There’s a lot happening in the news right now. So it’s possible you’re not aware that the Oscars are happening this Sunday.
It’s also possible that you wouldn’t be paying attention to the Oscars no matter what kind of news cycle we are in. The cultural footprint of what used to be a giant television event celebrating movies has been shrinking for years, for pretty obvious reasons: We are watching less TV, and spending less time going to the movies.
But this year’s awards show does seem like it’s happening at a particularly newsworthy time for Hollywood, which has already been going through painful contractions. And it’s about to shrink again, assuming Paramount’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery closes.
I talked to Puck’s Matthew Belloni, whose writing and podcasting about Hollywood is closely followed by the industry, to help me put all of this in context: What do this year’s Oscars, and likely winners, tell us about the state of the industry? And how will Hollywood react to its newest owners — a father-and-son team with more wealth than just about anyone on the planet, who may also be joined by petrostates like Saudi Arabia?
You can hear our entire talk on my Channels podcast; the following is an edited excerpt of our conversation.
Peter Kafka: What storyline is most compelling for you at this year’s awards?
Matthew Belloni: The hilarious thing about the Oscars this year is that the leading studio with 30 nominations was just gobbled up by another studio [and] the fourth richest man in the world. This is almost like a swan song for Warner’s. This is the best it’s ever going to get for this studio.
Put aside the fact that “One Battle After Another” lost them tens of millions of dollars. “Sinners” did very well for them, and validated the strategy that has been put in place at Warner’s — to bet hundreds of millions of dollars on auteur filmmakers to make original movies. People in Hollywood love that.
If “Sinners” wins, it’s because, in part, people want to thank Warner Brothers for betting on filmmaker Ryan Coogler and saying, “Yes, we will make your a hundred million dollar vampire movie and give it a full release.”
I still think “One Battle After Another” is going to win, but that’s also a validation. That movie cost $130 million to $150 million, and it grossed about $200 million. It’s not going to make money, but the filmmaker community loves the fact that Warner’s did this.
Assuming that one of those wins, what does that tell us about the state of Hollywood in 2026?
It says something about where we’re going in the sense that we don’t know whether David Ellison and his Paramount team is even going to allow the kind of bets that Warner Bros. made to get those two movies into production.
If you look at the past history of Skydance movies — the movies that David Ellison made at his company — it’s a lot of garbage; all of these movies that kind of came and went. Then he attached himself to Paramount franchises: “Mission Impossible.” “Top Gun.” He did “Reacher” and “Jack Ryan” on TV. He’s done OK on the franchise front. That is his focus.
It’s gonna be interesting to see if he will even allow the kind of filmmaking at the budgets that were employed on those [Warner’s] movies to even happen.
So it could be a last gasp for that kind of filmmaker, at least at Warner Bros.
To be fair, they’re not saying that. They’re saying that Warner’s is going to be autonomous, and they want them to make these kinds of movies. But I think there’s going to be a lot more control over Warner Bros. from the Paramount side than there would’ve been at Netflix.
This is the first Oscars where prediction markets are fully mainstream. How do you think that affects the awards race?
A little bit. These awards prognosticators claim to have the inside track and be able to reflect things that the prediction markets do not. Right now, for instance, Michael B. Jordan is the favorite to win Best Actor, and Timothee Chalamet has dropped down to like 30%. And I think that is because a lot of people are seeing this stuff online and not realizing how little it’s impacting the voting. So Timmy’s a pretty good bet right now.
People who promote gambling say that it’s good because when you can bet on something, it adds stakes and generates more attention. Do you believe that?
I do. And I know people at the Academy that believe it. They secretly kind of like this stuff. They like it because they’ve seen what it does to sports. It’s an entirely new avenue to get people invested.
So I think the Oscars would love it if that became a thing. They do not have a prediction market partner.
Normally, we spend time every year talking about the TV audience for the Oscars and how it shrinks almost every year and whether anything can be done about it. Now that question is going to go away, because the Oscars are going to move from ABC to YouTube in a couple of years. What does that tell us?
First and foremost, the Academy needs money. YouTube was stepping up to maintain the license fee that the Academy has become accustomed to.
