Jonathan Poritsky

🍿 Could Theatrical Movies Shut Out Streamers for the Top Oscars? ⇒

Should streaming films be completely shut out of the top six Oscar categories, many will call it a comeback for theatrical exhibition […] But even if theatrical movies dominate this year’s best picture field, that victory will come with some complications.

Smaller, less spectacle-driven contenders have struggled to generate box office returns on par with prepandemic levels: “The Fabelmans” has earned a weak $3.6 million so far, while “Tár” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” haven’t cleared the $10 million mark domestically after weeks of release. Just a few years ago, those kinds of films would have at least doubled their current grosses. But the older audiences they rely on simply haven’t returned to theaters with any consistency.

The accepted wisdom that older audiences are the only people who see “smaller” films¹ feels extremely outmoded. Box office numbers don’t lie, of course, but something feels totally off to me about it.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see where things go next. It feels like theaters are getting one more chance before streaming takes over completely.

The Fabelmans is a spectacle, as is Elvis, mentioned earlier in the article, which did gangbusters at the box office. ↩︎

Short Explanation of Why I Can't Publish My Site 📝

Here’s a short explanation of why I can’t publish the candler blog right now.

The site runs on Octopress, which I had been building at my web host. The host went under and transferred everything to another company, at which point everything was fine for awhile (months? years?) until it wasn’t.

For over a year I haven’t been able to build the site, not even locally. Octopress relies on too many outdated dependencies, and even trying to transition it to vanilla Jekyll on a modern Mac is full of challenges.

When I made the jump to Octopress [gulp] a decade ago, transitioning to it from Wordpress was well-documented; tons of folks doing the same thing had published blog posts about their experience. I’m finding far less guidance these days for how to move to, say, Hugo, or back to Wordpress. This lack that I feel…that’s why I want to publish my site again.

I don’t know my next steps, and I don’t know if Micro.blog fits into that plan. But it feels good to put a few words out into the world.