An Oscars Roadblock, 15 March 2026.
This article was originally about the Academy Awards, or, as it’s more commonly known, The Oscars, but as I was a block away from the ceremony, I‘ve turned it into a more personal reflection. I was near the Oscars to attend a memorial service for Oscar-nominee Sally Kirkland, who passed away in November. Sally was also an acting teacher whose clients included Sandra Bullock and this year’s Best Supporting Actress winner Amy Madigan for Weapons. When Sally was nominated for the Best Lead Actress award for her role in Anna (1987), she had already appeared in many films as a supporting actress. After her nomination, she was offered more starring roles because the Oscars was a much bigger deal at that time.
After interviewing Sally for this website, she told me she enjoyed the experience, and we kept in touch on Facebook. (There’s a lot more to Sally than what I have mentioned in this article, so if you want to know who Sally really was, you can read the full interview here.) When invited to attend the service via a Facebook event, I decided to attend. However, it was not just Sally I came back for, but Los Angeles, where I spent a couple of years in the late 90s.
At that time, if you wanted to work in the entertainment industry, you had to live there—there was no other option. Today, that isn’t the case anymore. Locations such as Canada, as well as US states like Georgia and New Mexico, now offer plenty of opportunities to produce films or TV shows there, in addition to tax incentives. Further, recent reports show that the job market in Film & TV is collapsing, with Hollywood compared to Detroit’s fall from grace in the post-automobile industry years.[1] But I didn’t need any of that knowledge to see what had changed in Hollywood since I last went there.
Sally’s service took place a day before the Oscars and was located at a church only a block away. I had booked a hotel near the Hollywood sign. Considering the Academy Awards ceremony is one of Hollywood’s biggest nights, I was shocked at how dead the place looked. Most businesses were closed and the whole area felt and looked run down. When I lived in LA in the 90s, ordinary days felt livelier than Oscar week in Hollywood.
Then, there were the Oscars themselves. Last year, I wrote a piece for the Oscars and felt that if they focused on films people knew, they would do better ratings. This year, it seems they got the lesson. The top two contenders, Sinners and One Battle After Another, were far better known than last year’s contenders Anora and Emilia Perez.
Despite having an established host in Conan O’Brien, viewer ratings dropped 9% in 2026. I can’t give a precise reason why; Conan was a great host, and the show was fine. Of course, politics was involved. Trump was mentioned not by name, but even he didn’t feel the need to post anything about it on Truth Social. The winners were Michael B. Jordan for Sinners, Sean Penn for One Battle After Another(though he received his award remotely from Ukraine), and Amy Madigan for Weapons—all mainstream studio films. The only winner for an art house film was Jessie Buckley as Best Actress for her role in Hamnet.
What did stand out for me, however, were the nominees for the In Memoriam section. I was thrilled to see Sally make the list, but there were also tributes to Rob Reiner, Robert Redford, and Diane Keaton, all of whom had made movies that will be remembered long after all the Oscar winners themselves. Being reminded of their achievements indicated a golden age of cinema that has now passed.
When One Battle After Another won Best Picture, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson mentioned the 1975 nominees: Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, and Nashville. Anderson used these examples not to tell the other filmmakers that his picture wasn’t necessarily superior, but that their films were just as accomplished as his. Yet, Anderson’s statement reinforced that the golden age has conclusively disappeared. Nevertheless, many of these films are still remembered; even Gen Z is familiar with Jaws.
The Oscars will soon no longer be a televised event on ABC. In 2029, it will be streamed exclusively on YouTube. I recently heard the theater that hosted the awards ceremony will move from its original location in Hollywood to downtown LA.
But it isn’t just the Oscars ceremony that is losing relevance; younger people seem to be less interested in films in general and more keen on YouTube and TikTok, and has a lower attention span on average than older audiences. To give an example, I read an article about a film class in which the students were shown a film and subsequently asked to take a test to answer basic questions about the film. Most failed due to lack of attention. Joe Rogan’s interview with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck describes this lack of interest among the younger generations in greater detail. (Whatever your views on Rogan, in my opinion, this interview is worth watching.) In the interview, Damon explained that in the past, films would have an action scene at the beginning and one in the middle, reserving the major action scene for the end. Today, he explains, with films typically viewed on platforms such as Netflix, there is an action scene every five or ten minutes, with the plot repeated every ten minutes so the viewer knows what’s going on. Likewise, Ben Affleck spoke about how he gets his thirteen-year-old son to watch a film. Also, what I found curious was that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had a new film about to be released, but it was on Netflix. I would have never known about it if it wasn’t for the Rogan interview. If the same film had been scheduled for release just before the COVID pandemic, a Damon/Affleck movie would have undoubtedly been a hit in theaters and backed by a large promotion campaign.
Hearing about these recent trends and seeing the decline of both Hollywood and the Oscars, it seems as if the film industry may be in its death throes, or at a bare minimum, no longer resemble the type of movies I loved. This may be still the case, but the recent success of Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, has been a box-office hit, and the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy indicates that similar success awaits. Perhaps the film industry isn’t over yet. My next article will look at those two films in greater depth.
[1] Nate Wratner, “See How Hollywood’s Job Market Is Collapsing.” The Wall Street Journal, 30 March 2026. Retrieved 31 March 2026 from https://www.wsj.com/business/media/see-how-hollywoods-job-market-is-collapsing-230be437?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink.
