You’ve got to love the Oscars, the biggest night in the entertainment industry, where the red carpet gets rolled out over the detritus and waste of Hollywood Boulevard.
There, for a single night every year, the celebrity impersonators, strung-out junkies, and Midwestern tourists give way to the biggest night in Hollywood, which, if you’ve ever actually been to Hollywood, isn’t really saying much, particularly after the tragic closure of the last Kenny Rogers Roasters location in the US.
On Oscar night, the biggest celebrities in the world show up at a mid-tier mixed-use shopping mall anchored by a DSW and a California Pizza Kitchen for a night of self-congratulatory speeches, overpriced drinks (the Golden Globes would never), and awkward Melissa Rivers encounters.
The real reason for the Academy Awards is as much about perpetuating the myth of “Hollywood” (which features exactly 0 studios or major production companies, although it does have the world’s busiest Chick-fil-A and Jimmy Kimmel) as the actual awards themselves.
Of course, occasionally, reality shows up and ruins the entire evening faster than you can say “Weinstein.”
The 2026 Oscars were no different. The industry’s biggest night delivered the usual parade of gowns, speeches and emotional montages, but the subtext hanging over the Dolby Theatre felt a little darker than usual – which is kind of surprising, given that Sean Penn decided he had better things to do (much like viewers, apparently, as ratings across platforms hit a 4 year low (the year a movie in sign language distributed by Apple won Best Picture).
The Oscar apathy has been building for some time, a result of the same things that should give everyone in the industry existential angst: fragmented audiences, “multi-device viewing,” and the fact that when most people want to see the rich and famous call out their designers and accessory brands, they just go to TikTok. Ditto one-off Conan O’Brien bits, as his @TeamCoco TikTok (high recommend, fwiw) has close to a million followers.
For comparison, the average audience for his stint hosting the Tonight Show – a prestige brand on a broadcast network, back when TikTok was called Music.ly and YouTube was still in its Chocolate Rain/Charlie Bit My Finger days – was around 3 million. This might have been why he was replaced so quickly, but at least he’s finally beating Letterman in the ratings (who has less than 200k TikTok followers).
The real winner here? Probably Larry Ellison, who now owns both the Oscars and TikTok (we dedicated a whole newsletter to his Lex Luthor reboot last week). But for AMPAS, even the winners are starting to look like losers, except for Michael B. Jordan, because no one loses when there’s a double-double involved.
The point is, the Academy Awards this year were a celebration with the same vibe as people must have felt listening to the musicians on the deck of the Titanic during their impromptu jam session. Studios are merging (congrats to Warner Bros. on its last Best Picture award as an independent entity), layoffs continue to ripple throughout the industry, and content creation has shifted from vertical integration to commoditization over the past decade.
The Oscars have always been way too self-congratulatory and self important, but this year, it felt more performative, with the nagging question that kept surfacing in the coverage from the trades: if this is the golden age of content, why does if feel like even the people who are working and being recognized as the literal best in the business all look so nervous about their job prospects?
The fact that they invented a category for Best Casting almost seemed like an implicit shout-out to the people responsible for helping them get gigs (interestingly, agents and managers seemed to get far fewer acceptance speech thank yous this year). Because as everyone working in this industry knows, even winning an Oscar doesn’t necessarily make getting paychecks any easier – just ask Cuba Gooding, Mo’Nique, or Harvey Weinstein.
It really has been the year for One Battle After Another in the industry.
Speaking of, here’s where the battle lines were drawn for media and entertainment careers this week:
Look, there’s nothing about Paul Thomas Anderson’s career that’s really a great lesson in how to work your way up the ladder (see: Adam Sandler and Healthy Choice jello as a major plot device). But the fact is, his latest exercise in esoterica swept the night, with six more wins than the Timothee Chammolet ping pong period piece.
That those were the two leading contenders proves the growing divide between industry and audience preferences – and there’s never a happy ending for industries or brands that fail to evolve along with changing consumer tastes.
