Mailbag for March 15, 2024
Are Best Dressed lists impacted by likeability, how we plan coverage, on crediting and idea theft, award declines past and present, and go-to strategists for Oscars
Dear Squawkers,
What a week for our team – the Oscars are historically our busiest week, and I think it’s obvious why, since it’s basically Hollywood’s Super Bowl and we are in the business of covering Hollywood but also, where LaineyGossip is concerned, at least for me, it’s because … we’re also performing for YOU, the readers who could go anywhere and choose our website, our writing, our perspectives. This is always in the back of my mind, knowing – or presuming – that you’re out there refreshing the site, going through all the posts. And I hope this doesn’t sound somehow, like, conceited. I’m not saying that we’re all that special and you’re out there waiting for us. It’s more that we appreciate your time, your patronage, and we want to put on a good show. So this is part of the pressure, to make it worth your while, especially on Oscar Monday.
That said, you may have noticed that there was a significant change to how we covered the Oscars this year because of my schedule. On the television side, a new live production was added to our ETALK coverage and, as I shared last week in the mailbag, this meant that I was losing a few hours on Sunday night/Monday morning to write. Which is why we decided that it would be Sarah editing on Monday for the first time. Sarah handled “Dear Gossips”, and with an assist from Duana, she set the order and the assignments. This is the first time I’ve just shown up for our Oscar coverage, in the history of our site, and not been the lead editor.
I don’t know if Sarah wants to hear this, because her workload was heavier, lol, but let me tell you… it was freeing! That’s not to say I wasn’t busy and that the writing wasn’t hard, just that it felt SO good to have a partner who can share the responsibilities. And it got me thinking, yet again, about leadership and why our understanding of it is so narrow. Shared leadership might not work in every situation and in every organisation, but it definitely should be more explored. Why choose being alone when there’s the option to not be alone, when there’s someone you trust who can do the job and even improve on it?
I guess what I’m saying is that this is a bit of a love letter to Sarah, and Duana too, because without them, this year’s Oscar coverage would not have been possible. And of course, we thank all of YOU for engaging with our coverage – the live chat popped off! There was so much activity on LaineyGossip! THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Let’s get to the mailbag.
Question from Myra: I submitted a fashion-based question last week then deleted it after reconsidering it. But now I know the real question I have. It was because you mentioned the truth about Julia Roberts, and because of the ways in which Kate Middleton’s and Meghan Markle’s style has been rated by critics. How much does a celebrity’s personality and likeability factor into how their style is rated by the media?
Lainey’s Answer:
In my opinion, a celebrity’s personality and likeability is a huge factor. And the person who comes to mind first is Jennifer Aniston. Someone commented on one of the threads here a couple of weeks ago when I was grumbling about Jen’s latest little black dress and they were like, Lainey, chill out, it’s a boring dress but why are you going so hard on it. Fair! I was going hard on it (I called it a flop) because it was the most ordinary silver dress – and they gave her alllll the flowers. Just because it’s silver and not black?
Jennifer Aniston is always on the Best Dressed lists and I’m like, seriously, with everything that’s available to her, why are we settling for mediocrity? Can’t we have higher expectations?
Look at what Andrew Mukamal has been able to do with Carey Mulligan and mostly black dresses. Every black dress was its own moment, and that insane Balenciaga she wore to the Oscars was a fucking showstopper. Sarah and I both wanted that for our Best Dressed coverage on the site and Sarah won.
So when there’s another celebrity doing black every day all day and killing it – and, by the way, also not changing up her hair that much – why does the media keep trying to tell people that Jennifer Aniston is always one of the best? It’s not BEST! Please understand the meaning of the word “best”! We are literally killing the English language!
Well, the answer to that, to go back to your question, is popularity. How could they, we, NOT say that America’s Sweetheart is one of the best? The fact of the matter is Jennifer Aniston attracts attention, she’s the MiniVan Majority’s number one girl. So when she shows up somewhere in a snore of an outfit, they can’t ignore her, they have to include her somehow, and that’s how she ends up on the fashion page with these online editors trying to turn flaccid into an erection.
Question from Cassie B: I'm curious about how the team plans its coverage of the Oscars. How do you all manage to churn out so much content in such short time, how much do you change the content plan based on what happened that night, etc.? And do you get any sleep?!
Lainey’s Answer:
I wrote a little up above about our coverage plan but to get more detailed about it, we churn out all that content on very, very little sleep. I napped for 45 minutes from 230am – 315am on Sunday night/Monday morning. And then woke up to find Kate Middleton’s “apology” posted online, which happened to be the next article I was supposed to write. That nap saved my ass! Because if I had started writing that post before the nap, everything would have had to have been trashed after her update.
