So the biggest story in Entertainment today is the announcement that starting in 2029, in its 101st year, the Oscars will not just be available on streaming platforms — last year it was available on Hulu and I imagine will be there/Disney+ through 2028 — but be exclusive to one… and that one is YouTube.

And despite the fact that I barely watch or really even care about the Oscars, I have a lot of feelings about this and the threat that it poses.

Because sure, there is one objective positive here: I will now be able to just watch the dang awards. I have watched them — seeing the broadcast cut out as The Slap happened during a watch party was genuinely wild — but it’s not something I actively look forward to or make an effort to do. And this will probably change that.

But in every other respect, it’s awful.

Because this comes on the heels of the likely purchase of Warner Bros.’s cinema and streaming arms by Netflix (Skydance’s hostile bid to acquire the entire company seems unlikely to succeed in large part because it’s stupid as hell), which will truly turn a century of cinema into Content.

And sure, Netflix promises to keep showing Warner Bros. productions in movie theaters, but stated goal is to destroy movie theaters, and now huge swaths of the cinematic canon — Casablanca, 2001: A Space Oddysey, Blade Runner, so much etc. — will become weapons in that fight.

I saw Wake Up Dead Man at the Paris Theater in New York City. It’s a historic institution and the only single-screen theater left in the city: just one big room (with a mezzanine!) and 535 not-particularly comfortable seats. It also closed in 2019, though only briefly: Netflix opened it back up and started showing their own movies there. They have expanded to doing series inspired by the films being shown: the upcoming film by Laura Poitras — one of the journalists who brought Edward Snowden’s story to the world — is being shown alongside some of her other films as well as thematically similar ones — All the Presidents Men, Spotlight, The Parallax View. It’s cool. I go there every so often.

But the reason that Netflix took over the Paris is not because they changed their minds about movie theaters: it’s because to qualify for the Oscars, a movie must play for at least one week in New York and LA. And Netflix can now ensure that whatever movies they would like to make Oscar-eligible get that week (they own The Egyptian in LA for the same reason).

And yeah, sometimes they may give movies broader showings — Wake Up Dead Man was screening at the Alamo Drafthouse as well — but if there’s no feeling that a movie might get awards buzz, it doesn’t get anything. Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge would have been a whole lot more fun in a movie theater… but too fucking bad for me and Saulnier and everyone else.

Now, it’s not like the Oscars were shown in movie theaters, but this new decision from the Aademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences creates an extremely weird scenario where streaming-exclusive films aren’t eligible for awards that will be exclusively viewed via streaming.

And in that, it feels like a death knell.

We don’t know what control YouTube will have over the not-broadcast (fuck man do I have to call it a “stream”?), but I’m quite sure it’s not “none.” Now, I can’t even really fathom what YouTube will be in three-and-change years: they’re doing everything they can to completely upend the platform that is probably the reason you know who I am. If generative AI still exists after the money dries up and a whole bunch of companies die, will Gemini be a presenter? Will the In Memoriam section be generated by Veo?

Disney’s deal with OpenAI to put their characters in their own video generation product that loses them an absolutely hilarious amount of money every single time someone uses it (I’m so glad that the House of Mouse officially blesses people making Mickey do 9/11) is evidence that nothing is safe under the current system, but there is a fundamental difference between an entertainment company doing tech shit and a tech company doing entertainment shit, and the shift from the former to the latter has been accelerating.

Award shows are weird because the only reason they matter is because people agree that they matter. Even with its ever-diminishing reach, there is something special about the words “Academy Award—Winning Actor” being in a trailer (that I only will watch after I’ve seen the movie). It’s cool that people will be introduced to movies that they haven’t heard of by the Oscars, even if the picks are mostly the ones that everyone has been talking about for months.

And I guess that brings us around to the one good thing: the same way this means I will now be able to watch the Oscars, literally everyone with access to YouTube will be able to watch the Oscars (there’s something weird in the language that says “Available for free worldwide on YouTube and also to YouTube TV subscribers”… which, I dunno why that would be separated? Will it work differently in the US? Whatever: I have a VPN so I don’t really care). And so it will likely become more “relevant” than it’s been in years.

And if that means more people are introduced to more amazing movies, then that’s the silver lining of that torrentially down-pouring cloud… but it is also a diminishment of the art. In the years to come, we will see Cinema and Slop sit side-by-side, and no one knows exactly what will happen. Perhaps by the time we get to 2029, this conversation won’t even matter because every movie theater in the country will have gone bankrupt and it’ll all be streaming on Netflix which is the only platform left because they are in the process of buying everyone else too.

But no matter where it is financially or distributionally or whatever, bringing Cinema’s Biggest Night down to the level of Mr Beast and Pregnant Elsa and The Week I Review is something we should all mourn.

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So this kind of immediate hot-take/reaction thing was something I periodically wanted to but was never able to practically do on YouTube. In any case, I had fun writing it and hopefully it's coherent and you found it worthwhile. I'm sure I'll do things like it in the future.