We’d Like To Spank The Academy

Let’s talk about the movies. A bunch of factors have contributed to the shrinking of the movies and the Oscars in recent years. The film industry itself has changed. Streaming services have become fixtures in most households. COVID-19 happened. Social media wrecked everyone’s attention span and came to compete with every other kind of media for what was left of that attention span. Social media also tribalized the collective experience of movie watching and entertainment awards. It has tended to create multiple camps within which there’s only one right answer to questions like, Which movie was best? Which actor deserved to win? It doesn’t have to be like that! We think there’s a way to revive and modernize the way movies fit into our culture, including how people talk and disagree about them. We think we can make our collective experience of film a little more enjoyable, a little less like zero-sum warfare. Host Brian Beutler and Crooked Media Producers Kendra James and Olivia Martinez discuss the merits and flaws of last year’s hits and misses, from Top Gun: Maverick and M3GAN, to Babylon and Beast, and invent new award categories for these movies that better capture how fans relate to cinema in the modern era.