Mailbag for March 6, 2026
Michael B Jordan is the safe choice over Timmy Chalamet (!?), Connor Storrie and SNL, scrapped movies and unpaid writing, Lindsay Lohan’s career resurgence, the 'must watch' Oscar rule, and more
Dear Squawkers,
Let’s talk about The Hollywood Reporter’s hilarious piece on Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar chances that was published on Wednesday, one day before Oscar voting closed. The SAG Awards on Sunday made it a race for best picture and for best actor. Which is more fun for everyone! Let me repeat what I wrote last week in the mailbag, before the SAGs:
“For what it’s worth, I’m not rooting for Timmy to win the Oscar though I would prefer to see him win it over Leonardo DiCaprio, if it was a two-horse race. But I would rather see it go to Michael B Jordan, Wagner Moura, and Ethan Hawke, in that order. So if any of those actors win, I’m happy on Oscar night. If Timmy wins, I can’t say I’d be elated but honestly, I wouldn’t revolt either.”
What I am elated about is the suspense. We really don’t know which way the Academy will swing, but we do know that MBJ is suddenly a frontrunner, alongside Timmy, prompting David Canfield at The Hollywood Reporter to write a whole piece asking, “Why not Timothée?”
To be fair to David Canfield, most of the essay is a mostly fair – and favourable – assessment of Timmy’s talent, career, and image management. He then points out the Academy’s aversion to younger actors winning best actor while awarding younger actresses in the best actress category. But then he plays the comparison game, and this is where my eyes bugged:
“To an extent, [Timmy and MBJ] run in parallel: Jordan is similarly representing an original box-office success story and previously toplined his own hit franchise relaunch with Creed. But he’s also about 10 years older than Chalamet, traveled the circuit in far more traditional fashion and hadn’t even been nominated for an Oscar up to this point. For the Academy, that’s a relatively familiar, appealing package.
Chalamet represents a less comfortable path for the industry — an anointing of the popular kid, an endorsement of a set of campaign standards that doesn’t exactly align with its own. That’s a fascinating tension for this particular moment: Chalamet has proven the worth of his brazen, defiant style just as Hollywood is looking for any savior it can find. This leaves the ball, as it were, in the Academy’s court.”
So, basically, my takeaway from those two paragraphs is that Michael B Jordan would be the safer (i.e. boring) choice for the Academy and voting for Timmy is the riskier, bolder one? Imagine being able to say with your whole chest that a Black actor would be the safer choice for the Academy and Hollywood when he’s starring – in TWO roles – in a film that interrogates colonisation, systemic racism, artistic commodification and theft, and also the magical and connective power of music. The same film that made so much money that industry trades tried to discredit it because the genius director who conceived of it became the master of his own work. This is the safer, “relatively familiar” and “appealing” choice?
David Canfield is basing much of his piece on campaign styles. He mentions that he’s heard from Academy members who’ve been turned off by the way Timmy has been going about his award season and no, it’s not necessarily to do with his stunts, it’s because he hasn’t been attending the cocktails, all the gladhanding parties on the circuit, making small talk with the old fucks who want their asses kissed in exchange for a vote. They’re pissy that he’s not following the prescribed path of how one finds themselves onstage on Oscar night and is instead doing things his own way. As Canfield points out, MBJ has “traveled the circuit in far more traditional fashion” – in other words, he’s played by the rules of the Oscar campaign: don’t be controversial, talk to all the Important People, get on the phone at a party to say happy birthday to their wives, mothers, and neighbours. In contrast to Timmy who’s out here mugging next to a mystery white rapper in a ski mask and being waited on hand and foot by orange ping pong humans.
Like Michael B Jordan would ever have that fucking luxury!
If it was Michael B Jordan clowning on a Zoom call, or sending blimps into the sky, after starring in a genre-bending film about vampires and the Delta Blues, he wouldn’t even have been nominated. Because Black people move through the world having to confront a whole different set of expectations, especially in Hollywood during award season.
Saying that MBJ “traveled the circuit in far more traditional fashion” as if it was a choice made with the same freedom and privilege that Timmy chose to be a punk on the circuit is, frankly, a mischaracterisation of the respective realities in which each actor exists. It’s bullshit, sinister even, to frame one as a conformist and the other as a rogue.
