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Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

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Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#461

Post by bradchris »

sbarre wrote: post #14
awongh wrote: post #10

The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I think the economics of streaming is finally playing out in the loss of the geographical concentration of power in Hollywood and California. This is the endgame of the feedback loop of streamers causing industry consolidation... the direct connection of dollars people spend to sit in a theatre seat was slowly declining,…

As much as I support unions and labour rights, the last SAG-AFTRA strike mostly just helped the big studios realize they could do more with less. Hollywood is a factory town at the end of the day, and we all know what happened to most factory towns in America. This one is just getting there a few decades after the others.

Well, Hollywood is not the end all be all of Los Angeles (though that is the image Hollywood projects out onto the world).

It’s not even Los Angeles’ biggest industry. Everything from China enters through the Port of Los Angeles, which is the biggest in the United States. In fact, the top two busiest ports in the USA are both Los Angeles and Long Beach (which directly borders Los Angeles).

This is just one example, but Los Angeles, despite its own external projections and self-mythology to the contrary, is much more than just a one industry town. Aside from shipping and logistics, it’s also a center for auto+aerospace manufacturing, and a major healthcare hub. Downtown Los Angeles, which actually serves as a glorified rail freight hub, is still far and away the nation’s capital of garment manufacturing, with over 80%(!) of the nation’s made-in-USA clothing produced here (this is downstream of being the biggest port in the US). Los Angeles has always existed as a center of industry and agriculture before Hollywood, and while the decline of Hollywood certainly hurts the city, it will not kill it.

SF, ironically, is actually moreso a factory town: if one day its tech champions decided to up and leave, there wouldn’t be much left relative to its current GDP. But one thing that may protect both SF and Los Angeles from ever becoming Detroit are their beautiful weather and geography. People will always want to live here, despite the costs. See Santa Barbara, a real city with no major industry to claim as its own, yet it still boasts some of the highest real estate prices in the world.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#462

Post by Jensson »

mmooss wrote: post #222
zimpenfish wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Didn't The Game Awards receive more viewers than the Super Bowl? To be fair, barely anyone (in global terms) watches the Super Bowl. You are correct though - [0] claims 171M for TGA with [1] claiming 125M for the Superb Owl 2026. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2025 [1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...

There's no cite for the 171 million, which is a bit hard to believe. There are cites (which I didn't check) for these claims. Maybe they are counting people watching clips on Twitter? According to Streams Charts, the ceremony peaked at 4.4 million concurrent viewers—the most in its history and a 9% increase from 2024—including 1.4 million viewers on the official YouTube broadcast (an 8% increase) and 1.8 million on T…

You also have to count that people often view these events together in front of the same client. Superbowl isn't shown on that many TV's, its usually a lot of people watching each screen, so you have to count the same way for the game awards.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#463

Post by seanmcdirmid »

raydev wrote: post #428
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The movie theater experience has always been expensive. I don't think they were that expensive in the 1930s and 40s, maybe into the 50s. Supposedly, in the 1930s, they were around 25 cents, which $5 in today's money. We've just seriously gone of the rails on pricing for some reason, but it probably started before I was born (in 75) and has just gotten a lot worse over time (so in the 90s, they were expensive, but a…

Why are you comparing prices from a time when most people in the US weren't even born yet? Comparing with the 90s seems reasonable because nothing is dramatically different about the experience except there are generally better seats now.

If someone says “it’s always been like that”, I definitely take that as a historical pre-birth statement.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#464

Post by Jensson »

awongh wrote: post #223
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic that pro-unionization people on HN frequently use SAG as an example of what a software industry union could look like. Ignoring that that's absurd (no other engineering union I know of works like that), just as the parent highlights, unions won't make a difference when the economics of an industry no longer make sense and that is what is happening to software right now.

One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it. That is just not the case with acting, where the end product being differentiable is part of the inherent value of the product. Also, it's probably true that SAG's loss of in…

> One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it.

But that never happens. The different browsers should in theory be exactly the same but they are different in many ways due to engineers being different.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#465

Post by bradchris »

socalgal2 wrote: post #230

If Sinners and One Battle After Another are up for movie of the year then it's no wonder no one is going. One is a fun but ultimately forgettable horror action movie. The other is a movie that just based on its major theme would attract less then half the country and even in those remaining is a very polarizing movie. It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good.

I can’t agree with this statement because One Battle After Another is actually a movie about fatherhood and the lengths you go to to raise a child, and very explicitly makes fun of how many “fight the power” movements are often ineffective or devolve into making the problem you’re fighting against worse.

It’s a movie about family loyalties transcending and persisting through all else, which is a pretty universal message.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#466

Post by snthpy »

WarmWash wrote: post #96

My fiance mentioned we haven't gone to see a movie in theaters in years and it would be fun to go. I checked what was playing and: 2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn. $86 dollars. Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.

