In 1999, with a baby on my hip, while living in a one-room guest house behind my sister’s house in Van Nuys, California, I had a really good idea. I’d already been online for five years, with an entire social life and an outlet for creative expression. Back then, it was mostly words tapped out on a screen. We played around with emoticons to convey our shorthand attitudes, but most of the people I knew back then frowned upon them. It was the beginning of the Dot Boom, which would become the Dot Bomb one year later, in 2000. Most people thought the internet was never going to be profitable, but obviously it has been. Not only that, but it is a powerful surveillance device for consumers, for citizens, and everything in between.
I wondered: Why did Citizen Kane not beat How Green Was My Valley? And why is it that we all talk about how bad the Oscars are? Why don’t the best films win? That was the question that motivated me to start Oscarwatch.com in 1999. I was an early adopter, building an HTML site from scratch and hoping people would come. It wasn’t soon after that publicists began contacting me in hopes of positioning their contenders.
My first experience with a publicist was when A Beautiful Mind was up against The Fellowship of the Ring. But not only did I know that A Beautiful Mind would win, I felt like I was on the movie’s side, largely due to my relationship with the publicist. We’re only human, after all.
I went about my work day in and day out as a single mother running a website that everyone thought was professional. They thought I was male, too. They had no idea on the other end of that site they read was a woman trying to survive, broke ass, with a child. The first person to really notice or care was David Carr, who’d just been hired by the New York Times as their new Oscar blogger. Yes, after I started, an entire industry bloomed around me with a new industry I helped invent: Oscar watching.
David Carr wanted to know everything about it so he could be good at predicting. We became good friends, though we went down different paths as he was called upon to be the tech writer at the Times. He left the Oscar world behind—he never much liked it. The Slumdog Millionaire year killed him. It’s hard to keep the passion going and the curiosity, especially once you know how the sausage is made.
Two great mentors of mine came out of this website—well, three. The first two would be David Carr, who showed me that I could make money too, like the mainstream outlets. I could sell ads and support my daughter. By then, he knew, I was working as a janitor, a teacher’s aid, and freelance journalism. So I took his advice, and I was able to support myself and my daughter and even afford a new car and a vacation once in a while.
The second mentor was David Fincher, who has been saying for years that I was wasting my time and my talent covering the Oscars, not because he didn’t respect the awards—don’t get it twisted—but because he could see what I would eventually see—that the Oscars don’t represent the best of the year. Maybe they never did. Every so often they get lucky and match up, like Casablanca, the Godfather, etc. But most of the time it’s a momentary fling, not a lasting relationship.
Out of that mentorship came a little Netflix movie called The Summer of the Shark. But COVID got in the middle of it and by the time it dropped, the whole world had changed, and some of the conclusions I drew in that film essay no longer applied. Like, there was no box office to speak of. Like, the Great Awokening resulted in spitting in the face of the target demo—mostly males—to appeal instead to the “elect,” an elite group of high-minded “woke” aristocrats. And the rest is history.
Either way, I will always take those things with me no matter where I land. They were exceptional relationships with exceptional people who taught me a lifetime’s worth of lessons. But more than that, they represented two important people who told me: You are worth my time. That in an industry that rarely acknowledged I even existed, let alone that most of them were walking in footsteps I laid down first.
When they did decide it was time to put the spotlight on me, it was Rebecca Keegan — a respected journalist at the Hollywood Reporter — to tell the world that I was a “MAGA darling” now. She spent time talking to people—to Academy members, to publicists, to people who used to work with me—all to paint a picture of someone who derailed what was a brilliant career.
That’s not the end of the story, but it’s the crisis point, the climax, if you will, in the protagonist’s career path. My daughter, who was the baby on my hip, is now 26 years old and has lived a decent life because of this website and all of you readers who have faithfully read my too-long posts all of these years.
The third mentor is my friend Ryan, who takes a lot of shit for having his name on this site and for continuing to be my friend. He gets nothing out of it, especially now that the money train went the way of the dinosaurs. But there he still is—in a relationship with someone he doesn’t agree with on almost everything. But he’s been a mentor to me, teaching me to write better and often to protect the readers from my sometimes harsh or damaging opinions.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how much longer I will even be doing this. So much of what the industry has become is not a place for analysis but a place for acceptance and conformity. I am gobsmacked that the publicists I’ve known for so many years, whose films I pushed, would so easily turn their backs on me—but that’s the lesson everyone lives by in Hollywood. Comply or else. And it’s killed the business, frankly. So what fun is there anymore in any of it? More importantly, what role do I even provide anymore?
The one thing I feel I must do every year is thank you, dear readers, for 25 years of visiting here, those who have stuck around now especially. I get your letters. I read them. I appreciate them. I’m sorry that I am not better at thanking you for them. But thank you. It’s been a hell of a ride only because so many of you have cared about what I had to say.
And thanks to the ADTV crew who fled but only did so out of necessity. We’re still friends, and maybe they can build something more profitable over at The Contending. I hope so. Clarence Moye, Meghan McLachlan, Joey Moser, David Phillips, Ben Morris, and Jalal Haddad. Dr. Rob for his annual AD Oscar ballot, and our great international correspondent Zhuo-Ning (Tony) Su.
Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. All the best to you.
