annies would be in-person this year on February 26, the Omicron variant was not even on the horizon,” Frank Gladstone, ASIFA’s executive director, said in a statement. “But now it is here and so highly infectious that, after much debate and discussion, ASIFA’s board of directors has decided, in an abundance of caution, to once again move to a virtual ceremony. We’ve also moved the date of the event by two weeks to give our production crew time to gather and edit the huge amount of additional material it takes to construct the virtual ceremony.”

“Raya and the Last Dragon” led the field of nominees this year with 10, followed by “Encanto” with nine. Pixar’s “Luca” and Sony Animation/Netflix’s “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” each received eight nominations. See all the nominations here.

The Annie Awards have been handed out since 1972, initially to give lifetime-achievement honors and then, beginning in 1992, to honor the best animated films of the year. In the 20 years since the Academy Awards created a category for animated features, more than 93% of the Oscar nominees in the category have first been nominated for Annie Awards in either the Best Feature or Best Indie Feature category. No film has ever won the Oscar without first being nominated for an Annie.