Speaking of Kate though…
A decision was made between Sarah and Duana that night that our Kate post could not wait until Tuesday, it had to go up on Monday, among the Oscar posts, and that it had to be me to write it. There were maybe a few minutes of consideration to push it to Tuesday but through the night, as the situation got louder and louder, even more noisy than what happened at the Oscars, our lead editor made the right call – we had to address it immediately.
As for how we were prepping BEFORE the Oscars, we try to anticipate as much as possible. Sarah was always going to write Lily Gladstone, that was decided well in advance. And there were also groupings that were considered beforehand – Sarah and Duana had predetermined certain categories to help guide the content, whether it was fashion trends or Oscar moments or whatever. Here’s a video of Duana putting up the board on Saturday night. It helps her visually, and she fucking loves stationery.
Here’s a photo of the final lineup after Sarah and Duana set the assignments and they’re colour-coded: Sarah is purple, Duana is yellow, and I’m pink (note from Jacek: that’s orange - no one will think that’s pink).
Sarah and Duana hopped on Zoom right after the show wrapped. I was offsite shooting our live aftershow. I don’t know how long they were there for and she might jump in and speak to that but by the time I got back, all I had to do was look at the wall with those sticky notes, and open up my email where a document was waiting for me that listed off each “category”, the person writing it, and the names of the celebrities that should be included in each post.
I did not stick to those names because, as I made my way through my thoughts, of course there were some adjustments. I scratched out some names and replaced them with others that were not already claimed by Sarah and Duana, and I also was looking at the footage coming in from the afterparties. For example, the Greta Lee, Sydney Sweeney, Kirsten Dunst, Gabrielle Union, and Barry Keogan post was supposed to be Greta, Danielle Brooks, Gabrielle Union, and someone else I can’t remember. I didn’t have much to say about Danielle and I noticed that Barry and Sabrina Carpenter went to VF together, so I made that adjustment on the fly.
Sarah is a speed demon, she always, always finishes writing before me and Duana. I actually sent her an email that night when she was done with all her pieces before Duana and I were even halfway through ours. My message was something to the effect of “WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF how are you so fast?” My suspicion is that she’s much more disciplined. Duana and I are fidgety writers. Duana can’t sit in one spot for more than 45 minutes. I can stay in the same writing spot, but I am constantly getting up – to pee, to eat, to stretch, to find some more snacks, to fill up my vape… which then becomes a thought interruption and requires a reset. And also, I get distracted by my text messages and the group chat and that’s another ten minutes of going back and forth with a friend about whatever.
Yes, I know I need better habits. Maybe next year I’ll have gotten better at it.
Sarah’s answer:
I studied writing and photography in college, and I used to make jokes about my degree in “useless and pointless”. …but then I got a job writing for Lainey. And then four years of learning to write on any topic on someone else’s schedule suddenly became incredibly relevant. I have learned how to sit in one place and write copy for a list of topics until I’m done, yes. There’s no such thing as a useless degree!
I also didn’t get much sleep. I went to sleep at 4 AM, got up at 6, edited some pieces from Lainey and Duana, went back to sleep at 6:30, and got up at 8:30 and went back to editing. I am STILL tired lol.
Question from Mel: This is a series of questions about Laineygossip's evolution of online citations and consideration of intellectual property. This is more of a show your work question, but I'm curious about how crediting sources has evolved. I have done a lot of post-secondary studies and know the academic perspective, but I've always noticed and appreciated the efforts to link and cite sources in Laineygossip content. I recall some posts including reference to parallel thinking and I wondered if there have been challenges, i.e. has anyone ever claimed that they were not credited? Are there other contractual obligations that complicate how content is posted? Have you felt conflict between sharing a tip with etalk or saving it for the site? Also, when I read about the Olivia and Taylor IP conflict, I wondered if Taylor went too far, or if she was claiming rightful credit. I think many of us faithful readers appreciate the deeper more philosophical provocations Laineygossip compels us to conisder - the cultural analyses and to me this is Lainey's unique angle. I'm curious what if anything goes into protecting this work?
Lainey’s Answer:
I don’t really know how crediting has evolved on our site because I feel like this is just what I was taught in school. Back in my day, plagiarism was a mortal sin. You can’t take people’s ideas, writing, work. And maybe the internet has degraded that honour, because everything just feels more… temporary (?) on the internet.
For me personally, I’m extremely proprietary about my ideas, which is why if you’ve been reading LaineyGossip over the years, you’ll know that I often do “braggy or boasty” posts calling back to my predictions and/or analyses when I was the first to run with it. Some might consider this poor form – but I don’t give a shit, if I’m not going to stick up for my own thoughts, who will?
