The Hollywoodland Revue

This morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards, and the results sparked immediate buzz across Hollywood and around the world. At the center of the conversation is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a bold period supernatural film that has just rewritten Oscar history: with 16 nominations—more than any film ever—it surpasses the longstanding record shared by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land and positions itself as the dominant contender in this year’s race.

With a new slate of films arriving in theaters this weekend, audiences are once again faced with that familiar question: what’s worth the ticket price? Below is a quick early look at how critics and viewers are responding to the major new releases—ranging from high-concept sci-fi and franchise horror to intimate literary drama and ambitious historical storytelling. While some titles are still too fresh for fully formed audience scores, initial reactions and early metrics offer a useful snapshot of which films are connecting immediately and which may appeal more to niche or art-house tastes as word of mouth develops.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in the late 1920s—at the exact second, some might say—that Hollywood figured out it needed more than glitz and glamour to survive. The film industry was already a national juggernaut in the making, but it was also a rickety workplace rife with fractious crafts, burgeoning unions, and studios scrambling to control production, wages, and image. Out of that pressure cooker emerged an idea that would prove both utilitarian and symbolic: Create an organization that could corral the industry's top talent under one roof, smooth labor friction, inculcate "standards" of craft and—crucially—give motion pictures the kind of institutional prestige that was enjoyed by older arts.

There are restaurants that you go to when you're hungry. And then there are restaurants that you go to when you want communion with history. Heading into Musso & Frank Grill at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard definitely puts you in that second category. Operating since 1919—and most accredited as Hollywood's oldest continually operating restaurant—Musso & Frank isn't just a dining room. It's a historic archive where time has been preserved, not fabricated.

In an age when the internet often rewards noise over nuance, filmmaker Arthur Dark has carved out a quiet, reverent corner of the digital world—one where memory, artistry, and history converge among marble angels and manicured lawns. As the creator and host of Hollywood Graveyard, Dark has transformed the simple act of visiting cemeteries into a remarkably cinematic experience, preserving the legacy of the world’s greatest entertainers by guiding viewers through the final resting places of the people who shaped our culture. His “Famous Grave Tour” videos have become a modern ritual of remembrance, a way for audiences to reconnect with the stars they know and love while discovering forgotten performers who once illuminated Hollywood’s golden stage.

In the late 1920s, at the height of Hollywood’s confidence and productivity, a quiet dread began to creep into the margins of popular culture: the fear that motion pictures—so new, so dazzling, so seemingly permanent—might not last at all. A widely read 1928 magazine article by journalist Lynn Fairfield posed the unsettling question bluntly: Is time rotting our film records? It was not a metaphor. It was a warning.

Long before West Hollywood lit up with rainbow crosswalks and pride parades, LGBTQ life in early Hollywood existed in whispers, shadows, and coded invitations. In an era when police raids were common and studio contracts demanded public “respectability,” queer Angelenos carved out their own constellation of hidden establishments — places where men could flirt, laugh, drink, or simply be themselves without the panoptical gaze of Hollywood morality. Some were bars, others cafés, some nothing more than back rooms or basements. All were lifelines. They formed the secret geography of queer Hollywood long before the word gay was spoken aloud.

When I recently wrote about John Mayer preserving the Chaplin Studios name, a reader’s sharp-eyed comment raised an intriguing question: was the historic studio itself once physically moved to accommodate the widening of La Brea Avenue? I knew the street had been expanded, but I hadn’t realized that Chaplin’s studio had quite literally been lifted and shifted to make way for progress—until I looked into it. What I discovered was one of those quietly astonishing Hollywood stories that sounds apocryphal until the records confirm it, and it’s a tale worth telling in full.

The movies opening this weekend look like new. They just feel like the past. This weekend’s post-apocalyptic horror flicks channel the anxieties that went into Universal’s monster movies during the Great Depression. This weekend’s true-crime movies retread the real-life terrors that populated headlines in the 1930s and ’40s. This weekend’s intimate period dramas resurrect the prestige films studios used to release when they wanted to be taken seriously, remembered. Even this weekend’s animated family films follow a family-friendly lineage straight back to Hollywood’s original promise: entertain us. Make us feel safe. Lure us into theaters together, young and old, with wonder.

The Sea Beast opened on January 15, 1926, to one of the biggest advance advertising campaigns in silent film history. In terms of billing and enthusiasm, The Sea Beast was no ordinary prestige picture: it was a project expressly tailored to the needs of an actor in the prime of his day-stealing career, John Barrymore, and to the requirements of an adaptation of one of the nation's most daunting masterpieces, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, for popular consumption. The result was not a faithful adaptation but a bold, romanticized reinvention that captured the spirit of obsession and the scale of the sea, even as it reshaped the story into something unmistakably Hollywood.

The surest sign that a movie star is serious is not when everyone likes what they’re doing. It’s when they can ignite resistance. Over the past few years, Timothée Chalamet has emerged as one of the few actors in a current Hollywood landscape with that capacity. In performance after performance, he triggers arguments over questions of taste and morality and gender and even the very purpose of acting. That friction, in Chalamet’s work, is not a defect. It’s fuel. The roles that cleave his audience most often are the ones that offer the least reassurance, the least likability, the least desire to make any unease go away. They are, also, the roles that are likely to last.

George Zucco was born for the stage. The refined British actor, who would eventually become one of Hollywood’s most familiar purveyors of silky menace, first began his career in the classical theater before moving toward motion pictures in the 1930s. Possessing hawk-like features, impeccable diction, and the ability to suggest both intelligence and moral rot with the slightest narrowing of an eye, Zucco quickly found a place for himself in the studio era’s increasingly thriving market for sophisticated villains.