“It’s a crazy irony that your reward for incredible artistic success in modern Hollywood is that you then get to lay off a bunch of your employees,” Prestige Junkie host Katey Rich tells Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Natalie Jarvey in the run-up to Sunday’s Oscars, where two Warner Bros. films — Sinners and One Battle After Another — are going head-to-head for best picture right as Paramount Skydance is about to swallow the studio whole. “It really couldn’t be a more perfect metaphor for how backward so many of the industry’s priorities are.”

Speaking of which, The Business of Television author and former head of business affairs at Paramount TV and Amazon Studios, Ken Basin, stops by to chat about the current state of dealmaking in television, how much the Paramount-Warner merger is going to weigh on day-to-day business (“Warners is effectively frozen”), and what Netflix should do with its $2.8 billion breakup fee.

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