JIMMY KIMMEL: And welcome to the 96th Oscars, everybody! Look at these beautiful human actors.

ARIANA GRANDE: And the Oscar goes to… 

OCTAVIA SPENCER: And the Oscar goes to… 

BRENDAN FRASER: And the Oscar goes to… 

FRANKLIN LEONARD: I think all movies are on some level about identity. I think Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese wrestling with his identity as a white man living on stolen land. Poor Things is about what it means to be a human encountering the world. Barbie’s about identity ‘cause it’s about women: The struggles of more than 50 percent of the population

American Fiction’s about, you know, black people. It’s about an American family. And what it means to be an American family and the pressures that come with that.

BOB SAFIAN: Hi everyone, Bob Safian here. Welcome to Rapid Response. This year’s Academy Awards ceremony provided a window, not only into the entertainment world but how the U.S. consumer marketplace is evolving. 

To help read the tea leaves, I’ll be talking with Franklin Leonard, one of my go-to sources when it comes to understanding Hollywood. He’s worked for the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Smith before founding The Black List, a breakthrough platform that has helped identify overlooked scripts and turn them into best picture winners, from Argo to The Kings Speech to Slumdog Millionaire. 

We’ll dig into the insights from this year’s Oscars, who won and who lost in the big picture, the implications of last year’s strikes, fears and hopes about AI, and more. Let’s get to it!

SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Black List. It’s a platform for writers, training, and identifying talent. And he is also a Vanity Fair contributor. Franklin, thanks for joining us.

LEONARD: Uh, no, it’s really good to be here. Thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: We’re here to talk about themes from this year’s Oscars and what it indicates about the direction of entertainment and of the marketplace and of culture.

LEONARD: It was a ceremony I very much enjoyed. I think that incredible films and incredible filmmakers, uh, were celebrated. I came away feeling very positive, and I woke up this morning feeling very positive as well about the entire experience.

SAFIAN: Now for you, is it a night of fun?

LEONARD: My wife and I went to the Vanity Fair dinner and party. So we arrived at Vanity Fair just as the ceremony was starting and I think we realized by the time that we left, we had been there for almost nine hours. So my feet were hurting and I’m sure Emma’s were even worse off than mine. Getting to watch the ceremony with people who had been previously nominated with sort of the luminaries of the industry, it’s always a fascinating experience because people… They are invested.

Examining the economic value of being nominated for an Oscar

SAFIAN: You, you use the word invested and I know you mean emotionally invested, but also financially invested.

LEONARD: Yeah, I think I’m using that with a double meaning intentionally. The Academy Awards are… They’re an advertisement for the art form on some level, right? To the world. Here are the incredible people that make the amazing things that we all love.

SAFIAN: And whether you win or you’re just nominated, I know everyone says, “Oh, it’s an honor just to be nominated,” but for the purposes of like the business of that film or the business of that director or that actor, it doesn’t really matter that much.

LEONARD: Well, I think it can. I mean, I think being, you know, not only the fact of the nomination or a win, but the attendant visibility that comes with that has an economic value, right? You think of it as earned media on some level, both for the individuals, but also for the movies. 

Everyone is talking about your nomination and your win. And I think that, you know, it also, the Academy Awards is an annual meditation on what and who the industry values. And so the perception of that value ends up translating into real value when it comes to negotiating, uh, for your next project, when it comes to who gets to make their next project, what resources they have at their disposal. So again, a lot of it is a perception game but that perception translates into a concrete reality.

SAFIAN: So you’re there at the Vanity Fair party, like you’re watching what happens, whether what you’re watching or what’s happening around you that made you feel like, ‘Oh yeah, this is, this makes me feel good about where this industry is.’

LEONARD: I think it’s been a very tough year. There were dual strikes that lasted six months. And still, despite all of that, through the creative ingenuity of brilliant artists. We had incredible films. We had Oppenheimer, we had Barbie, we had The Zone of Interest, we had Killers of the Flower Moon, we had The Holdovers, we had, I mean, you know, the list goes on and on and on.

Despite all of the supposed complaints that there aren’t any good movies anymore. There are great movies every year. And there will be great movies next year.

Franklin Leonard on Oppenheimer’s success

SAFIAN: So, Oppenheimer won the most awards, won the big awards. And I’m always curious about sort of the interplay between like, to what extent these are creative triumphs, which certainly they are, but also sort of reflecting or catching a certain kind of cultural moment. And I don’t know if you have any reflections on that relative to Oppenheimer or to any of the films that were awarded.

