Lady Gaga has canceled her appearance at the 2023 Oscars, where she was slated to sing “Hold My Hand.” She’s filming and can’t get her performance up to par in time, says the Academy.
Lady Gaga was nominated for the Top Gun: Maverick song, “Hold My Hand” but will not perform this year. Oscars Executive Producer and Showrunner Glenn Weiss confirmed the cancellation to Variety.
“We invited all five nominees. We have a great relationship with Lady Gaga and her camp,” Weiss adds. “She is in the middle of shooting a movie right now. Here, we are honoring the movie industry and what it takes to make a movie after a bunch of back and forth. It didn’t feel like she can get a performance to the caliber that we’re used to with her and that she is used to. So she is not going to perform on the show.”
All of the Oscars 2023 nominees for Best Original Song will perform at the ceremony on March 12—without Lady Gaga.
Lady Gaga is in the middle of filming Joker: Folie à Deux, portraying Harley Quinn. Director Todd Phillips shared the first image of her as Quinn on Valentine’s Day. That film releases on October 9, 2024.
“Thank you so much to the Academy for nominating my song ‘Hold My Hand’ for an Oscar this year!” Lady Gaga wrote on Twitter when the nominations were announced. “Writing this song for the film ‘Top Gun: Maverick‘ was a deep and powerful experience that I will never forget. So grateful for the magic of music and cinema.”
Other nominees in the category include “Applause” from Tell it Like a Woman, “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, “Naatu Naatu” from RRR, and “This Is A Life” from Everything Everywhere All at Once. Lady Gaga claimed the win for Best Original Song at the 2019 Academy Awards for her song “Shallow” from A Star Is Born.”
