Book news! I’m happy to share I’ve signed a contract with @ucpress.bsky.social to write a book about Motown’s film and TV production company, which will be easing on down the road to you in 2028 or early 2029. (Title forthcoming!)

STUDENT MEDIA LAWSUIT: Eight students have sued the University of Alabama, arguing that the closures of the women- and Black-focused student magazines violated the First Amendment. thecrimsonwhite.com/127869/news/...

Looking forward to roundtabling with this fine company at #SCMS26 this week! @alyxvesey.bsky.social @askjerseth.bsky.social

Fun time to get on a plane!

Congrats to Warner Bros. (1923-2026) on its 11 Academy Awards tonight

Part of the rationale for Chalamet for Best Actor was to recognize the rare movie star who can draw young people to theaters and get projects made and…they awarded someone who does exactly that

You can’t do a bunch of stupid comedy bits and then play people off when they’re having the biggest moment of their life. It’s bullshit.

the new rule is if a nominee doesn't show up to collect their Oscar, it goes to Delroy Lindo

Very happy Oscar clips are back

My BP rankings… Excellent!: Secret Agent Great!: Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle, Sentimental Value Pretty good!: Bugonia Pretty! Good?: Train Dreams I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards: Frankenstein What? No. Why?: F1 Oh, fuck off: Hamnet

Why not just carry the boat?

My students want Sinners to win all of the things fyi

This long interview with Tony Kushner about writing Munich, one of the most profound films distributed by a Hollywood studio this century, is excellent. This passage stood out in particular www.gq.com/story/tony-k...

The existence of same-sex relationships and gender nonbinary people is some of the easiest shit in the world to explain to your kid. Like, two sentences tops

New cabinet members:

The thing I got wrong in this post was that it won’t be 10 years

Lost Méliès found that was owned by "a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western PA by day, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures." blogs.loc.gov/loc/2026/02/...

When you’re doing curriculum work and accidentally call a new prep a curse instead of a course

I'm guessing theaters don't do this as often because it relinquishes a later-night showtime, but 8pm is truly the optimal time to see a movie

This week for Silent Sundays, a look back at five lost films made by Bluebird Photoplays with a little history lesson about the filmmakers and stars who made them. Read: oldfilmsflicker.substack.com/p/favorite-p...

"Homework Machine" by Shel Silverstein

the technology the left is excited about is 16mm projectors

I feel like I honored the memory of Fred Wiseman today by having a series of long meetings

I got to talk with @historyonfilm.bsky.social about my 70s Hollywood class :) open.spotify.com/episode/1Ne0...

my favorite Robert Duvall role is where he appears as a priest on a swing for 2 seconds for no apparent reason in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

gonna go out on a limb and say the folks at the investment firm Ancora are overpaid (via www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/b...)

Drop an album that was important to you when you were 19

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

I do not believe that an AI video of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting threatens the practice of screenwriting, but I do understand why it would threaten the specific career of the guy who wrote 'Deadpool & Wolverine'

Last month a got to host a conversation with Alfre Woodard for our students. A fr “oh wait my job is cool” moment

Love it when my health insurance provider e-mails me that my prescription costs will go down with this one cool trick when the one cool trick was supposed to be enrolling in health insurance

The Secret Agent. What a picture

My wife is teaching a very cool class on the romance novel, and UA student media interviewed her about it: barefield.ua.edu/2026/02/02/e...

we've ended up at a pretty weird equilibrium of privacy breaches + unequally distributed legal power where our info is constantly stolen and sometimes you get an e-mail that says you're part of a class action lawsuit and sometimes you get another e-mail that says here's $20 then it all happens again

One last trip from my couch to Park City

The moment in Home Alone where John Candy is listing his polka hits and Catherine O’Hara dryly says “These are songs.” is an all-timer of a line reading for me

A Minnesotan here in Tuscaloosa gave a speech last night at a vigil detailing what her family, friends, and neighbors are experiencing right now. It’s worth watching in full. m.youtube.com/watch?v=lUWt...

A good read to follow up yesterday's nominations. 'Sinners' feels like a movie made from a Hollywood that could-be but almost certainly won't prospect.org/2025/12/11/s...

That ambient baritone droning you're hearing is the sound of middle-aged dads celebrating Bryce Dessner's Oscar nomination

Diane Warren getting an Oscar nomination for a song she wrote for a documentary about Diane Warren is really funny

The director of Frownland is an Oscar nominee

Philip K. Dick: I wrote Minority Report to warn of the freedom we exchange for a false sense of safety in a police and surveillance state. It’s about how the idea of free will is incompatible with authoritarianism. Chris Pratt: I bet I could win at it.

Just saw the new Avatar and, man, you really didn’t have do make Jemaine Clement fake an American accent for this

New pub from me! For this cool new collection that reconsiders Elvis's iconography, I wrote about the fan culture that developed around the movies Elvis could have been cast in but wasn't TL;DR: This culture reveals a gap between the 60s-70s we canonize vs. the 60s-70s in which Elvis participated

This photo from Tim Curry’s memoir brings me joy

Thinking today about how she was both an activist and a parent, how being a parent who wants to realize a world in which children and the adults they become are safe and free requires unyielding action, how people in power mock what it would take to build such a world, and how far we have drifted