LEONARD: I struggle with this because I think it’s inevitable that some amount of an audience’s response to anything is going to be about the context in which they had the experience of that thing. So I think it’s impossible to get away from any of that. You know, I also think it’s important to remember that the number of people who do the nominating in each category at the Academy is roughly the number of people that vote in your average American high school student government election. Right? We’re talking hundreds, only hundreds of voters. It’s a very small group.

The number of people who vote in the awards themselves among who choose among the nominees for the winners. Again, we’re talking not even 10,000 people. The number of people that would vote in a city council race in a small village. And so that’s really what we’re talking about is the sentiments of those people. And so I think there are a lot of ways to judge movies: There’s critical response. There’s, you know, how much money it made. There’s whether it wins awards from this specific voting body.

I do think it’s really interesting though, that Oppenheimer is actually the highest grossing film to win Best Picture in two decades, and the third highest grossing film ever to win, topped only by Titanic and the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Oftentimes, there’s a conflict that’s framed around the idea of sort of creative genius and, and commerciality. And I think, you know, we can see in something like Oppenheimer and the work of someone like Chris Nolan, and Greta Gerwig for that matter. While we’re talking about Oppenheimer, it’s hard to not mention Barbie. Those two things come together when you make something exceptional. There is an opportunity for a massive commercial bounty as well.

Franklin Leonard on Barbie’s success

SAFIAN: You mentioned Barbie.  I feel like in some ways Barbie won the night, even if it didn’t, even if it didn’t win. 

LEONARD: I feel like if you’re on the Barbie team, you’ve got to work really hard to take a loss out of any of the wins that you had over the course of the last year. Not only, you know, did it make an absolutely insane amount of money, it was a cultural touchstone that will be for quite a long time. The work across the board was incredible.

And look, we can’t, we can’t not mention Ryan Gosling’s I’m Just Ken performance. I know there were a lot of people who thought him doing that was a risk. I think those people should familiarize themselves with his work in the Mickey Mouse Club because those who were familiar had no doubt that we would get exactly what we got on that stage.

I think Ryan Gosling, if I have to choose one person who won the night between the ‘I’m Just Ken’ performance and also the stunt presentation with Emily Blunt, I think, was genuinely hilarious. I think, you know, Killers of the Flower Moon not winning a single Oscar, and really, I think this means that Scorsese had three separate movies with 10 nominations and zero wins, which is just a sort of statistically fascinating phenomenon for a truly brilliant filmmaker. 

I think a lot of people would have loved to have seen Lily Gladstone win. I, myself included, but I also think that Emma Stone gave an absolutely incredible performance in Poor Things, so it’s really hard to be mad about that. I think the one better way to celebrate Lily Gladstone than with an Oscar is with ongoing employment in roles that befit her talent, and we still have time to get that right, so I look forward to that.

Oh, and Sandra Hüller would be another person. I think it is really important to mention, you know, starring in both Anatomy of the Fall and The Zone of Interest. A name that I don’t think most people knew prior to this award season. I really, really look forward to seeing her in a lot of movies going forward. If she’ll, if, if she’ll have us.

SAFIAN: As you go through that list, I can see why you were feeling buoyed when you got up this morning and left last night about where the business is.

LEONARD: Yeah, and I think, look, and that doesn’t even talk about all the movies that were genius that weren’t nominated, right? Or didn’t win. I, you know, I look at something like the new Spider-Verse movie, which is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Absolutely genius. And I’m already looking forward to the third one that won’t come for years.

Ava DuVernay’s film Origin, which received no nominations, but absolutely broke my heart multiple times over the course of the film. Both times I watched it. It’s again, it’s, it’s hard to be pessimistic when you have, when you’re lucky enough to have such close proximity to people doing incredible things.

Is Hollywood risk averse?

SAFIAN: We did an episode a few weeks ago right after the Super Bowl, focused on the Super Bowl ads. And, and one of the themes was about how sort of risk averse in a lot of ways the ads were. And I was thinking about it when Cord Jefferson went up, who won for adapted screenplay for American Fiction, the director of American Fiction.

And he talked about sort of a risk averse industry. And, you know, the need for more, maybe cheaper movies. And I’m curious what you think about whether Hollywood is in a particularly risk averse moment or whether, this is sort of a constant plaint of certain folks that like that the industry could take more risks.