Sure, network news remains editorially independent and has journalistic cache, but who needs Tony Dukopil for news when you’ve got X or Reddit?
Full Story: Hollywood Economic Strain Can’t Be Hidden at the Oscars (Bloomberg)
What It Means for Your Career:
The Academy Awards are, like the Masters, a tradition unlike any other. Also like the Masters, those traditions seem about as irrelevant to audiences today as the Eisenhower era, when both were arguably at their apogee.
True originality and creative vision continues to play an outsized role in influencing industry tastes and trends, even in an era that’s dominated by franchises, algorithms and IP valuations. There’s never been more filmed content flooding into the market, but if you have a distinct voice and enough determination, eventually, you’ll find recognition, respect and validation – if not a first look deal or a streamer exclusivity contract.
You just might have to survive five development hells, a lot of high concept prestige pilots for streamers that never get picked up for full runs, and having to buy groceries with money you made from Substack subscriptions and one-off content marketing gigs in between.
That’s incredibly encouraging if you value the craft – but highly frustrating if you also value craft services (and some semblance of stability).
Full story: The Best Genre Films of the Year – New York Times
Genre works, like horror movies or sci-fi, have always been relatively easy to produce and consistently profitable. The first-ever narrative film, in fact, combined sci-fi and stop-motion animation, two genres that remain entrenched in the industry firmament. But (cue bad Rodney Dangerfield impersonation), they get no respect. Suddenly, though, they’re driving the few growth businesses in media and entertainment (see: A24, Crunchroll, Korean limited series).
Suddenly, though, the genre is winning Oscars. Sinners, a supernatural blaxploitation period piece featuring vampires and the storytelling conventions of The Parent Trap, became the most nominated movie of all time (and Amy Madigan won a well-deserved first award for the campiest Oscar performance since Gloria Swanson in yet another high genre, low budget horror film).
Even the latest iteration of Frankenstein, a story that’s inspired an estimated 450 feature-length films – one opened as recently as last week, and apparently, Maggie Gyllenhaal should stick to acting – walked away with multiple awards, including production design, makeup design, and costume design.
There used to be a hierarchy between “legitimate” entertainment and genre projects that was fairly rigid, even though the box office and Nielsens have always been about even when comparing “serious” and “popcorn” projects (the latter holding a slight edge since the late 70s).
Now, that delta is collapsing, and genre storytelling is finally seen as a path to prestige, even though most are, in fairness, crassly commercial – which today, isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Full story: The Best Genre Films of the Year – New York Times
The lesson here is pretty obvious: the categories that used to limit your career or make you professionally irrelevant are now what’s getting produced and funded – and often are where the most interesting and innovative work happens. Finding a niche often means finding an audience, but there’s no longer a trade-off between selling tickets or selling out. If you can’t do both, you should probably find another line of work.
In today’s era of personal brands, influencer marketing, and extreme segmentation, specialization, and reputation go hand in hand. Doubling down on a single genre, even a seemingly obscure one like, say, K-Pop Anime, is likely a better strategy for building a sustainable career than diversification and generalization, above and below the line.
The good news is, in today’s entertainment and media landscape, you no longer get shunned for doing so – you get celebrated. Hell, Ed Wood could probably get an anthology series greenlit by Peacock these days, so if you end up stuck in a single genre, chances are, you’re gonna crush it.
Speaking of the Oscars, Disney didn’t walk away with Best Animated Feature for a fourth consecutive year, winning only one Oscar: Best Visual Effects for the most recent Avatar reboot. What must be particularly galling to The Walt Disney Company’s leadership is that, for the first time ever, Netflix walked away with the award in a category whose genre Disney literally invented.
This is sort of indicative of larger problems at the House of Mouse – because, surprise, surprise, Disney is in a reinvention cycle. Again. If you’ve been paying attention, this means someone expensive broke something, so a little rebranding exercise is in order.
True to form, longtime chief Bob Iger’s newly minted replacement, Josh D’Amaro, is doing exactly what you’d expect from an incoming exec inheriting a company that’s simultaneously the most recognizable brand on earth and quietly hemorrhaging audience trust: leaning on storytelling and creativity as Disney’s North Star, paired with some obligatory gestures toward technology.