And the Oscars are so worth it to YouTube as a branding moment and to get everybody talking about how this pinnacle of Hollywood excellence is moving to the internet and moving to the home of cat videos and MrBeast. This will be the narrative everywhere.
Will the audience actually grow? The Academy hopes that not only will the audience get younger, it will grow worldwide because it is so accessible and everybody can watch anywhere they want. I’m not convinced of that.
Last year, we speculated about Netflix getting this deal. Wouldn’t this be as valuable to them as it is to YouTube?
It would, and they were interested. But first of all, Netflix already has the SAG awards, which were renamed the Actor Awards.
There’s also a political thing within Hollywood. Netflix is already controversial within the film industry because they do not put their movies in movie theaters and give them wide releases, generally. So there’s a lot of people that believe that’s the reason why Netflix has not won the Best Picture award, despite campaigning heavily for a decade.
Which also explained why many people were dismayed when Netflix was originally set to buy Warner Bros. Now it’s set to be Paramount instead. What are people most worried about with this deal?
The thing people are scared about is simply the math. They are taking on $80 billion of debt to buy this company.
And when you just went through what happened with Warner Bros. Discovery, which also took on tens of billions of dollars of debt to combine those companies, they spent three years cutting costs. That was the North Star. So much so that they changed the compensation structure for CEO David Zaslav, so that he would 100% focus his time on cutting the debt.
He did so, but he did so at the cost of a lot of spending that people in Hollywood are used to.
And when you’re combining these two storied studios, the Ellisons are already talking about $6 billion in cost cuts. That’s a lot of people.
RedBird Capital’s Gerry Cardinale [the private equity investor working with Paramount] came on my show and talked about how it’s not primarily going to be employees. Nobody believes that. They think that it’s going to be painful, and I think they’re probably right.
And then I do think [there’s a] freakout over CNN and CBS News and the positioning of those networks. I think people are right to recognize that Ellison has a very different view of the news than the previous ownership. He is going to move those two entities rightward. He calls it towards the center, but it’s going to be more like Fox News.
And whether he’s doing this to appease Donald Trump or because he genuinely thinks that’s a good idea — for business reasons or ideologically — it doesn’t matter.
I don’t think he’s a particularly ideological person. He’s not doing this to create some kind of Fox News competitor because he thinks that the world needs more conservative news.
I think he’s looking at the market and he’s saying, “There’s one news network in cable that kicks everyone’s ass. And why are they doing that? Why are they kicking everyone’s ass? Because it’s the one place that a center-right country can congregate around a news product that they feel reflects their sensibilities. So why not compete on that playing ground, then compete with 10 other outlets that are espousing a left-center view.”
I also think his father [Larry Ellison] has a role here. His father is a conservative guy, has a relationship with Trump. And the political stuff: They recognized very early that they had an in here. They’ve got two-and-a-half years to be in the good graces of the government. They’re gonna do everything they can to exploit that relationship.
A few months ago, Paramount told WBD that Saudi Arabia and two other Gulf states would invest $24 billion into the deal. Now, Paramount won’t say if that’s still happening. What’s going on?
They’re still trying to get this deal approved. And the last thing they want is an entire street-full of Democratic senators with pitchforks going after their Saudi money.
That makes sense, even though Cardinale basically told you that getting Gulf states into this deal would be a good thing. Another theory is that maybe the Saudis and others are less eager to invest in these deals than they were just a few months ago.
I think what’s probably going is [Paramount] wants to keep their options open. And even though they may have these handshake commitments from these groups, they potentially want to bring in others.
If Gulf states do end up owning part of WBD, will Hollywood care?
You know what? I don’t think so. I think that when push comes to shove, people want their projects made.
They worked with Rupert Murdoch for many years. He was very smart. He kept it separate. Fox News was in New York, with a separate leadership team. The [Fox] studio was the studio, and they worked with the kind of creators that very much did not like Fox News. I think that that will be the prevailing wisdom.
Unless it becomes something that stars get asked about on the red carpet, or it becomes embarrassing for them. Maybe it could be a deciding factor if a hot project is going to one of two buyers and one is the Ellisons, the other is someone who’s not involved in this stuff. Maybe.
But there’s only a certain number of buyers in Hollywood. So you’ve got to work with everyone if you can. And people want to see their projects made.