LEONARD: Well, I think that it’s, it depends on how you define Hollywood in some cases, right? I think in the case of the major studios and the major streamers, yeah, I think we’re in a particularly, in 20 years that I’ve been in the business, it feels like we’re in a particularly risk averse time. But there are independent financiers, you know, outside of the U.S. and increasingly international films, non English language films are being distributed in the U. S. I think there remain people who I think heroically embrace risk because they see the opportunity on the other side of that risk. Personally, for me, I think the fundamental problem is that the industry, you know, look, we are a business, we are an art form that requires a great deal of upfront financial investment, right?

To make a small movie, right? A couple million dollars. Which, you know, in, in start-up investing terms, that’s a Series A round, right? And no one expects if you make a $4 million movie that you’re gonna be a billionaire unicorn. So, like, I understand why there’s an instinct that investing in film may not be the best investment, right?

But I think the point that Cord is making is that if you choose well among those $4 million movies, you should be able to deliver a return on your investment incredibly consistently, and you will mint the next Martin Scorsese, the next Chris Nolan, the next Greta Gerwig, the next Da’Vine Joy Randolph, the next Margot Robbie, the next Ryan Gosling, the next Danielle Brooks.

And so investing in those movies is not just about the immediate return financially on those investments, it’s about all the people that you give opportunities to make a movie like Cord did. And then make their next one and then their next one which might be Barbie, Oppenheimer, Black Panther, things like that.

Exploring the speeches that addressed the outside world

SAFIAN: So during the show there was a little surprising in some ways in the unscripted portions of the show. Nobody got slapped, the speeches weren’t particularly combative, even the Ukrainian winner 20 Days in Mariupol, while bringing up the issues that Ukraine is facing, was a little muted about, you know, calls to action, give money to Ukraine now. And the audience’s response was a little muted too, certainly compared to Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s standing ovation.

LEONARD: I mean, I think it’s, those are challenging moments because I think there’s a, how do you show due respect to the reality of what’s happening there? And I think it lays bare also the sort of inherent frivolity at the center of we’re a bunch of very successful, rich people giving each other awards. I thought there were a lot of speeches that I think very elegantly tried to address the world outside of that theater.

I think that Divine Joy Randolph’s speech, it was inspired as everything she said over the award season has been. I thought that Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest speech, you know, specifically calling out the dehumanization and mentioning both the victims of October 7th and the victims of the ongoing siege of Gaza was incredibly poignant. And I was actually really disappointed to see so many people misrepresenting his comments this morning.

So no, but I think it’s a challenge. I think we are all aware of how lucky we are to be a part of this community and do this for a living and so I think those of those people who are serious about it want to show due deference to those realities and oftentimes it means not necessarily Injecting ourselves into them

SAFIAN: Yeah. When at the very end, when Jimmy Kimmel came out and was reading the post that he said was from Trump at the time, I wasn’t sure whether, like, was that real or was that a joke?

LEONARD: I actually still don’t know. Was it real? 

SAFIAN: It was real. I just thought it was kind of brave of Kimmel, to be honest, to like, to bring that out there as an unscripted bit. I just, I didn’t know whether when you were at the Vanity Fair party when he said that whether there was any reaction there.

LEONARD: I think it was, I think it was laughter. And I think in all cases, I think we all were like, ‘it shouldn’t be true that a person running for president would post something like that, but it’s probably true.’ And it’s happened so often that none of us feel that compelled to even find out. 

What do this year’s winners say about films in 2023?

SAFIAN: So, sometimes the Best Picture winner or the constellation of winners in a year sort of point to say something about the future of entertainment writ large, right? Whether that’s, you know, Coda winning, which came from Apple+, or I don’t know, Parasite, kind of a more globalized storytelling and marketplace. Are there insights or signals that you saw from the films that were talked about this year that say something about where we’re moving?

LEONARD: I mean, if there’s one thing that I’d take from it, it’s the fact that this year had the record number of non-English language films winning Academy Awards. So, Zone of Interest, Anatomy of the Fall, The Boy and the Heron, 20 Days of Mariupol, and Godzilla Minus One. 

And I think increasingly we’re going to see an internationalization of Hollywood, an internationalization of the movies that are available to people in the American public, and a greater response to them. And I’m very excited about it. 

SAFIAN: Oscar winners come from all sorts of places — and even if you don’t win all the statues, in the case of Barbie, you can still win the night. After the break, Franklin and I will talk about last year’s strikes, fear and excitement around AI, and a $30 billion opportunity that Hollywood is mostly ignoring. We’ll be right back.

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SAFIAN: Before the break, Franklin Leonard of The Black List broke down the big moments, and big winners, from this year’s Oscar ceremony. Now we get into streaming, the Hollywood strikes, AI’s impact, and a $30 billion opportunity that is being ignored. Let’s jump back in.