Translation: fix streaming before they burn through another few billion dollars finding out what doesn’t work.
For anyone who’s followed Disney for longer than a fiscal year, this should sound pretty familiar by now.
Disney has long positioned itself as a storytelling company, even while the actual revenue engine drifted toward theme parks, licensing and IP deals and basically milking Marvel and Star Wars until both brands were so diluted that audiences kinda stopped paying attention.
Disney Parks & Resorts, which D’Amaro ran before this promotion (his last was a 2 for 1 on clearance mouse ear hats) has been carrying the financial weight while the media business dealt with declining linear TV and uneven streaming results.
So what you’ve basically got now is an operations guy running a creativity company, with a chief creative officer installed as a kind of institutional conscience – a negotiated cease fire between art and earnings.
That means while the content of his remarks will grab headlines, it’s the subtext that truly stands out.
When a CEO starts talking about creativity this loudly and this publicly, it usually means the content pipeline has gotten stale. This isn’t news to anyone who loves film – or anyone who loves Disney, for that matter. Franchise fatigue is real, data suggests it’s accelerating, and audiences in 2026 have more options than most studios want to admit in public.
That’s the actual problem underneath all the “unified storytelling” language. The old model, where IP alone was enough to guarantee a theatrical opening weekend, is cracking. You can reboot the same story a certain number of times before even the most nostalgic fans start to feel like they’ve been had. Research on franchise fatigue has been circulating in the trades for a few years now. The box office is just making it undeniable.
Full Story: Disney’s New CEO Says His Focus is on Storytelling and Creativity (LA Times)
The headline is simple, even if everyone around it insists on making it complicated. Creativity is back in fashion because mediocrity stopped paying at scale.
If you’re anywhere near content, development, or production, the bar is quietly being raised while the job description stays exactly the same. Tolerance for “good enough” has dropped. It had to. Audiences aren’t as loyal to platforms or studios as they used to be, more or less out of habit. They’re loyal to things worth watching. That’s a different contract entirely.
This renewed emphasis on storytelling isn’t some romantic return to filmmaker-driven cinema. It’s still a business. The people who actually thrive here are the ones who can hold both things at once, which is the creative instinct and the distribution logic, without insisting one is more legitimate than the other. The ones who treat data like the enemy of art usually aren’t working at the level they think they deserve.
There’s also a structural signal here that’s easy to miss. Disney reorganizing around storytelling that spans film, streaming, TV, and gaming isn’t just a reshuffle. It’s an indication that medium-specific expertise is becoming less of a moat.
Knowing how to make a movie, or a limited series, or a game is less valuable on its own than knowing how to build something that works across all of them: franchises, ecosystems, the audience journey, etc. – not just putting another generic project in the can and calling it a day.
Then there’s the trust problem, which is harder to fix than any of the operational stuff. Disney’s brand was built on emotional consistency.
Once that slips, no amount of IP acquisition gets it back quickly. That puts a real premium on people who understand why audiences feel things, not just how to green-light content that fits a release calendar.
The irony of “storytelling and creativity” being the strategic priority is that they sound like soft skills right up until they’re the most valuable and hardest-to-hire capabilities in the building. Sequels are easy, but making something people feel compelled to watch is pretty hard. Trust us, we write a weekly newsletter.
Disney is betting that going back to its roots will solve a very modern problem. If you’re building a career here, you don’t get that same luxury. Nostalgia isn’t a strategy, and you can’t keep your castle secure without building a moat.
The Oscars aren’t the only awards in town, obviously; Emmy season is technically still months out. Nominations drop in July, the ceremony’s on September 14. But the industry’s real storyline for 2026 isn’t going to be about which streaming drama sweeps or whether Zendaya finally becomes a dynasty.
It’s about who won’t be around to watch.
While award season coverage fixates on prestige cable and whatever HBO Max is doing with Sunday nights, the FCC just quietly handed local television to a single corporation.
