Conan O'Brien, tech critic
The Oscars host mined Hollywood's unease with Silicon Valley. Plus, BuzzFeed nears bankruptcy after its pivot to AI, China's exploding gig economy, and a playwright calls Sam Altman a Nazi.
I didn’t watch the Oscars live on Sunday, but I saw some posts floating around noting that host Conan O’Brien tackled AI in the opening monologue, so I gave it a look last night. Pretty good! O’Brien was just harsh enough on a few points that if this were ten years ago, you could imagine some headlines like ‘CONAN EVISCERATES SILICON VALLEY’ on Huffpo or BuzzFeed or such.
O’Brien’s first joke was about how he’s the last human host of the Oscars, and that next year it will be a Waymo in a tux. That kind of broad, lightly absurdist and mostly victimless joke plays well at the Oscars, and he got a good solid laugh. The other kind of joke that tends to do well is lampooning a famous person in attendance who is clearly game to be lampooned, so everyone can feel good in laughing along. Conan had this one to that end: “Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, is here. And this is exciting—it’s his first time in a theater. This is what they’re talking about.” O’Brien then did his evil rich guy imitation: “Why are they all together enjoying themselves? They should be home alone where I can monetize it.”
He also got in digs at Amazon—”Why isn’t the website I order toilet paper from winning more Oscars?”—and one later at YouTube, as described by the Associated Press:
“Some people are worried this is going to change how the Oscars are viewed,” O’Brien said Sunday, “but I’ve been assured …” he was then cut off by a wildly intrusive, YouTube-style ad featuring actor Jane Lynch pitching a tactical flashlight.
With the very large caveats that a) I haven’t watched a lot of the Oscars in recent years and that b) I may be guilty of some degree of confirmation bias given my interest in these particular subjects, there seemed to a queasiness to the vibes in the audience that I don’t recall encountering in Academy Awards past. There was a sort of omnipresent ‘should we be laughing at this joke about Amazon’s vertical monopolization or Netflix’s role in destroying movie theaters because they might fund our next film’ feeling hanging over the proceedings. You could hear it in the uncertain laughter that followed the Silicon Valley-skewering jokes that didn’t fall into one of the two above-mentioned categories, a kind of muted enthusiasm, a shifting in seats real or proverbial.
Now there have surely been jabs at streamers in past monologues, but I don’t remember the whole theme of the opening bit and thus the general framing device for the award show that follows centered so wholly around tech criticism, which was pretty much the case here. But it does makes sense. Even when Netflix and the big streamers started eating into the major studios’ business a decade or so ago, there wasn’t the palpable level of existential dread among creatives in the entertainment industry that we’re witnessing today.
Part of that dread is of course thanks to the continuation of trends put in motion by the streamers years ago; the gigification of writers’ rooms, the undermining of creative labor with tech disruption, yes, the usurping of audiences from movie theaters. Part of it is thanks to outside economic factors, including incentives to lure production outside of Hollywood, and part—perhaps most, depending on who you’re talking to—flows from the rise of AI, a tech product that just so happens to be funded by many of the same people who have monopolized large swaths of the entertainment industry and eroded working conditions for actors, writers, and film workers. Even if it’s not wearing the tux, AI embodies the broader trend O’Brien was skewering; the deskilling, degradation, and Silicon Valley takeover of entertainment work.
In fact, it seems to me that one reason Timothee Chalamet’s comments about not wanting film to go the way of ballet or opera—and become a niche endeavor that only small audiences will pay to see—caused such sustained backlash is not just because they were insensitive to practitioners of arts still beloved by their adherents, but because they arrived amid a crest of anxiety over the sense that, for the first time in a century or so of film’s cultural dominance, such an outcome actually seems plausible. (What’s especially frustrating to me about Chalamet’s comment is that it’s oblivious to all of that; it was made in service of the idea that the industry just needs to make more good movies to avoid the “fate” of ballet or opera.)
Conan called out Chalamet and his comment, too, early on, amid all the tech criticism. And it’s probably worth noting how Conan himself is an interesting vessel for all this; his career has been stymied by the old studio guard, which famously denied him tenure at the Tonight show, and arguably reached new heights via a popular podcast, a travel show on the streamer HBO Max, and a social media ecosystem that disseminates viral clips like his Mark Twain award acceptance speech or his now infamous Hot Ones appearance.
After that Hot Ones spot, when his podcast cohosts asked about the fallout, he said “If I think something is funny, I’ll do it, and deal with it later.” He’s committed to the bit. At the Oscars, it’s not like his jokes were especially brave or risky or anything, it’s just that he and his writers felt that gallows humor about big tech and AI strangling his industry would be funniest, all things considered. No wonder he got raves online, while the humans in the room squirmed.
In other Academy Awards news, I enjoyed this The Real Sarah Miller post on the futility of watching the Oscars. Frankenstein won some stuff.
Oh and an award-winning playwright called Sam Altman a Nazi to his face at the Vanity Fair afterparty. More on that below.
NEXT MONDAY, friend of the blog Joanne McNeil is hosting a Q+A with the writer of the pioneering cyberpunk show Max Headroom in LA; it’s free but spots will fill up quickly so RSVP here. I plan on checking it out myself.
In case you missed it, the latest edition of AI Killed My Job, focusing on educators, published last week.
CRITICAL AI REPORT. TUES, MARCH 17
Buzzfeed is on the brink of bankruptcy after pivoting to AI
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