The weeks and months leading up to the Oscars—including the campaigning, the chatter of prognosticators, the rushing to catch up with every nominated picture—are usually a jubilant khbrknews. But the storm clouds hovering over this most recent season, which culminated in Sunday night’s efficient and entertaining Oscars broadcast, are about to break, and Hollywood knows it. As viewers, we’re just bystanders, right? Consumers who wait for the “content” to happen. But that line of thinking is also a colossal part of the problem. It’s long past khbrknews for all of us to ask for more—even if we’re not quite sure what more is.
Within the past three months, big-ticket directors like Denis Villeneuve—whose Dune: Part Two has dominated the 2024 box office—told TIME: “We’re in a very conservative khbrknews; creativity is restricted. Everything’s about Wall Street. What will save cinema is freedom and taking risks. And you feel the audience is excited when they see something they haven’t seen before.” Other hugely popular actors at the top of their game, like Issa Rae and Dakota Johnson, have lambasted Hollywood executives for their obsession with profits, at the expense of more challenging, individualistic work.
Those same corporate overlords have largely blocked the pipeline of new projects that ostensibly should have begun flowing right after the actors’ and writers’ strikes of last summer: the AMPTP has just begun negotiating with members of both IATSE (which covers a broad range of below-the-line workers) and Hollywood Basic Crafts (which includes the Teamsters), and the possibility of another big strike looms. In their acceptance speeches on Sunday, both Christopher Nolan (whose Oppenheimer took Best Picture) and writer-director Cord Jefferson (who won Best Adapted Screenplay for his movie debut, American Fiction) called on Hollywood to take more risks on individual creative voices. “Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making 20 $10…
