Weekend Reads (March 8): The Oscars, Prince, Zelenskyy, Firefox, Dimension 20
Recommended weekend reading material for March 8, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
The 2025 Oscars were held this past Sunday, with Anora taking top honors of “Best Picture” and “Best Director.” (Anora also won awards for “Best Actress,” “Best Editing,” and “Best Original Screenplay.”) NPR has a list of all of the nominees and winners. As a nerd, I was pleased to see Dune: Part Two take home two awards for visual effects and sound. But I was especially pleased to see Flow take home “Best Animated Feature.” (The Latvian film was also nominated for “Best International Feature,” but lost to Brazil’s I’m Still Here.)
I watched Flow several weeks ago, and it’s tale of a group of animals trying to survive in a post-human world possesses a fantastical realism that’s a refreshing change of pace from the usual Disney/DreamWorks/Pixar fare (read my review). Animation Obsessive offers up some behind-the-scenes info on how Flow was made, and how it differed from the usual Hollywood process.
Hollywood loves Flow. It’s been praised by Guillermo del Toro; Barry Jenkins called it a “masterpiece.” Yet it couldn’t have been done in Hollywood — it’s too odd for the people who call the shots. This is a movie with no stated story, about animals that don’t talk, filmed in long, immersive takes that can last for minutes. Plus, it’s indifferent to the visual fidelity race: certain execs might dismiss it as previz.
Flow succeeded anyway. It earned $20 million — far more than it cost — and swept awards season. This comes as Hollywood animation is reeling from executive mismanagement: cutbacks, canceled movies, poor treatment of artists and a chronic aversion to risk. Today, only a few animated films are happening there at all.
There are always losers at the Oscars, but perhaps this year’s biggest losers were those who tried to watch the ceremony via Hulu’s livestream.
Hulu subscribers watching the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night were outraged when the streaming service ended its broadcast before the show was actually over. Viewers saw a “thank you for watching” message that falsely claimed “the live event has now ended” — despite the fact that the Best Actress and Best Picture Oscars were still to come. Social media platforms and the Hulu subreddit immediately lit up with complaints and threats of cancellation.
Turns out, the issue was because Hulu set an end time for the Oscars and couldn’t change it. But you’d think they know by now that the Oscars always run long.
Related: The Playlist highlights the best and worst of this year’s Oscars, from Conan O’Brien’s hosting to the ceremony’s “In Memoriam” sequence.
Oscar-winning director Ezra Edelman spent five years working on a nine-hour-long documentary about Prince, only for Netflix to shelve the project and strike up a deal with the famous musician’s estate. Which, according to Edelman, sets a dangerous precedent for celebrity documentaries.
“Right now, we live in a culture and in a documentary universe, and in some ways in a journalistic universe, where the subject gets to dictate who they are to everybody. And that is not the way that the Fourth Estate was set up. So, my issue is that in trading for access, you now have a lot of companies and filmmakers making deals with the subject, sanitizing their story and or their image, that to me, it’s like, of course, it serves them,” Edelman said on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. “I think the exercise is very hard. I think the danger and the problem I’m finding is that what’s the compromise? Of course, there are movies being made with subjects that have some say in how the story is told or are getting paid for the access, which to me is a no-no, and gets to be a producer of their own story. What happens that these streamers or whoever the distributors are, they get a film about whomever.”
I’m not saying someone should leak Edelman’s documentary for everyone to see. But I’m not not saying that, either.
The Polygon staff have compiled their picks for Spring 2025’s most exciting and interesting movies, TV shows, and anime titles. (Anyone else excited for a new Anne of Green Gables anime?)
Discogs has published a guide to the women who paved the way for modern electronic music, including Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, and Suzanne Ciani.
Suzanne Ciani’s legacy encompasses electronic and new-age music, sound design, commercial jingles, and film and television. A true pioneer in the field of electronic music, Ciani is best known for her mastery of the Buchla synthesizer — a complex “West Coast” synthesizer that enabled her to craft soundscapes that are both emotive and technically sophisticated.
Personal note: When we were kids, my brother and I often fell asleep to the sounds of Carlos’ Switched-On Bach on our tiny little record player.
