Welcome back to What I’m Hearing...

Happy Oscar weekend! I’ll be at the show and a couple of afterparties on Sunday, so my usual weekend edition will instead hit inboxes on Monday evening, hopefully with something semi-coherent to say…

Contest! Yes, it’s an Oscar ratings challenge. Reply to this email with your guess for total viewership, per Nielsen, and the closest person (without going over) will win some status-defining Puck merch. I’m on record guessing 14.5 million, which would be a big surge over last year’s 10.4 million. Good luck!

One more plug: If you haven’t subscribed to my new podcast, The Town, this week you missed Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw and me correctly predict how Rachel ZeglerGate would play out, my breakdown of the sports rights shift with WME agent Josh Pyatt, a debate with author (and Mr. Tony Kushner) Mark Harris about booting the Oscar categories, and Vulture’s Joe Adalian on how streaming can save awards shows. Subscribe via Spotify here.   

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Thursday Thoughts…

• If the over/under on this weekend’s Sandra Bullock-Channing Tatum jungle movie The Lost City is $25 million domestic, I’ll take the over. I think this one will overperform.
  
  
• Producer Keith Redmon sued Anonymous Content on Tuesday over his firing and the claim Anonymous made to me in November about “multiple incidents of sexual misconduct by Redmon, some physical in nature,” which he says is false. He wants Schitt’s Creek money that he says he’s owed and other damages. Here’s the full complaint, which includes some choice words about Anonymous investor Laurene Powell Jobs...

Tim Cook’s Oscar Moment Didn’t Come Cheap

If Apple wins the top prize Sunday for CODA, it will have achieved in two years what Amazon and Netflix couldn’t accomplish in a decade. How? The road to the Oscars wasn’t easy—and reveals a lot about the harsh realities of Hollywood.

So, this is happening, isn’t it. Apple is really going to beat Netflix and Amazon to the Oscar. Maybe? Probably? Definitely? CODA, the deaf family drama that rivals dismissed as a Hallmark movie—and a remake of a Hallmark movie, no less—seems, with each guild win and momentum marker, to be the favorite to win best picture on Sunday. Vegas still has CODA as virtually dead even with The Power of the Dog, and Belfast could be a late spoiler, but at least around L.A., the race doesn’t feel that close. It feels like it’s over.

Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook will attend the show on Sunday, I’m told, and if he walks out of the Dolby Theater with the top prize, he will have triumphed just two and a half years after formally entering the film and TV business. Two and a half years. Netflix and Amazon, after more than a decade of original content, and five years of aggressively throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at lavish campaigns, will have been outplayed by their richer tech rival. This isn’t exactly inventing the Macintosh or iPhone, but for a consumer products company that has always positioned itself as creative rather than utilitarian, reaching the apex of Hollywood would be a triumph. Even Steve Jobs would be mildly impressed.

Sure, but Apple is worth nearly $3 trillion these days, more than a dozen Netflixes, so it just bought the Oscar it coveted. Not really. People who follow Apple for its hardware might not realize that’s not quite how it works...

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