June 2021: Heating Up
Mark London Williams
June 4, 2021
This particular dispatch is being written during America’s de facto kickoff to the season ahead: “Summer,” if you’re looking at the weather and contemplating how many wildfires we’re about to go through on the West Coast, and wondering how crowded and unmasked your Memorial Day barbecue should be. “Emmy season,” if you’re thinking of a more showbizzy way of marking time.
And yet, by the latter metric, if we’ve just left “Oscar season,” it becomes harder and harder to differentiate the passage of time on the award-smitten calendar – much as wildfire and drought are now year-round considerations – if similar entities, like, say Amazon and Netflix, are lobbying to win both sets of accolades. And harder still, when one of those corporations buys a legacy brand, like, MGM Studios, which pretty much epitomised “the picture business” at one time.
This particular dispatch is being written during America’s de facto kickoff to the season ahead: “Summer,” if you’re looking at the weather and contemplating how many wildfires we’re about to go through on the West Coast, and wondering how crowded and unmasked your Memorial Day barbecue should be. “Emmy season,” if you’re thinking of a more showbizzy way of marking time.
And yet, by the latter metric, if we’ve just left “Oscar season,” it becomes harder and harder to differentiate the passage of time on the award-smitten calendar – much as wildfire and drought are now year-round considerations – if similar entities, like, say Amazon and Netflix, are lobbying to win both sets of accolades. And harder still, when one of those corporations buys a legacy brand, like, MGM Studios, which pretty much epitomised “the picture business” at one time.