Midweek Update: A Steady Oscars in a Tumultuous Hollywood

The Oscars have been flailing over the past decade or so as the entertainment industry likewise is in an upheaval. You can’t turn the clock back to 1998 or 2004 when Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King were massive hits that won loads of Oscars and everyone tuned in to see it. The media landscape is more fractured, blockbusters have come to rely more on IP and franchises, and people are cutting the cord, which makes it less likely they’ll watch the Oscar ceremony. Since the Academy depends on the ABC telecast for revenue to fund the Academy’s other projects like film restoration, ABC has tried to make the ceremony catchier and more exciting to combat declining ratings. This led to painful gimmicks and tiresome broadcasts that seemed to actively despise the movies the Academy ostensibly wanted to celebrate.

After last year’s chaos of not only nonsense like shuttling winners in some category to pre-ceremony and launching Twitter polls (and that’s before you get to The Slap, which wasn’t the Academy’s fault, but even if it had never happened, the show still would have been bad), the 95th Oscars were a relief. It was as straighforward as the Oscars get—opening monologue, awards w/presenter banter, songs performed, and In Memoriam. And it’s not that every element of these things were perfect, but the shape and pace of the show were what they should be. The Oscars don’t need to be radically reinvented, and there’s no evidence that such a reinvention would yield the higher ratings that ABC demands.

This straightforward and familiar ceremony exists in strategy to a rapidly changing Hollywood. You need look no further than the night’s two big winners—Everything Everywhere All at Once and All Quiet on the Western Front. One was a strange film with a very big heart, and the other was an old-fashioned and handsomely crafted war drama based off acclaimed material. But even here, All Quiet signaled a different Academy of even ten years ago when Foreign-Language features were relegated to the category of the same name and rarely anything more. The fact that a German-language feature from the biggest streamer (Netflix) was the most serious contender against a movie where people jump across multiverse is the latest sign of how much has changed in cinema in the 21st century.

Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m not going to lay an entire country’s misogynoir at the feet of a single industry group, but there’s certainly a strain in the Academy that sees awards for white people as normalcy as awards for people of color as something they do everything so often as a token gesture. I’d recommend reading these articles by Robert Daniels and Maya Cade about where the Academy is falling short in recognizing Black women, and I hope that in the year to come, they’ll do a better job of recognizing that talent.

You can say, “The Academy just went for the best movies,” but we all know “best” has rarely had much to do with what the Academy chooses (and I say that as someone who loved Everything Everywhere All at Once). It’s politics and it’s influence, and voters would do well to think about which voices they choose to uplift on a regular basis, and which they choose to only acknowledge every five years or so. Hollywood is in upheaval from streamers, changing viewing patterns, and the kinds of films that get made. But in that upheaval, there is hope for doing things better than we’ve done in the past and celebrating artists who are continually overlooked. That’s not just a challenge to the Academy, but to all of us, myself included.

What I’m Watching

We’ve started watching Curb Your Enthusiasm since I haven’t watched it since Season 8 ended in 2011, and my wife has never seen it. The show has lost none of its sting, but I had forgotten that it was one of the earlier shows that shot on digital and was one of the earlier single-cam sitcoms, so the visual quality of season one is pretty lo-res in comparison to even shows that came a few years later.

What I’m Reading

I finished Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars and loved it. While it doesn’t necessarily go deep into any one era, it shows that the most valuable insight the Oscars provide is by reflecting the history they’re a part of. I’ve now moved on to reading Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. I had only read half of it in the past and never got around to the final six issues, so now I’m diving into that.

In other reads:

• “Would You Date a Podcast Bro?” by Gina Cherelus [The New York Times] - This was just funny to me. There’s definitely a “podcast bro” type, but it also feels like such a modern occurrence and something that would merit a Seinfeld episode were the show on the air today. But the article also reminded me of a joke a friend told me when were we thinking of starting a podcast back in 2009. “What is a podcast? Three white dudes with a microphone.”

• “Podcast Companies, Once Walking on Air, Feel the Strain of Gravity” by Reggie Ugwu [The New York Times] - In a related story, the podcast market has, predictably, constricted. Even back in 2013, Parks & Recreation had a great joke where Tom (Aziz Ansari) says, “Podcasts: there are a million of them and they’re all amazing.” Like with most social creative endeavors, my feeling is that if you’re going to get into it, do it because you genuinely enjoy it, not because you think it’s a path to riches.

What I’m Hearing

If you watched the Oscars, you probably noted the three distinct notes from the Oscar-winning score for All Quiet on the Western Front. I decided to listen to the full thing, and why I don’t think I’ll put it on repeat, I certainly didn’t have a problem winning the category (although I remain baffled that The Batman didn’t make the shortlist).

What I’m Playing

It’s still Hogwarts Legacy, which is both addictive in its gameplay and frustrating in its storytelling. It makes you appreciate something like Red Dead Redemption 2 where every side quest feels like a narratively rich story as opposed to Hogwarts Legacy where a guy was like, “My sister stole my money,” and I was like, “I’ll go investigate,” and it turns out it was a niffler (a magical beast that takes shiny things), and that was the end of it.