Sam Sanders

Kate and Ryan's book is called Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

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This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Sam Sanders in for Shumita Basu.

Today, how the Oscars actually work and why we still love them anyway.

At last year's Oscars, a small independent film called Anora won Best Picture.

On stage, producer Alex Coco underscored just how small that film's budget was, compared to a lot of other nominees.

What Coco didn't mention is how much more money the Anora team spent to win its Oscars.

Behind the scenes, the marketing, distribution, and awards campaign for Onora reportedly cost around $18 million.

That's almost three times the film's production budget.

Awards season isn't just about making the art.

It's about strategy, months of screenings, Q&As, festival stops, for-your-consideration ads, private receptions.

And this is all aimed at a relatively small group of people, the roughly 11,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Turns out, Onora's price tag is not that unusual.

That's Katie Rich.

She's been covering the entertainment industry and the Oscars for years.

She's the awards editor at The Ankler, an entertainment business newsletter, and she hosts the podcast Prestige Junkie.

With the Oscars coming up on March 15th, I sat down with Katie to break down how these campaigns work, what she makes of this year's nominees, and why the Oscars, regardless of what we think of them, probably aren't going anywhere.