Oprah Winfrey’s eyeglasses glinted in the stage lights at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Whoopi Goldberg scuttled up beside her, hands in the pockets of her balloon-leg trousers.
It was just before noon on Saturday, and the two women faced a mostly empty audience as they rehearsed the speech that they would deliver the next night at the 97th Academy Awards.
Instead of A-listers, the theater’s seats were filled with poster-board printouts of celebrity headshots. A dozen boxes of Girl Scout cookies sat on a makeshift table in the orchestra.
One of the Oscars’ less glamorous rituals is a tightly choreographed rehearsal intended to ensure that the broadcast unfolds sans catastrophe. Over several days, presenters practice entering and exiting, ripping open winners’ envelopes and handing out heavy golden statues.
Despite those efforts, the live event has still had its share of mishaps, including a best picture mix-up in 2017 and an infamous slap in 2022. This year’s telecast is set to begin at 7 p.m. Eastern time on ABC.
On Saturday, crew members dressed in black hurried around the theater carrying paper packets the length of ambitious screenplays. The actors Goldie Hawn and Andrew Garfield walked out arm-in-arm to pantomime presenting the awards for best animated short and best animated feature.
Mr. Garfield stretched his arms overhead as if he were in a yoga class, and Ms. Hawn stumbled over a line on the teleprompter.
“OK — here we go,” she said, before trying it again.
Emma Stone, the winner of last year’s Oscar for best actress, shimmied onto the stage in jeans and a white T-shirt. A man wearing a black headset showed her where certain celebrities would be sitting in the audience; she waved enthusiastically as if they were actually there.
Presenters left their ball gowns at home. Sterling K. Brown wore gym shorts; Ana de Armas’s hair was piled atop her head in a messy bun. Miles Teller took the stage wearing a “Late Show with David Letterman” T-shirt. (Oprah, however, wore stilettos.)
The journalists in attendance were prohibited from revealing details of the ceremony’s script. To keep the winners under wraps, each presenter announced a randomly selected, mock victor of his or her category. Statuettes were handed to stand-ins: working actors who came to the stage and delivered improvised acceptance speeches.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won the award for best supporting actress last year, rehearsed her segment with such gravitas that a listener might have been forgiven for thinking it was the real thing.
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