Let’s get to the mailbag…
Question from Ashley Jenkins:
Please review and post about Conner Storrie and SNL night! Any inside details on after party, fashion, special guests! I’m a long-time reader of LG, and the event didn’t happen until I get my LG contribution 💛.
Lainey’s Answer:
I feel the same way about Connor Storrie’s episode of SNL as Sarah – not every sketch was great, but he was great in every sketch. Connor’s background in clowning was such an asset, particularly in that last skit, but overall, he’s the perfect host because he’s not only game, he brings the energy. You could see it even when he wasn’t talking, even when the humour was being delivered by one of the cast members, he’s fully committed, he’s only thinking about the comedy, nothing else. He’ll be back, no doubt.
As for the special guests…Hudson Williams, was obviously the scream of the night and I LOOOOOOOVED the sketch they involved him in because it wasn’t just a gratuitous, let’s just get Hudson on camera. It was the cleverness of the subtext as it relates to Heated Rivalry, you could read it straight…or not, no pun intended. And of course, like you I devoured all the footage online that has been shared of Connor and Hudson hugging at the end of the show, and the details that have since come out about how Hudson didn’t want to be up front during the finale, wanting Connor to have his moment alone, but he was pushed to stand there and it was so obvious that he was channeling all the attention and warmth to his best friend. What they have and are protecting continues to be so wholesome.
Sorry, I can’t say the same for the male hockey players. It was disappointing in the days leading up to Connor’s night to learn that they’d been invited to appear – a star on the biggest show of the year doing a solid for a culture that does not deserve the grace. And to be clear, when I say culture, it doesn’t matter to me what country any of those male players represent.
The women, on the other hand, if it had to be this way, I was happy to see Hilary Knight and Megan Keller push the other two off to the side and be in the places of honour beside Connor, arriving to much louder cheers (at least from what I heard). And then for Connor to be able to say “my show speaks to people who are not always represented in hockey” – the way I heard that statement, this was Connor upholding two truths: that marginalised communities should not be exploited by those who show their asses over and over again and that those who have been disrespected, like queer people and women, are always the most gracious.
Question from Vitally Useless:
Going back to the scrapped Star Wars movie that Steven Soderbergh, Adam Driver and Rebecca Blunt worked on, that was two and half years of work that they put in on a project that did not come to fruition. They were not paid for this time and effort. How common is this? I know the money filled production holding deals of yore are mostly gone but some compensation should be possible for people putting in this type of work, right? It’s Disney, not some passion project being done on a shoestring. Time is money and someone like Soderbergh will be ok, but he also could have been working on something that got him paid. When it comes to other people who just can’t decide to work on something that might happen because they have bills to pay, are they at a disadvantage? This has been bothering me for weeks, sorry for the word vomit. I don’t even care about a Ben Solo movie, but I do care about people not being compensated for work that took time away from their lives where they could have been doing other things.
Sarah’s answer:
This was a HUGE part of the writers’ strike in 2023! You can read about that here, and you can read Steven Soderbergh talking about the failed Ben Solo movie pitch here.
This issue is much bigger than a Star Wars movie. Free work among screenwriters is an age-old problem. Technically, the WGA has collective bargaining parameters around development, re-drafting, and polishing scripts. But the situation that evolved in Hollywood is much the same as what happened across every industry—if you don’t do the “free overtime”, you’re not a “team player”, you might even be branded “difficult”. Writers fear losing projects and future work over not giving in and providing unpaid labor on “pre-first draft”, or re-writes, or really, whatever the producer/studio was demanding.
Typically, screenwriters are paid when they submit a first draft to either a production company or studio, but producers/studios would and do abuse writers by making them write draft after draft, declaring their work not ready for official submission. This leads to writers putting in months if not years of work and never seeing a dime for their effort. Once upon a time, a screenwriter could supplement those big production paydays by doing paid development work, or script doctoring (polishing “completed” scripts). As her acting career floundered, Carrie Fisher made a very comfortable living as a professional script doctor, but those paydays started waning in the 1990s and pretty much died in the 2000s.
