LOS ANGELES, CA — Grammy producers entered the first day of rehearsals at Crypto.com Arena on Monday by walking through the show’s most technically demanding sequence: the four-second cutaway in which Taylor Swift will react, organically and from the heart, to whatever happens in any given category.
Camera 4, a robotic crane unit nicknamed ‘Mother’ by the broadcast team, has been programmed with seventeen preset moves spanning the full Swift emotional spectrum, from ‘genuine surprise mouthed at table-mate’ to ‘hand over mouth while standing for someone else,’ to a contingency setting one producer described only as ‘the Beyoncé one.’
‘We rehearse the spontaneous reactions the most, because those are the ones people screenshot,’ said Marisol Quennell, a segment producer who has worked on the broadcast since 2019. ‘Last year we did forty-seven takes of a single gasp. By the end her stand-in was doing it in her sleep. That’s the level we’re at now.’
Other carefully blocked candid moments include Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘I can’t believe it’ head-shake, Chappell Roan’s ‘I’m not going to do a bit, I’m just going to walk up there normally’ walk, and a roughly two-second window in which the camera will find Jack Antonoff somewhere in the room, regardless of whether he is nominated for anything.
The Recording Academy has also added a new rehearsal block for what producers are internally calling ‘the moment,’ an unspecified surprise tribute that has reportedly been rehearsed in three separate configurations depending on which legend dies between now and February 1. A fourth backup configuration exists for legends who, per one staffer, ‘might die during the broadcast itself.’
Sabrina Carpenter, who is set to perform, spent four hours Monday rehearsing a transition in which she crosses the stage, hits a mark, and delivers a single eyebrow raise that her choreographer described as ‘the most expensive eyebrow raise in cable television.’ The eyebrow raise will not air if she loses Record of the Year, at which point a backup eyebrow raise has been blocked from a different angle.
The show’s director, asked whether anything at all on the broadcast will be unrehearsed, paused for several seconds before answering that the in-memoriam scroll speed is technically locked but the audience reaction to it ‘leaves room for a little jazz.’
Rehearsals continue through Friday, with Sunday reserved for what the call sheet lists as ‘authentic spontaneity walkthrough, full run.’ Doors open February 1 at 5 p.m. Pacific, by which point every accident on the broadcast will have been workshopped, timed, and signed off by legal.