How the strikes impacted filmmaking

On the television broadcast that I watched, there were in previous years, they sometimes flash on executives, you know, you’ll see Jeff Bezos, or Bob Iger, or something in the crowd. And that didn’t happen this year. And I and I wonder whether, you know, was that because of the strike?

LEONARD: I actually don’t know the answer to that. It could have just been a choice of the ABC director to focus on the nominees and the celebrities that were in attendance. But it is interesting. I suspect that post-strike, people were keeping a relatively low profile. 

SAFIAN: I’m curious how the strike impacted you and, you know, how it felt for others around you.

LEONARD: The Black List made the decision very early on in the strike to suspend Industry membership on the website to employees of struck companies. So, you know, we basically provide a two-sided marketplace that allows the studios, agents, managers, everybody to find great writing.

And it didn’t feel right. That we would be helping the studios find writers while the Writer’s Guild was on the picket line. So, you know, we, we stood with the writers, we stood with the broader case that better compensating writers would result in better financial outcomes for the industry, which I think should be self-evident to anybody who’s paying attention.

And when the strike was over, our business returned. We reinstated all of those members, folks were using the site even more than they were prior to the strike. And I think again, it reflects a need for great storytellers. And that sort of, that’s the role that we play in a business that’s the lifeblood of the business.

Especially I think in a dawning AI revolution, apocalypse, whatever it ends up being. There will all, there will specifically be a need for curation. There will specifically be a need for people that can tell stories that emotionally arrest their audiences and leave them transformed. And AI will never change that. 

SAFIAN: And the writers on your platform, do you find them excited about, you know, what AI can do or nervous about it? 

LEONARD: I think that, even those who are tremendously excited about it recognize the tremendous dangers that it poses. And I think even those who are terrified of the dangers that it poses recognize that it may have value. And I think anytime that’s the case, you know, there’s a lot of work that people have to do. On all sides to handle a technology that I guess could destroy us all. 

And maybe that’s, maybe that’s the cultural context in which Oppenheimer really succeeded. But I also am perhaps, you know, naive enough, pollyanna-ish enough to believe that at any time, if Oppenheimer had come out, it would have struck a cultural nerve because of its artistic execution. And I also think every era has its technology that threatens to destroy the world. This just happens to be AI.

SAFIAN: Oppenheimer’s not a cautionary tale specifically about AI where, but we see it that way because of where we are?

LEONARD: Yeah, I think Oppenheimer is a cautionary tale about, you know, uh, man’s insistent desire to create and possibly destroy itself. And again, I think every generation has that story.

SAFIAN: I will confess that I watched most of the Oscar Best Picture films at home, streamed them.

LEONARD: As I’m sure did most of the Academy, by the way. There’s a reason the Academy app exists so that we can see all of the films.

Franklin Leonard on the future of streaming

SAFIAN: So is that a win or a loss for the industry that people are streaming. Is it like, where does this say we are or is this just inevitable? This is where we’re going.

LEONARD: Yeah, I think it’s just sort of inevitable. Again, look, this was the third highest grossing Best Picture winner of all time. 

I am excited about the potential of the theatrical box office. I think when you, again, when you make ambitious, emotionally arresting stories that want to say something about the world, audiences want to go see them. And when they’re well executed, they leave the theater, and they hop in their group chat or they hop on social media and tell other people to go see them. I think the box office numbers change from year to year, right? And there’s certainly been a downward trend, and there were a lot of reasons for that. Not the least of which, you know, just increased competition for leisure time. 

But I remain optimistic first and foremost because of the incredible talents of the people who make these movies. Like, I remain convinced that as long as I’m alive, people are gonna be making bangers. And I hope people can watch them in communal environments like theaters. But I am also very happy if people watch those bangers in their homes and then talk about them on social media because that too is a community and socially binding experience.

SAFIAN: Yeah, The Black List started because you felt like the bangers weren’t getting made or not enough of them. Too many

LEONARD: No, I mean, well, The Black List… I felt like I was not reading enough bangers, which may have been my failure. So I needed to find a way to find more bangers. It was really the way The Black List started.

SAFIAN: But The Black List philosophically is about bringing more attention to bangers that are being overlooked, right? 

LEONARD: Yeah.

How bias continues to impact Hollywood

SAFIAN: Do you feel like the industry has gotten better at that? Or do you still feel like there’s so many bangers out there that are just not being embraced?

LEONARD: There are so many bangers out there that are just not being embraced. Look, I think that the industry is probably better at finding them than it used to be. But, you know, we already know, for example, McKinsey has done two studies in the last four years about the economic costs of sort of racial bias.