By 2023, the situation was untenable, and that is why payment for this work became a pillar of negotiations. But it still isn’t great, producers and studios will still hold the lure of future work over writers’ heads and demand unpaid labor, and writers are historically one of the most systemically disadvantaged labor forces in Hollywood. The WGA begins a new round of negotiations with AMPTP this month—the day after the Oscars, actually—and I know this issue of development and polishing compensation will come up again.
As for this: When it comes to other people who just can’t decide to work on something that might happen because they have bills to pay, are they at a disadvantage?
Yes. Many people have been driven out of screenwriting because they cannot support themselves on writing alone. And sure, no one is guaranteed a living doing anything, but writing is work, and people should be paid for the work they do. If you lose out on a screenwriting career because you don’t have the chops, that’s one thing. But if you are doing the work, you should be paid. This is going to come up in the WGA negotiations this month, for sure.
Question from Jenn H:
This has been on my mind for a while it’s probably no longer even relevant, but I’ll ask anyway. What caused Lindsay Lohan’s image rehabilitation/career resurgence? For so many years she was known for her party girl ways, and then seemingly out of nowhere she reappeared in Hollywood like nothing ever happened. I’m not saying I agree with how she was covered in the media when she was younger. I just find it odd that her personal life overshadowed her career for so many years, but then she reappeared with a fresh face and new husband and now she’s taken seriously and getting jobs again like nothing ever happened. She seems happy and that’s great, I’m just wondering how she was able to get her acting career back so apparently seamlessly.
Lainey’s Answer:
I don’t know that it’s been all that seamless or that it kinda just happened. Lindsay Lohan wasn’t working for a while. And when she started working again, she took roles in a specific genre: the Hallmark movie, now rebranded as Netflix holiday movies. She did three of them back-to-back. And the success of those projects was a major factor in getting Freakier Friday off the ground. Freakier Friday was her first theatrical release in something like 12 years. That’s a long, LONG time for someone who once was a proper movie star.
For someone like Lindsay, who came up when she did, before streaming, and just before the rise of premium television, she still believes in the old Hollywood hierarchy of movies over television. She said as much in an interview last year when she was talking about her Netflix deal:
“I love making movies for that reason — for people to escape and find something that they can take into their own life and realize everything’s going to be okay. But with Netflix, I was like, ‘Okay, now we need to be thinking about other stuff.’ I can’t do movies like these forever.”
“Movies like these” means movies for television, for streaming, and not for theatre. So of course while she’s grown and figured some shit out and is certainly a lot less problematic these days, she’s still that girl who declared once upon a time that she wanted to win an Oscar before she turned 30. That quote about “movies like these” tells me that girl is still there, still ambitious. Which is a good thing. The question is whether her ambition is meeting the opportunity. And right now, not yet.
To your point about her being “taken seriously and getting jobs again like nothing ever happened”, that’s true she’s getting jobs but I don’t know if it’s at the level of if nothing ever happened. In a Sliding Doors alternative universe, it would have been interesting to imagine what would have happened if Lindsay’s personal drama didn’t derail her professional momentum. She and Emma Stone are two years apart. Emma broke out just as Lindsay’s life was getting more and more complicated. It’s not like Lindsay has just picked up where she left off. Hallmark movie equivalents are not where she left off. What she’s picking up is what’s available to her, and I respect her for committing to the breezy Netflix movies and rebuilding.
Five years into the rebuild and her next project is a TV series, Count My Lies (based on the book by Sophie Stava), co-starring Kit Harington and Shailene Woodley. That’s an interesting combination, because the hype around Shailene isn’t what it was a decade ago. She’s been great on Paradise this season, though, and it’ll be interesting to see her playing opposite Lindsay as a scammer nanny (Shailene) who goes to work for a couple (Lindsay and Kit) with their own secrets. This, though, is living in the same universe as The Housemaid and the upcoming adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson.
Lindsay, then, is moving into the domestic/psychological thriller space, where Jessica Biel has been hanging out for the last few years. It’s a crowded marketplace with increasing uncertainty in the industry and shrinking budgets and fuckass mergers undercutting creativity. So Lindsay Lohan doesn’t exactly have her pick of projects nor is she at the top of every callsheet. In fact, to go back to the Hollywood hierarchy, she’s probably at best on the B+ list right now?
