It isn’t easy getting into the Academy Awards ceremony, especially if you’re not an A-list actor or a major name in the Hollywood film industry. But we normal people can live a little vicariously through the eyes, posts, and livestreams of the influencers who graced the evening’s red carpet.
The 98th Academy Awards were held on March 16 (Philippine Time) at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of big moments took place as the ceremony progressed. For her work on Sinners, Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and first Filipino to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. After 11 nominations and almost 30 years of zero Academy wins, Paul Thomas Anderson finally won the Oscar for Best Director for One Battle After Another, before following it up with the win for Best Picture. And Lil Timmy Tim (excuse me, Timothée Chalamet), despite Marty Supreme being up for nine nominations, went home with no golden statuette to his name.
But perhaps what was almost as interesting as the Oscars itself was the Gen Z-coded coverage of everything surrounding the main event. For the third year in a row, Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg returned to the Oscars as its official social media ambassador. This year, the gig included sitting down with nominees like Wagner Moura, Teyana Taylor, and Rose Byrne for a Pre-Luncheon Luncheon (sans fried chicken), before heading to the red carpet and interviewing the likes of Hudson Williams, Chase Infiniti, and Ethan Hawke. She also put out a Chicken Shop Date episode with Oscars host Conan O’Brien just two days before the ceremony.
Cole Walliser, who’s best known for manning E!’s Glambot booth, was also seen herding celebrities on the red carpet for his ninth year in a row. And the Vanity Fair Oscar party, which has been a mainstay of A-list debauchery since 1994, saw Brittany Broski, Jake Shane, and Quenlin Blackwell transform from TikTokers to official red carpet correspondents.
The Academy, especially in recent years, has shifted to reaching out to younger viewers in order to make the almost century-old ceremony more relatable to an ever-changing audience. As Conan O’Brien so aptly put it in his opening monologue this year, “When you’re hostmaxxing the Oscars and lowkenuinely trying to rizz up the younger demographic by going brain-rot mode, and even though you’re unc-coded with a bunch of famepilled NPCs, you’re still S-Tier level aura farming. Six-Seven.”
However, the shift towards inviting more content creators into the world of the Oscars hasn’t come without its hiccups. This year, Jake Shane caught some strays when he asked Julia Fox if she found the daughter in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You “so damn annoying.” Fox avoided responding, instead choosing to focus on the main theme of the film, which she argued was the systematic oppression of mothers. An hour later, Shane doubled down on his “annoying kid” take when he asked F1’s Damson Idris the same question (to which Idris replied with an awkward laugh before walking away).
It’s safe to say that the Academy’s strategy of dressing up influencers as Hollywood-centric correspondents isn’t always foolproof. Said influencers also recognize that they don’t have a background in reportage, with Shane even acknowledging in an interview with Rolling Stone, “I think it’s insulting to journalists to say what I do is journalism.”
But there are moments when the strategy pays off (think Dimoldenberg gently calling O’Brien a “sad Victorian child, or a pumpkin that’s melted”). There’s no denying that the Academy’s pivot to reach Gen Z and Alpha has made it more accessible, with hundreds of TikToks and Reels flooding our phones and giving us every angle imaginable to the Oscars. It just needs a little more fine-tuning before the Academy can claim that it’s completely won over its younger, “brain-rot” demographic.