Nexstar’s $6.2 billion deal to acquire Tegna cleared both the FCC and the Justice Department this week, creating what would become the largest operator of local TV stations in the country.
And the way the agency got there is worth pausing on. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr simply waived the cap that had, for decades, prevented any one company from owning stations reaching more than 39% of American households. One signature and a decades-old safeguard is just gone.
The combined entity will own 265 television stations across 44 states, most of them local affiliates of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. At that scale, you’re less a media company than a utility, and one with very little regulatory friction left to worry about.
The Oscars spent a good chunk of this past awards cycle worrying about what studio consolidation means for the film industry. Fair concern. But the Emmys, if anyone’s paying attention, are about to roll around against the backdrop of something more consequential.
This merger absorbs the local news ecosystem into a single balance sheet, and it was already producing casualties before the ink was dry.
Full Story: US Approves $6.2B Nexstar-Tenga Deal that May Reshape Broadcast TV (Washington Post)
Nexstar laid off KTLA’s Mark Kriski, an eight-time Emmy winner who had been a fixture of LA morning television since 1991, along with midday anchors Glen Walker and Lu Parker, as part of nationwide cuts that also hit WGN in Chicago and WPIX in New York.
At WGN, Sean Lewis, a nearly two-decade veteran and the station’s first openly gay anchor, found out he was being cut while sitting in on a meeting to support a colleague who was also being let go. That’s the kind of detail that doesn’t fit neatly into a synergy slide deck.
SAG-AFTRA condemned the layoffs, with president Sean Astin saying Nexstar was “eroding the resources and talent that local communities rely on for trusted news.” The union also noted that Nexstar was simultaneously pushing to gut severance in active contract negotiations, so the cost-cutting was running in both directions at once.
Now here’s the part that should make anyone watching the Paramount-Warner Bros. situation very nervous. Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is expected to close sometime in Q3 2026, pending regulatory clearances.
The conventional wisdom was that federal approval was likely given the political climate. What happened with Nexstar-Tegna this week reinforces that read pretty decisively. If the FCC will waive a decades-old ownership cap for a local broadcasting deal with this little public process, it’s not hard to extrapolate what happens when two of Hollywood’s most iconic studios come knocking with a friendlier political tailwind.
The uncomfortable throughline connecting all of this is that synergies tend to land on the same group every time: working journalists, local anchors, the producers and technical directors who built careers at stations that now belong to holding companies focused on household reach rather than actual reporting.
The Emmys celebrate the best of what television can be, while the merger wave systematically hollows out the infrastructure that makes most of television function. Both things are happening at the same time, and the industry has gotten very good at only paying attention to the one with a red carpet.
The Emmys will still happen in September; the speeches will still land well. But the television industry (as we know it), celebrating itself in that room, will be considerably smaller than last year’s audience.
The Oscars have always been better at eulogizing an industry than actually representing it.
This year’s ceremony was pretty impressive, if we’re being honest. The films were ambitious, genre storytelling finally got its due, and there were enough genuine surprises to keep the discourse going past Monday morning.
But the acceptance speeches and the after-party coverage still aren’t enough to distract from what’s actually happening to the business underneath all the celebration.
Hollywood in 2026 is mid-merger, mid-layoff, and mid-identity-crisis, all at once. The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal is still winding through regulatory review; local television just got handed to Nexstar after the FCC waved away a decades-old ownership cap like it was a parking ticket.
Streaming still hasn’t figured out how to be profitable at scale without either raising prices or cutting the kind of content that won awards last night – the math doesn’t work yet, and everyone knows it, and no one at the podium is going to say so.
That’s the actual tension that’s going to become the most acute. The creative side of the industry is genuinely doing interesting things. The business side looks like a Jenga tower, three moves from collapse. Both of those things are true at the same time, and the people who tend to do well in this environment are those who can hold both realities without needing one to resolve first.
The industry has always been one battle after another. The current one just has more lawyers.
Matt Charney,
Executive Editor, Mediabistro
