Good morning, It was another great week: Matt Belloni assessed an Oscars unforced error; Kim Masters captured the town’s latest Netflix gripes; Eriq Gardner explained the latest Baldoni-Blake legal wrinkle; Dylan Byers got to the bottom of a Maddow mini crisis; John Ourand depicted an ESPN tête-à-tête; Lauren Sherman examined the upcoming Gucci appointment; Rachel Strugatz covered a Carolina Herrera shocker; Sarah Shapiro solved Madewell’s midlife crisis; Bill Cohan investigated Bill Ackman’s latest gamble; Marion Maneker chatted with the Christie’s chairman; Julie Davich compiled a midseason auction report; and Baratunde Thurston conducted the second quarterly edition of The Puck Private Conversation, powered by Orchestra. Meanwhile, Julia Ioffe conveyed the fallacy of Trump’s Putinphilia; Leigh Ann Caldwell broke the news of the president’s House intervention; Peter Hamby detailed Elon’s Icarus moment; and Tara Palmeri plumbed some Biden regrets. Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together. P.S.: I’d like to quickly correct an error in last night’s issue of In the Room. In an item, we confused outgoing Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley with New York Times opinion editorial director David Leonhardt. Shipley is not going to the Times. (Although, to be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up there one day.) It was an honest mistake and we regret the error.

Lauren Sherman reads the Gucci succession tea leaves and notes a Burberry revival. and… Rachel Strugatz uncovers a major development at Puig. meanwhile… Sarah Shapiro dissects Madewell’s midlife malaise and captures the key trends in her week in shopping.

Marion Maneker conducts a candid interview with Guillaume Cerutti and predicts the Riggio auction estimates. and… Julie Davich prepares a modest midseason auction report.

Matt Belloni details how the Oscars’ internationalization fundamentally changed the taste of the awards body. and… Kim Masters explains how Netflix’s promise to Greta Gerwig has the industry on high alert. meanwhile… Eriq Gardner reveals the latest shoe to drop in the Baldoni-Lively psychodrama.

Bill Cohan deciphers Bill Ackman’s new $900 million offer.

Dylan Byers illustrates the latest intrigue at MSNBC. and… John Ourand portrays the final days of the ESPN-MLB marriage.

Baratunde Thurston helms the second quarterly edition of The Puck Private Conversation, powered by Orchestra.

Leigh Ann Caldwell scoops Trump’s House vote interventionism. and… Julia Ioffe offers a brief history of Putin appeasement. meanwhile… Tara Palmeri chats with a former top Biden aide, and Peter Hamby examines Elon’s polling problems.

🎧 Dylan catches up with former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim on The Grill Room. and… Big East commissioner Val Ackerman prophesizes the future of the NCAA with Ourand on The Varsity. and… Lauren and super-stylist Becky Malinsky discuss the Saks wipeout and Burberry’s revival on Fashion People. and… John Heilemann welcomes former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul on Impolitic. and… Matt and WME’s Robert Newman debate the Oscars’ relevance on The Town. and… Tara and Michael LaRosa, Jill Biden’s former press secretary, discuss the former president’s summer from hell on Somebody’s Gotta Win. and… Lauren and Peter discuss White Lotus collab mania and Nike’s female fashion problem on The Powers That Be.

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Unlike most people who get into the media business, I didn’t start out in a newsroom or the mailroom; I wasn’t a producer’s aide, or an ad planner or marketing intern. Instead, I was a glorified manservant at golden-age-era Vanity Fair—at one point, an assistant to an assistant whose responsibilities included fetching Pluck U Chicken when the junior editors had hangovers; more than occasionally retrieving an executive’s dress from Madame Paulette dry cleaners in Midtown; ordering Christopher Hitchens scotch for his birthday (and Dominick Dunne flowers on his); and taking the A train to Canal Street to burn For Your Consideration DVDs of Oscar-contending movies, distributed by the studios in advance of the Academy Awards. In those days, of course, the biological clock of the joint revolved around the Oscars. My boss, the legendary editor Graydon Carter, threw the party of the year around the annual ceremony. His was such a coveted invite that the events team would blow out a wall at Morton’s on Melrose to build a veritable banquet hall atop the parking lot to fit everyone. Meanwhile, guests were invited to enter during specific time windows, both to avoid overcrowding—L.A. county officials were consulted during the planning, of course—but also to subtly reflect their status. The real swells, like Geffen and Mick Jagger, might arrive to watch the award show at dinner. The riffraff was allowed in after midnight. Sara Marks, whom some of us half-joked would have been equipped to lead Operation Iraqi Freedom, manned the guest list from the chauffeur drop-off. Crashers, and Courtney Love, were bounced. All these decades later, Oscar weekend remains my Proustian madeleine. Of course, the industry has changed profoundly in the intervening years as streaming, cord-cutting, the rise of the trillion-dollar tech platforms and other secular forces have reshaped how audiences consume movies. I remember walking through the VF party back in 2005 when Million Dollar Baby, the definitionally monocultural $200 million grosser starring Hilary Swank and directed by the great Clint Eastwood, won best picture. Ever since, as our culture has balkanized, Oscar favorites have become increasingly niche-ified. It’s just the way media works these days. In his latest piece, my partner Matt Belloni offers an incredibly insightful analysis of one of the latent factors in the transformation—a growing split between what American moviegoers watch on the big screen and the films that take home gold statuettes. During the past decade, as the Academy rightly attempted to diversify its ranks, around 40 percent of the new invites went to members outside the U.S. And while this sort of cosmopolitanism was overdue, in some respects, it also shaped the Academy’s taste, thereby impacting which movies got nominated and eventually won awards. “This isn’t an artistic point, or even a complaint about the ‘qualifications’ of these international invites,” Matt noted astutely. “But when voters have no connection to the Hollywood film industry—or, in some cases, even an interest in the kinds of movies that are shown in U.S. theaters—how can the Academy expect them to nominate movies that appeal to the American audience that consumes mostly Hollywood films and might want to watch the Oscars on a Sunday night?” Matt offers a fascinating depiction of the dynamic in The Academy Did This to Itself. Tastes do change, of course. (Although, I have to say, for some reason I recently found myself rewatching Hannah and Her Sisters, a 1987 best picture nominee, and it still holds up perfectly.) And the fashion industry knows more about capriciousness than any other market we cover here at Puck. If you have time to read only one piece this weekend, I’d turn your attention to Lauren Sherman’s fantastic Gucci Successorology & Burberry’s Mini Revival. Indeed, the industry’s biggest brands are enduring their own quiet evolution, too, away from singular star creative directors and in pursuit of safer, annual-recurring-revenue-friendly strategies that make them less immune to key man risk. The business of art and the art of business remain the story of our time, and something you should always expect to read about in Puck.

Have a great weekend, Jon

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