The 2009 Academy Awards took place this past Sunday and aboard the Sapphire Princess, we were ready to celebrate. It was the night of our first Sea Day, and the first Formal Night of our Mexican Riviera cruise. The accommodations team had done a spectacular job of decorating Club Fusion, complete with a red carpet and a giant ice sculpture of an Oscar statuette. There were custom graphics created for the screens about the lounge, and a PowerPoint presentation for the two sessions of Oscar Trivia that would take place during the ceremony. Passengers packed the lounge looking their finest, and everyone settled in for a fun evening. There was just one problem.

Right before the show was to begin, we lost our TV signal. It said right in the Princess Patter that the event was “Satellite Reception Permitting”, and it started to look like the satellite reception would not permit. The host of the event, I noticed passengers start to nervously look at their watches as five minutes late turned into ten. And ten minutes late turned into twenty. I made intermittent announcements to tell the passengers that the tech crew was doing all that they could to pick the signal back up. But as time continued to tick by, the need to get some entertainment happening grew urgent.

The trivia quiz was supposed to be conducted a question or two at a time during the commercial breaks in the Oscar telecast. But we kicked it off to get the festivities started, and the passengers were happy to play. The tech team kept in touch with the production staff in the Club Fusion booth regularly but it got late enough that we knew we needed to come up with a new plan quickly.

Immediately, the event was restructured. Karen, one of our cruise staff, went into the back office to get stationed on an Internet terminal. I conducted the two sessions of Oscar Trivia, giving out early-bird prizes for particularly hard questions and breaking to take a call from Karen whenever an award was presented. Passengers submitted their Oscar picks earlier in the day so they were keeping score with great enthusiasm, especially now that our Cruise Director, Josh, had upgraded the Grand Prize from a tote bag and bottle of champagne to dinner for two in the Sterling Steakhouse (our fancy-pants fine dining restaurant).

There were a few people who drifted away to dinner or to find something else to do as the crowd realized that we were not going to get the TV signal. But as we reached an equilibrium and new people found their way into Club Fusion, something really fun happened. It stopped feeling like a rained out baseball game and turned into a really special event in it’s own right. The level of excitement amongst the trivia participants grew, and the cheers when awards were announced increased to cacophonous levels. You would not have been able to tell that this was anything other than exactly how we had planned to do the Oscars aboard the Sapphire Princess all along.

Tags: awards, boat, ceremony, crusie, event, holiday, life, me, oscars, party