There was a lot of nonsense during Trump and Zelenskyy’s disastrous Oval Office meeting, but arguably the most nonsensical moment was when one of Trump’s sycophants criticized Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit. Derek Guy explains why.
Much of the commentary on Twitter surrounds whether Zelenskyy was disrespectful by not wearing a suit to the meeting.
[…]
One reason why I think respectability is stupid is because it’s often used as a mask. Such judgements are rarely about the clothes themselves, but more often about the bodies beneath them. To wit, no one raised an issue when Elon wore a graphic t-shirt and ball cap to meet the Trump cabinet.
The White House is looking to slash NASA’s budget by as much as 50%, which would do untold amounts of damage to our nation’s scientific endeavors.
“If this is implemented, it would be nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society. “Losing this much money, this fast, has no precedence in NASA’s history. It would force terrible decisions, including turning off scores of active, productive, irreplaceable missions, halting nearly all new mission development, and decimating the country’s space science workforce.”
Related: Perhaps Trump wants space exploration to be driven more by the private sector. In which case, it’s probably not the best news that SpaceX’s latest Starship flight test ended with an explosion.
Once upon a time, Firefox was the scrappy, anti-corporate browser that promised to be an alternative to the likes of Microsoft Explorer and Google Chrome. Those days now appear to be over.
Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data… That promise is removed from the current version.
I was never much of a Firefox user, myself; however hard they tried, it never felt like a native Mac app to me. Still, I appreciated that Firefox was doing it’s thing and giving users a choice. Which is why reading all of their recent corpospeak is kind of disheartening.
This week, ABC decided to shut down FiveThirtyEight, a popular politics and economics blog, and John Gruber is mad.
And what is the deal with these companies that just unceremoniously pull the plug on websites when they close them? Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a server for a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted. It’s ABC’s business if they want to close FiveThirtyEight as an ongoing concern, but the years of work deserves to remain online, both out of respect for the people who made it and for the audience that might still want to refer to it. Disney didn’t burn the movies from now-closed subsidiary studios like Touchstone Pictures.
Related: I wrote something similar last year when Paramount shut down MTV News. “Paramount Global, which owns MTV, earned $29.65 billion in 2023. Admittedly, they’re also $14.6 billion in debt, but do they really think that shutting down websites and online archives will make a dent in that number? Surely they could still afford to archive the site properly.”
Earlier this year, Dimension 20 — a popular Dungeons & Dragons live play series — played a sold out show at Madison Square Garden in front of 20,000 fans.
An arena spectacle with WWE auras is unusual for Dungeons & Dragons, the famously nerdy tabletop game of fantasy heroics and lucky (or unlucky) rolls of dice. It’s also unusual for Dimension 20, a show where Los Angeles comics play serialized D&D games. It is the flagship show of Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor), a streaming service whose organic brand of comedy and feverish fanbase make it agile against lumbering corporate giants. At the center of Dimension 20 is Brennan Lee Mulligan. His ringmaster’s charisma, chameleonic voices, and occasionally viral socio-anarchist zingers work in concert with his encyclopedic knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition to qualify him as arguably the greatest Dungeon Master alive. Normally Mulligan’s games are filmed in an L.A. studio, on a domed set that looks like a spaceship’s interior where players sit around a U-shaped table. But tonight they’re inside the Garden, standing where Frazier upset Ali, waving to a roaring crowd on a 360-degree stage illuminated by a pattern of LED triangles under a waterfall of golden stars. Tonight, these jesters are turned into rock stars in the heart of midtown.
I’m a big fan of Brennan Lee Mulligan, by the way. His “Sauron as Trump” and “Narnian Republican” bits on Make Some Noise are pure comedy gold.
Related: Brennan Lee Mulligan answers all of your pressing D&D questions.
Finally, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest — which celebrates the worst opening lines to novels — is shutting down after 42 years.
It is with deep regrets that I announce the conclusion of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor!
Via Kottke.
At least they’re going to keep the archives around. I’d hate for gems like last year’s “Fantasy & Horror” winner — “Sir Arthur Pendragon, High King of the Britons, son of King Uther Pendragon, nephew of King Aurelius Ambrosius, who was in turn the son of a long list of people who weren’t kings and thus don’t matter, only slept with his sister once, but boy did it come back to bite him in the ass.” — to disappear into the ether.
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