Question from Ketri:
How are the Oscars enforcing the “must watch all the nominated films” rule?
Sarah’s answer:
For many years—ugh TIME—I have mentioned that Oscar voters notoriously weren’t watching everything they should be to make informed votes. And I get it, some of these people are very busy, they’re making and promoting new projects, etc, while trying to squeeze in viewing, it can be tough. I do understand, as I fit my own vote-viewing around my schedule, too. But this was a known problem that the Academy is finally addressing with a rule that voters have to confirm they have watched all nominated films before casting their vote in a given category. But how to enforce it?
It’s a lot easier now, thanks to technology. The Academy has a dedicated online screening platform, accessible only to Academy members. This is the first year the new rule is in effect, and the Academy Screening Room is now tracking viewers’ participation. Once a voter has completed viewing a film, the ASR notes the completion and keeps track of their tally of completed films. And if that sounds creepy, it is how online screening links have always worked. Some links are only available in a window, say for 72 hours, some allow up to 5 views—screening links have always worked on a system of tracking viewership and terminating the link once the window or allotted views have lapsed. Now it’s just being used to ensure Oscar voters are actually watching nominated films.
There is a loophole, though, which is in-person screenings, such as film festivals or screenings held through “for your consideration” events. In those cases, voters are on an honor system to log when and where they saw a film in person. So yes, someone could cheat the system by saying they saw everything in person, and right now, the Academy has no way of verifying that. But they could. For instance, when I go to TIFF, I get a badge with a barcode, which is scanned every time I enter a screening. Academy members could get a similar ID and have to scan and thus verify their physical presence at a screening, but that’s a future possibility. Right now, the ASR is tracking online viewership, while in-person viewership remains on the honor system. Imperfect, but heading in the right direction to ensure voters are actually watching films.
That’s it for this week’s mailbag. I will be covering the Oscars this year with ETALK and the prep is in full swing. It’s the craziest couple of weeks of the year for me and the production team! The press release just went out yesterday - the Oscars will air on both CTV and Crave this year. I know you all know Crave now because of Heated Rivalry, LOL.
ETALK LIVE AT THE OSCARS begins at 530pm ET/230pm PT, 90 minutes before the start of the Oscars, on YouTube and Crave. Our anchor, Tyrone Edwards, will be on the red carpet, and I’ll be in the balcony overlooking the Dolby entrance doing all the fashion and celebrity commentary. Then, immediately after the Oscars, ETALK AFTER THE OSCARS will air on CTV and also Crave.
Through Oscar weekend, I’ll be filming two regular episodes of ETALK and two live specials on Oscar night, plus other content for our channels and affiliates! It’s a lot of work…and a lot of looks!
I just tried on my Oscar dress for the first time on Wednesday and yesterday all day we had hair and makeup and lighting trials which is why I’ve been stretched a bit thin this week outside of LaineyGossip. There’s been very little desk time. Our production team has been in planning for this for months and I think most of our equipment is already on the road to LA so that it will arrive when we do.
Here at The Squawk, we won’t have a mailbag next Friday before the Oscars, but we’ll be live-chatting during the red carpet and throughout the show. We’ll post the link to the ETALK YouTube at that time, and I’d love if you watched our livestream during arrivals while live-chatting.
More on the Oscars next week at LaineyGossip and also here, because Sarah’s annual prediction post is coming soon. Both that and our Oscars live chat are exclusive to paid Squawk subscribers, so we’d love if those of you on free subscriptions jump over and join us.
Keep squawking and keep gossiping,
Lainey and Sarah
re: "Like Michael B Jordan would ever have that fucking luxury!"
Fck yes, Lainey! You said it! This is not a level playing field. Like at all. Calling out bullshit makes it apparent. Or else, it stays sinister like a snake in the grass.
A B+ list actress is Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, and Elizabeth Moss: all women who can go between fronting decent movies with decent directors and television shows. They aren't getting Emma Stone access but they are getting decent quality stuff and are respected. I wouldn't put Lindsay Lohan in their ranks. And I wouldn't put Lindsay Lohan on the same level as a Blake Lively either or an Anna Kendrick.