Oscar night is less than a month away. If you’re planning on tuning into the star-studded event on Feb. 26 you can get even more celebrity coverage with ABC’s and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Oscars, a universal iDevice app.
Most of Oscars’ features won’t be fully available until the last Sunday in February. If you need some Oscar magic now, you can use the app to view video clips about the nominees, Oscar buzz and related tweets. Oscars is also jam-packed with nominee information, including trailers and synopses. History buffs can check out Oscars of the past and host Billy Crystal’s greatest hits.
The app’s most compelling feature is its insider access live video streams from backstage at the show and on the red carpet. We won’t know the quality of these feeds until Oscar is close at hand, but if they’re similar to last year’s highlights footage, users should be happy. Viewers can choose how much they want to interact with the app — the live feed offers a hosted experience, while direct mode will allow users to pretend they’re in the control room and swap cameras and angles to see exactly the coverage they want.
Oscars also offers a “My Picks” ballot that integrates with Facebook, but currently I can’t get the feature to load on iPhone 4, although I hope this kink will shake out before 7 p.m. EST, Feb. 26.
