There’s a noticeable chill in the air during this year’s Oscars weekend, by which I mean that every home, building, and car in Los Angeles is air-conditioned to the exact temperature of a morgue. It’s one of the city’s many quiet harbingers of doom, the others being the rapid and seemingly unstoppable consolidation of Hollywood, the looming specter of AI, and the fact that the theme of this year’s ceremony is “humanity” — no longer a given state of being but an aesthetic.
I attend the Oscars rehearsal on Saturday afternoon, and though it’s 78 degrees outside, I am shivering in my jeans and long-sleeve shirt. Instructions for what I can and cannot reveal before the show airs on Sunday night are delivered inside a velvet-lined elevator. If I share any script details, or who’s introducing what category, or which triplets have been stacked on top of each other in a trench coat to play the role of Adrien Brody, “We will come after you,” says one of the representatives, cheerfully.