As for ETALK and my site and sharing tips – it’s never an issue, because it’s two different kinds of reporting. ETALK is a 23-minute television show that moves fast. Every story is only given 90 seconds, two minutes max. At LaineyGossip, you have noticed, we don’t care about word count, lol. We like to GO ON AND ON.
To go back to credit though, I try to credit always, and I am so grateful to you for noticing. In our very online world right now, though, with so much commentary and chatter on so many social media platforms, it’s not entirely impossible for multiple people to have the same idea, especially when it’s gossip related. For example, someone out there might suspect that a celebrity couple is about to announce a breakup based on their social media activity. Are they the ONLY person who thinks that? Probably not. But what if they’re the first person to *post* that? And if I have the same suspicion, should I still credit that person who posted it first on Twitter? If it’s speculation like that, based on a hunch that’s based on how much the celebrity is or isn’t posting photos of their significant other on socials, and that first-poster doesn’t have many followers, I might not see their post to be able to credit them – if indeed the credit is warranted. So that might be an example of an instance where credit is an issue. But I do my due diligence, and if a situation comes up where I should have credited, I will fix it right away.
This does bring up a bigger point about social media and credits though, and we saw this play out during the skirmish between TikTok choreographer Donte Colley and Nicki Minaj recently. TikTok’s whole shit is basically plagiarism. One person comes up with a dance and everyone rushes out to copy it and it becomes a trend and people forget who actually originated it and it’s turning into a real problem with respect to intellectual property, especially for Black and other artists of colour. But it’s also an epidemic now, in my opinion, where you have a whole generation, literally, of people raised on the actual practice of just copying other people’s shit. It’s so quotidian, it’s SO normalised – and it’s become BEHAVIOURAL. Which is terrifying!
I know someone who’s a teacher and he just happens to be with it enough to be on TikTok and he sees things that goes viral. One of his students came in with an assignment – and it was pretty much ripped from TikTok. It’s not that the student was lazy either, it’s that they didn’t know not to do that, that it wasn’t acceptable. Because, again, this is what they’ve been exposed to during such a formative time, this is what’s all around them, at this point, it’s almost socially genetic.
Which brings us to Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift. They are an entire generation apart. Olivia is now just 21 years old. And I’m not saying she’s like my friend’s student who’s out here willy-nilly just ripping other people’s songs but I also wonder if for someone her age, of her cohort, it’s not that big of a deal because she was literally grown, and is still growing, during a time of explosive social media growth where everyone is just taking photos, ideas, styles and posting it on their own feeds. That’s a question, I want to be clear that I’m not definitively suggesting that this is what Olivia is all about, it’s just a theory.
As for Taylor, it’s important to remember what Taylor was just coming out of when the rumoured beef with Olivia went down. One of the biggest moments in Taylor’s career was her fight over her masters. Two male industry executives decided who would own her work – songs she wrote, songs that only she could write and sing, and songs that found an audience because of HER, her image, her connection to her fans, her style of performing her celebrity. This is where she is the most sensitive, and she has a right to be. And some would argue that she has a right to expect this from other artists, especially younger female artists coming up after her.
Obviously, we don’t know what, exactly, went down. We don’t even know if this whole thing is true! But I’m engaging in the speculation here because I do think there are bigger lessons to take away from the rumoured, totally unconfirmed situation. If Taylor took issue with Olivia, was there some kind of confrontation? Did it get to the point of legal? And if so, is that too harsh? Would there be a kinder way of addressing it? A phone call, artist to artist, handling it gently? Sure.
Or maybe you could see it as an old school way of tougher mentorship. If the widespread problem on social media over intellectual property is a result of younger people being muuuuuuchhhh too lax about crediting, then isn’t one way of addressing it to be FIRM in the correction? To impress upon them that there are serious consequences, bound by law, to lifting others’ work without sourcing and, if applicable, compensation? Or is that kind of approach totally offside now and the expectation in all of our interactions, personal or professional, is to be gentle always? Again, it’s a question, it’s not a statement. I, too, am wrestling with where I stand on the answer.
Note from Jacek:
Also let’s not forget what AI is doing to crediting. These huge platforms are scraping the internet for all the work that has been done over decades/centuries by people who spent time, money, and effort doing research, documenting their findings, breaking stories, or sharing ideas, and they just swoop in and just grab all this as common knowledge without a meaningful way of compensating the person or people who helped build that knowledge base. So maybe these younger generations are seeing this, where you can just ask a bot a question and get an answer, and off they go. Who the fuck cares who did the work. Right?
