Mediabistro Newsletter

There’s a moment in every legal drama, usually around minute 38, when somebody in an expensive suit slides a banker’s box across a conference table and says the word “discovery” with the gravity of a papal decree. It’s the part of litigation where everyone finds out what everyone else actually knew, and when they knew it, and how badly they wanted nobody to find out. Hollywood has spent decades dramatizing this moment; this week, Hollywood got to live it.

There’s exactly one mass medium left that you can’t pause, can’t skip, can’t run at 1.5x while you clear your inbox, doesn’t get interrupted by ads, and has never raised a monthly subscription fee (annual or package, that’s a whole other story). Calling it a mass medium seems kind of quaint, since a Broadway theatre seats around a thousand people (or 999, for regulatory purposes) in an age where we measure viewership in the billions.

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.

Design is one of those jobs that everyone claims to need - at least, until budgets tighten or hiring freezes. Then, suddenly, the professionals responsible for making products more usable, brands more recognizable, and interfaces more intuitive - well, suddenly, design goes from mission-critical to commoditized and disposable. The past few months, judging by the numbers, have been a perfect reminder of this job market dynamic.

There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a good villain arc; after all, antiheroes are always the most interesting characters in pretty much every project, from Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, to Kevin Spacey in House of Cards, to Kevin Spacey in real life (his recent penchant for impromptu lounge performances is just the perfect kind of creepy). Let’s not forget, the industry practically runs on villains.