Three years ago, before the Oscars in 2021, a study dropped finding that, you know, the industry is losing 10 billion a year due to anti-Black bias. Part of that is by an underinvestment in films made by Black filmmakers. The study came out last week. The industry is losing between 12 and 18 billion dollars because of underinvestment in the Latino community.

A significant part of that is underinvestment in Latino filmmakers. So I think that we do a better job than we used to. But the people who are doing the choosing are doing a suboptimal job now, and there are a lot of easy fixes to find more. The Black List is one of them. You know, we try to operate at scale and find great material, both in the industry and all around the world.

But there’s a lot that can be done on that front. Great storytellers and talented people on a global scale has massive financial and cultural implications and no one has prioritized that arguably in the history of the entire industry.

SAFIAN: And the Oscar diversity rules, which in theory were constructed to try to mitigate some of that.

LEONARD: Yeah, I, I don’t, I think it would be very difficult to not clear that bar. Like, I think you would have to be making a real effort with your film and distribution apparatus to not clear the bar that the Academy has set out.

SAFIAN: It’s so low. 

LEONARD: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of ways to sort of meet the necessary thresholds. I do think it was important for the Academy to say, “look, these are values that are important to us.”

Now, for me personally, I don’t really care when I’m watching an individual movie about the diversity of those involved, right? But I also know that it’s more likely that if there were diverse points of view expressed in the process of making the movie, it’s more likely that the movie will be better. And it’s really important to me that the individual identity of the people involved does not determine the resources that the movie gets in order to exist.

And unfortunately, right now, That is a primary determinant of the likelihood of you getting your movie made entirely separate from your talent. That is a primary determinant of your likelihood of getting hired entirely separate from your talent. And until we have a true meritocracy where talent wins out, It’s really hard to imagine an industry that can’t think about these things consciously. But I’d certainly like to get there.

The movies that explored identity

SAFIAN: Both Barbie and American Fiction are both in different ways about identity and the way we look at them and the way we think about them. And yet that, you know, the industry will tell that story to the outside, but it is struggling to tell the story itself.

LEONARD: I think all movies are on some level about identity. I think Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese wrestling with his identity as a white man living on stolen land. You know, I think that’s the only way I can read the last section of it, and if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean. I think that Poor Things is about what it means to be a human encountering the world.

Oppenheimer certainly deals with a lot of identity issues as well. So I think that all stories are that on some level. I think that the challenge is that we only think of them as being about identity when they’re not about white men, right? So Barbie’s about identity cause it’s about women.

American Fiction‘s about, you know, Black people cause it’s about Black people. But Barbie’s also about the struggles of more than 50 percent of the population. It’s about the struggles of the majority. American Fiction is about an American family. And what it means to be an American family and the pressures that come with that.

So I think the industry just needs to do a better job of being meritocratic and making better choices financially. And we’ll all win.

SAFIAN: Yeah, listen, one of the things I loved about American Fiction was the way, and it was the way like most of the white characters were like caricatures, which is the way that films have historically shown Black characters, you know. It’s just so clever.

LEONARD: I would say that in my experience in this business, I didn’t read them as caricatures.

No, I mean, in all sincerity, like, many of the lines of dialogue from that script, and I think this is part of why, you know, Cord won, and stands on the shoulders of Percival Everett’s brilliant book, have been quoted to me almost verbatim in meetings that I’ve been a part of. So yeah, it’s funny. I didn’t, I didn’t read them as caricatures at all. 

SAFIAN: Well, I guess as a white man, maybe that’s just the way I don’t want to think of myself. But that doesn’t mean that that’s not the way I’m acting, huh? Damn. 

LEONARD: I think it’s sort of the genius of brilliant satire.

SAFIAN: Well, Franklin, thanks so much for doing this. Really appreciate it.

LEONARD: No, it’s my pleasure. And I’ll just encourage everybody to go to the movies this summer. The rest of the year, at all times. There are great movies coming out every weekend. Find out where your local cinema is. Go see them. Tell your friends when you like stuff.

SAFIAN: Franklin always calls it like he sees it, even if it means calling me out for my own ignorance. Assessing movies, as he acknowledges, is a highly personal thing. Not every film works for every viewer. It’s the same for all kinds of products. I keep coming back to two themes: about the centrality of identity in making meaningful emotional connections, and about operating as a true meritocracy. Whatever your product or service, if you hit those two things right, you’ll be on your way to making impact that matters — whether you win an award for it or not. 

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.