Lady Gaga will not take perform her nominated song “Hold My Hand” come Oscar Sunday.
The “Stupid Love” singer, 36, was invited to the 95th Academy Awards, but had to turn down the offer due to scheduling conflicts with the Joker sequel Folie à Deux, Oscars producer Glenn Weiss said Wednesday during the Oscars Creative Team press conference.
“We have great relationships with Lady Gaga and her camp [but] she’s in the middle of shooting a movie right now, and here we are honoring the movie industry and what it takes to make a movie,” Weiss said. “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, that she’s used to and all that stuff.”
Weiss continued: “So she is not going to perform on the show, however, this is all, from our point of view, about someone making a movie and us completely understanding that that’s what is priority in this business, especially when we are honoring movies.”
Aside from Gaga, whose nominated song was featured in Top Gun: Maverick, all of this year’s nominees for Best Original Song have been confirmed to perform at the ceremony.
She last performed at the 2019 Oscars, where her song “Shallow” from A Star Is Born won Best Original Song. She was also nominated that year for Best Actress, and also received a Best Original Song nod in 2016 for “Til It Happens to You” from The Hunting Ground.
All nominated songs are typically performed during the ceremony each year. This year’s nominations include Rihanna‘s “Lift Me Up,” Sofia Carson and Diane Warren’s “Applause,” Stephanie Hsu, David Byrne and Son Lux’s “This Is Life” and Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava’s “Naatu Naatu.”
During an interview in May of last year, Top Gun: Maverick star Tom Cruise sang Gaga’s praises for her work in the film.
According to Cruise, 60, the “incredible” Gaga is “not just on the soundtrack” of the movie, a follow-up to 1986’s Top Gun, but “helped compose the score.”
Cruise explained that Gaga presented her song to him and Hans Zimmer, who also composed the music for the film, after they were struggling with finding the right fit.
“It just opened up the whole movie. She’s amazing,” he told James Corden. “It just opened those doors to the emotional core of the film that we had … in that moment, things just came together in such a beautiful way. Her song that she’d written just fell right in and became, really, the underlying score and the heartbeat of our film.”
She released the song days before and encouraged listeners to have “faith in humanity” in an Instagram post.
“I wanted to say that I wrote the song for the INCREDIBLE movie #topgun#topgunmaverick but also for people who feel like they’re not gonna be ok or WE ARE never gonna be ok and that life taught me through hard times to have faith in humanity when it’s hard to have faith in yourself,” Gaga wrote alongside a selfie.
“When you feel lonely, sad, removed from the world, far away from yourself and others #holdmyhand One day you may even be strong enough to hold your own 🤝,” continued the caption. “I love you with my whole heart for all the years I’ve been blessed to sing, write songs, produce and perform for you. Thank you 🙏 here we go!!! 🖤✈️”
The “Alejandro” singer is currently filming for the upcoming musical sequel to 2019’s Joker, titled Joker: Folie à Deux with Joaquin Phoenix. She is set to play Harley Quinn.