Oscar backstage with iPad

The 83rd Annual Academy Awards will be held in just over a week and in preparation for the big night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and ABC have created an Oscar companion app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

The Oscar Backstage Pass [iTunes link] app is designed to give Oscar lovers an inside look before, during and after the big show. The $0.99 app is part of the Academy’s growing investment in digital media. Like the Grammy Awards, Oscar is fighting a battle to stay relevant in an always-connected, multi-screen, live-streamed world.

In the days leading up to the show, the app offers users access to interviews, behind-the-scenes video clips and key Oscar moments from the past. The real action starts with the red carpet arrivals before the big night on February 27. The app will let users access multiple live streams of celebrity arrivals and switch cameras and camera angles.

During the ceremony, cameras will continue to offer users customizable backstage viewing from more than two dozen cameras set up throughout the Kodak Theater. Just like the Grammy Awards, viewers won’t be able to watch the Oscar telecast live within the app. Instead, the app is meant to serve as a second-screen experience. Users can still get augmented backstage camera views (and can control the cameras that they see) and see post-award interviews, the ceremony itself will not be broadcast in the app.

The app experience will continue immediately after the awards at the official post-ceremony celebration at the Governor’s Ball. Having streaming cameras at the Governor’s Ball — an event only rivaled by Vanity Fair’sOscar party — is an interesting step for the Academy. Embracing voyeurism — and in fact capitalizing on it — is either shrewd or sad, depending on one’s perspective.

We think that charging for the app is smart — if risky. Most award shows that offer an enhanced backstage mobile or web experience do so for free. By charging, not only are the Academy and ABC better able to test the waters as to demand for this sort of content, the content itself remains exclusive. At the end of the day, that exclusivity is just one of the things that makes Oscar, well, Oscar.

Story by Mashable.com