On March 8, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gathered the press of Los Angeles for a very important announcement pertaining to this year’s Academy Awards ceremony: The star-studded preshow space is being reimagined and taken in a new creative direction … by your coastal grandmother. Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel announced that, in a change to over 60 years of history, the show’s red carpet will be torn out.
We asked 29 critics, execs, agents, producers, and analysts who’s winning and who’s struggling to survive. Illustration: James Merritt Illustration: James Merritt It’s been (another) brutal year for most of the players in the streaming space. Budgets are still being slashed and strategies trashed as the legacy companies behind Disney+/Hulu, Max, Peacock, and Paramount+ continue managing the aftershocks of last year’s talent strikes as well as the larger industry correction that began in 2022.
At its very best, Scandal was like a staged drama where everyone played to the rafters. Over seven seasons, the show gave us over-the-top, power-hungry monsters (okay, not all of them were monsters) who knew exactly what to say and when to say it, who felt boldly and loudly, who strode across life and took what they believed was theirs. But more than anything else, it gave us terrific monologues.
When Riverdale premiered back in 2017, it quickly distanced itself from its source text, the wholesome Archie comics. The CW spin on the comic series recasts its beloved characters — golden boy Archie Andrews (KJ Apa), sardonic weirdo Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse), girl-next-door Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart), and heiress with a heart of gold Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes) — as modern, horny teens who hope to solve a murder mystery.
College is among the most formative times in life, at least for the financially fortunate, loan-securing, and/or moderately ambitious among us. This is probably because it’s the first taste of freedom most people get away from home, their parents, and everything else that has defined them for the first 18 years of their lives. The experience is also pretty much similar for everybody.
You know who went to college? Screenwriters and filmmakers.
Nintendo has built a cottage industry out of reselling its classics over and over again. The company’s Virtual Console service, which was available on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS, hosted an impressive cross-section of old games, but it would also charge you like 5 bucks for the privilege of playing Galaga. That never felt like a great deal. Surely we don’t need to be doling out the archive piecemeal, right?
From left: John C. Reilly, Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, Paul Rudd. For your health. Guesting on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! took serious bravery. Anything could happen once you were on set. Would you need to play a pitchman for rentable juvenile clowns on the brink of an emotional meltdown? Or were you simply asked to hold your arms up in a weird way as you made the case for artificial bones?
Sex scenes have a rich, varied tradition in the cinema. They’ve gone through periods of near-ubiquity, as well as scarcity. In the 1960s and ‘70s, they were often used for shock value and to shake viewer complacency. In the 1980s, they were commodified in startling ways. These days, they tend to be relatively rare. But sex scenes have also been important — whether in the development of the cinematic idiom, or sparking controversy, or just plain helping break new ground in depicting intimacy.
Despite reports to the contrary, the romantic comedy is not dead. On television and in film, creators have been granted the freedom to upend traditional expectations for the genre. Glossy candlelit love scenes are out, replaced by rawer and more naturalistic depictions of sex. Happy endings, too, have given way to bittersweet conclusions and melancholy. And while there are still plenty of projects about good-looking white people falling in love in New York, the explosion of creative outlets available has also led to new voices and new kinds of romances.
The Force is strong with these ones. This list was originally published in 2015. We have since updated it to include events from Rogue One, The Last Jedi, Solo, and The Rise of Skywalker, all currently streaming on Disney+. There are many spoilers.
These days, it feels like the title Star Wars refers to battles about the movies, not in them. The galaxy George Lucas built has been roiled with controversy, with fans, trolls, and maybe even actors seemingly taking sides in a struggle over the series’ direction.