And the Winner Is... 📧
The Academy Awards take place this weekend. It has long been the one award show I actually watch, mainly because of tradition. I'll sadly likely miss most of the telecast this year due to the fact that I'm in England where it will air live at around 11pm local time and run until either 2am or 3am depending on how long they let the speeches go. It should be a pretty good one because there's a huge anchor movie this year in Oppenheimer. It's not only a great film, it will be an official anointing of sorts for director Christopher Nolan, who has never won the Best Director Oscar – which seems crazy until you consider that Stanley Kubrick never won it in his entire career – but will this year.
The movie business is riding into this weekend quite high, on space spice, thanks to Dune: Part 2. Denis Villeneuve's movie not only blew the doors off the box office, but it is very, very good. It will definitely be nominated for Best Picture next year – which is interesting because it was supposed to come out last year, but was pushed due to the Hollywood strikes. So it could have been Villeneuve vs. Nolan. Now the two friends and arguably the current kings of Hollywood get to fully enjoy each others' works of art.
Anyway, I still like my ideas from a couple years ago for how to "save" the Oscars. To summarize:
- Make the show two hours, max
- Create a "Best Movie" alongside "Best Picture"
- Give out a "Hall of Fame" Oscar which revisits a past year, each year
All may sound obvious and/or thrown out there in the past, but I'd urge you to read the post, I think the devil is in the details of how this should all work. The notion of "best" has always been silly as it's far too subjective and it's even harder to try to be objective without the benefit of time, as in years. Perspective. What movies actually stand the test of time? It's often not the Best Picture winner...
Briefly...
How Bad Can It Get For Hollywood? – This piece dives into some previous eras of Hollywood when things seemed imperiled, only for a reset and reinvigoration to happen thanks to the creative community, of course. It feels like such a reset is happening again in our post-franchise comedown. But there are other, more structural industry changes happening at the same time. Hopefully the movie theater answer is more in the vein of a great night out and less in the vein of, well, whatever the hell this is. Ultimately though, it still comes down to the content which will push us through. I mean, you've seen Dune by now, right? 🎬
Is He Going to Ruin My Day? – A nice profile of Matt Belloni, whose What I'm Hearing newsletter for Puck has been a great insider-y Hollywood read since day one. Some fun inside baseball about how he has operated within the industry he covers. "Belloni writes the way he speaks: chatty, a little bitchy, like a know-it-all parent." 🗣️
Can Warner Bros. Uncancel J.K. Rowling? – This is the dance David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery are trying to do right now – and both his future and the future of the entire company may depend on it. Some interesting tidbits in here about how they're able to navigate around Rowling with certain bits of Harry Potter content given all the various rights deals over the years. A full-on Potter TV series, which may cost $250M a season, is slated for 2026. 🪄
Rivian Surprises with R3 and R3X Electric SUVs – Rivian pulled the old "one more thing" in their next gen R2 announcement. The R3 looks fantastic. It's clean and distinct. I've never owned a Tesla myself – did some test drives back in the day, but found a lot of the little details lacking in quality that I couldn't get past. Rivian looks to be producing quality. I just hope they can scale and stay alive long enough. Speaking of "one more thing", the R3 looks like an electric car that Apple might have produced had they not been completely lost in the space for a decade. (Though I overall think it would have been far more interesting to try to do something different, like a self-driving pod, not just a nicer car.) If only Rivian would include CarPlay in their vehicles... 🔋
My Missives...
M.G. Siegler
Thoughts on Dune 2, after year, two viewings...
M.G. Siegler
The ongoing battle between the EU and Apple...
M.G. Siegler
The ongoing battle between Epic and Apple...
Quotable...
"The only reason it wasn’t higher is we ran out of seats."
-- Rich Gelfond, CEO of IMAX, on the Dune: Part 2 opening numbers of which IMAX represented around 23% of domestic ticket sales, or $18.5 million.
Some Thoughts On...
🍎 Apple's quest to find what's next...
📰 Microsoft going after the NYT...
🤖 That pesky definition of AGI...
🪟 How AI might reinvigorate Microsoft Windows...
🚗 The Apple Car that wasn't...
Quickly...
- At the Oscars the red carpet will actually be red again this year after switching to a more champagne color last year (due to fears of rain). The tradition in film dates to 1922 with the premiere of Robin Hood (though the Oscars have only used it since 1961, with their own, special shade of red).
- Speaking of red... Nikon has acquired the high-end film camera maker RED – which I had no idea was founded by the founder of Oakley as well.
- The WSJ shows some love to Clippy, the old,
annoyingpioneering AI avatar thing that started as a part of Microsoft Bob. Which yes, I owned. No relation to Steve Ballmer's Clippers, as was made clear with their weird branding change. - Reading online keeps getting more awesome!
- All of these are better options than what we currently get when an incoming call interrupts another call on iOS. Which is pure cognitive madness. Pick one of these and adopt it immediately, Apple.
- Everyone remembers the Christopher Walken-dancing music video, but did you know that some of the lyrics in "Weapon of Choice" reference Dune?! "Walk without rhythm/and it won’t attract the worm."
- Steven Levy has his mind blown by the speed of the chatbots powered by the AI chips of Groq.
- Lanny Snoot holds more patents than anyone else at Disney, and his latest idea involves a floor to let you move in XR...
- "All of US history has occurred within a single Pluto orbit."
- When Elon met Sam – colorful backstory on the latest OpenAI lawsuit
- I've wondered alongside many others what the VisionPro might be doing to our eyes, just having a screen that close. Sounds like it's fine, but you may need some eye drops every once in a while...
- John Walker, a co-founder of Autodesk who helped turn AutoCAD into a phenomenon, recently passed away – his backstory is a good read.
- Disneyland is apparently getting a new Avatar world to match the one attached to Disney World in Florida, but what's wild to me is that Bob Iger says that they could increase the size of Disneyland by 50%!
- Mike Tyson is going to fight Jake Paul in a exhibition boxing match produced and shown live by Netflix. So much for Netflix not being interested in live events, they're seemingly doing one a week now!
- At last, signs that San Francisco politics are thawing from their years of frozen stupidity. Make the city great again, sincerely...
Choose Your Fighter...
I mean, my god. How awful. As if the endless barrage of (completely meaningless because we've all drowned in them) privacy pop-ups weren't enough, the EU is now about to push the below in the face of all iPhone users in Europe. What could possibly go wrong with such a clearly well-constructed and thought-through list? We're going to find out!