Question from Jacqueline C: Some of (us) were discussing Emma’s campaign and the result for Lily. Setting aside her work over the last few months to campaign for her second Oscar in 7 years, is it possible for an actor to say no to an Oscar nomination and the ensuing campaign if the studio and producers want it?
Sarah’s answer:
Yes. RDJ declined to campaign for Avengers: Endgame. Disney would have done it for him, but he said no. I’m not aware of anyone declining a nomination—though Marlon Brando declined his award for The Godfather in 1973. George C. Scott was actually the first person to decline the award, doing so for Best Actor for 1970’s Patton. He informed the Academy way in advance he wouldn’t accept it if he won, it did not stop them for nominating/voting for him anyway. (He didn’t believe in comparing performances.)
Probably the time to actually decline it is when the awards machinery starts rolling in the late fall. Just inform the distributor you’re not into it, and they won’t spend money on it (like RDJ). But a LOT of people have contractual clauses about what kind of support they’ll receive come awards season, like guarantees that the distributor will commit to X amount of spending on For Your Consideration events/promotional items. I would not be shocked in the least if part of Universal’s pitch to Christopher Nolan to woo him over from Warner Brothers was a significant FYC spending commitment (which obviously paid off).
It’s just another reminder that whatever they say—they all want it. Except occasionally one of them gets their back up about becoming TOO synonymous with a role/franchise their peers come to see as silly and unimportant, and then maybe they’ll sit out that round, only to then immediately find a more prestigious role on a more prestigious project and throw their entire being into winning a trophy.
Question from Laura: Post Oscars I was thinking about campaign strategy and wondered if there are any ‘go to’ Oscar strategists or is it a mix of PR and studio marketing? If there are specific people are they under contract for specific people for an awards cycle? Do you think it was the right move for Lily to campaign in the Best Actress category or do you think she would have won Best Supporting Actress and do you think that this was the right move for the campaign? Will this be something they are thinking about today?
Sarah’s answer:
Absolutely there are go-to strategists for Oscars, just as there are for politics. It was a big deal several years ago when Netflix signed Lisa Taback, a respected and savvy campaign consultant, to work for them exclusively. There are consulting firms devoted solely to awards season and FYC campaigns, and some of the larger PR firms have departments devoted to trophies, too. It is big business in Hollywood. That’s why it’s so hard to get rid of an awards show, even a straight up embarrassment like the Golden Globes—SO many people make their living in this ecosystem! And yes, if an outside firm is hired (presuming the distributor isn’t big enough to have their own in-house strategy team), they are contracted to that company typically for the entire award cycle, because the whole thing is seen as build up to the “big show” of either the Oscars or the Emmys. It’s very cutthroat and competitive!
As for Lily, while I think conventional wisdom is that she would have marched unimpeded to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, much as Da’Vine Joy Randolph ended up doing, she essentially gambled on herself, to be seen as a leading lady. In that regard, she is looking at a bigger picture than one night and one award, and I really hope it pays off for her. That she already has lead roles in an upcoming TV drama and Charlie Kaufman’s next movie is a good sign, it will keep that “I am a star” momentum going. So while the award pundits might debate the merit of her category decision, from a career standpoint, I think she absolutely did the right thing. Also! She is the female lead of Killers of the Flower Moon! That she doesn’t have more screentime is a Martin Scorsese problem, not a Lily Gladstone problem!
And that pretty much wraps up our Oscar coverage – we don’t have to talk about awards anymore…for another two months when the Cannes Film Festival kicks off, ha.
But as we tie a bow on our first award season here at The Squawk, please know how much we loved having this space to nerd out on all the awards drama and speculation and race-watching. The Squawk is just over six months old now and it’s added such a wonderful new dimension to our work at LaineyGossip. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.
Keep squawking and keep gossiping,
Lainey and Sarah
Although the question around crediting people's work might have been more in the spirit of avoiding plagiarism, I, like Mel, absolutely notice and LOVE the fact that this site embeds love letters to new and legendary celebrity profilers, stylists, authors, and gives a special emphasis where people of color are doing incredible behind the scenes work. I absolutely end up going down rabbit holes based on these spotlights and as a result this site remains an important reference to me for who is driving cultural impact!
I'd also like to say that it is amazing that Lainey and Sarah can share the burden co-leading, which I think takes a tremendous amount of maturity (in my world, the C-suite in-fighting poisons any attempt at this type of collaboration), and that we get to have Duana's voice back on the site!
"I’m not saying that we’re all that special and you’re out there waiting for us."
YES WE ARE
"Sarah is purple, Duana is yellow, and I’m pink (note from Jacek: that’s orange - no one will think that’s pink)."
Salmon obv. Or Coral :-p
"We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have."
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