Different currency, same conclusion. Plus add on the cost of the baby sitter and the fact that TVs now provide a home Cinema experience.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#467

Post by xp84 »

Larrikin wrote: post #76
xp84 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To test whether you’re right, please list 10 movies made in the last 10 years that will stand the test of time as truly great movies. If fewer than one per year is worth watching, it’s a hard sell to say that we should spend our time sorting through the chaff trying to find it. It’s entirely possible that we’re in a period where most of those with creativity have just stopped making movies. Interestingly, I find TV h…

List ten movies that will stand the test of time in the time frame of the decade after you turned 25. This will make it less biased to stuff you think is good just because you had never seen anything similar. Any list will be subjective so instead of taking your initial bait for you to subsequently tear down, people (but probably AI) can construct a list to your personal taste.

I don't even think I'd have the right to tear down anyone's list -- I actually think that even if an 22-year-old replied with a list of ten movies from 2016-2025 that he went to the cinema to see, and which he would be happy to recommend, that'd be enough for me!

I brought up this list: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/essential-2000s-m... and scrolled through, and I think I saw at least half these movies either in the theater or as rentals, and most of the ones I saw I loved. Furthermore, I think at least a third are major contributors to the American cultural canon, both as being in the zeitgeist in the season of their initial release as well as being remembered going forward. For instance, people still today make references to "Mean Girls" or "The Dark Knight" or "Minority Report" that only fully make sense if you've seen those films or at least know they exist and their premises. And I think it would be pretty easy to make a list of 50-75 significant movies each from the 80s and 90s, but I'm focusing on ones during my adulthood to follow the spirit of your ask.

This is what I can't imagine finding ten of in the past decade. I'd be tempted to put "Barbie" on that list potentially, given how many memes I've seen using frames from it. Also, honestly, several Pixar films deserve to be on the list too, though I admit that I'm biased because they're some of the few that I've seen.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#468

Post by rambojohnson »

bloomingeek wrote: post #284
tyjen wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last movie we attended people were incredibly disruptive throughout the film, to the point that it was difficult to focus on the film. Some people enjoy screaming, laughing, and talking as part of the experience, but it's apparently been normalized beyond my tolerance threshold. Add in the cost and overall movie quality decrease of Hollywood productions, and it's difficult to justify. Presently, we watch foreign…

Sort of off topic, but almost the same can be said for music concerts. During slower or softer songs, people can be heard talking and laughing loudly. I get it, they paid their money, same as us, but we didn't pay to hear them.

A couple years ago I went to a county fair because someone said the pie judging was worth seeing. I’ve been to fairs before but never really watched the judging part. They had all the pies on this weird low table, like not quite a kid’s playset table but close, so people leaning in to look kept bumping it with their legs and thighs without noticing, and after a while one of the pies just slowly started sliding toward the edge every time the table got nudged until it eventually tipped off and landed upside down on the floor while the judges were busy debating crust integrity on another pie.

I picked it up and put it back and they still gave it third place.

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#469

Post by crabkin »

hitekker wrote: post #447
crabkin wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious political stance of One Battle After Another notwithstanding, given how much the film succeeds as an exercise in using the language of cinema to tell a compelling story, it comes across (ironically) as idealogically motivated to say the movie isnt nominated in part for its merits with regard to craft and construction. No doubt it appeals to people at the Academy in its persuasion, but if we were to strip…

Your first sentence is confusingly worded. Do you mean the GP is ideological for saying the movie is unpopular? Or that he's ideological for saying the movie isn't good? I haven't seen the movie in question but it looks like it underperformed pretty badly (-$90M) at the box office.

As if box office is a proxy for quality. I seriously question whether your comment is made in good faith to begin with, are you intentionally misunderstanding me?

Their assertion that "It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good," just flat out doesn't hold under scrutiny. Why? Consider that there is a lineage of people who are essentially writing statements using a language "of the screen," people like Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, to name a few. No matter what the film is ``about," the person crafting the film must grapple with the same things: how do I order the events? How does this work psychologically? Is this coherent? Does this say what I want it to? And such concerns scale down to very practical problem-solving on the day-to-day so that the vision may be best served.

Whether you agree with the values the film espouses or not, it succeeds as a work of cinema, full stop. That's true even if it was never shown in a theatre. People who work in the film industry know that, which is why the Oscars isn't precisely a "what is the wokest film" contest every year. Therefore if you assert it's just "preaching" correctly that is basically reducing something that has enormous value in terms of craft into just "messages;" ironically, you are doing so because you can't see past "messages."

Re: Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

#470

Post by remarkEon »

longislandguido wrote: post #212
WarmWash wrote: post #96

My fiance mentioned we haven't gone to see a movie in theaters in years and it would be fun to go. I checked what was playing and: 2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn. $86 dollars. Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.

Most if not all the ticket price goes directly into the studio's pockets. So the theatres stay alive by selling concessions. I'd wager everyone here complaining about prices would also wax poetic about how theatres don't "pay a living wage" to the kids scooping popcorn and would immediately drive home in their $100k Rivians or Teslas so they can give a one star review on Yelp or complain on Reddit about the bathrooms…

There's way more middlemen then when people went to the movies in the 1950s, it's not that complicated. Back then, the theater got the film roll in a USPS delivery, and the people that manned the popcorn were high schoolers. Over the years we have injected lots of lawyers at every level of this and, alas, everything about "watching a movie" is more expensive.
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