On Sunday, Michael Schulman will step onto the Oscars red carpet with Clarence Maclin, a first-time nominee for best adapted screenplay whose path to Hollywood is anything but conventional. Maclin spent 17 years incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, where he became involved in the prison’s rehabilitative arts program—an experience that led him to co-write and star in “Sing Sing.” With the film nominated for three Academy Awards this year, Maclin will take his place among Hollywood’s biggest stars, and Schulman will do what he always does—ask questions, fade into the background, and start taking notes.
A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Schulman has covered the Oscars since 2017—not as a film critic or industry insider, but as a documentarian of Hollywood’s most elaborately staged event. “I bring my tuxedo on the plane to L.A. I bring a tape recorder and a reporter’s notebook and pen, and that’s about it,” he says. “The whole point of my write-up is to capture what it’s actually like to attend the show.”
And that reality isn’t always glamorous. “Look right, and there’s Charlize Theron. Look left, and there’s a Dave & Buster’s,” Schulman once wrote, a reminder that the Oscars take place in a shopping mall. The Dolby Theatre, swathed in gold and crimson for the cameras, is an illusion—until it breaks. “I root for drama and chaos during Oscar season because it gives me something to write about and talk about. And there’s been a lot of that this year.”
The Oscars campaign for “Emilia Pérez” and “The Brutalist” has been mired in AI controversies, making artificial intelligence the latest battleground of awards season. “Emilia Pérez” faced backlash for using AI-assisted audio editing, while “The Brutalist” sparked debate over voice-cloning technology. The controversy surrounding “Emilia Pérez: deepened after the resurfacing of derogatory social media posts by its star, Karla Sofía Gascón, further jeopardizing the film’s chances.
Some years, the Oscars descend into live television chaos—the envelope mix-up of 2017, the Will Smith slap of 2022. When the latter happened, Schulman instinctively left his seat and went to the lobby to interview people, capturing the immediate reaction. “That’s where the real energy is,” he says. “During the show, you’re stuck in your seat—unless you want to risk missing a whole segment.”
Schulman has made a habit of attending with first-time nominees. Last year, he rode in with 15-year-old “Anatomy of a Fall” star Milo Machado-Graner. This year, it’s Maclin. But once the ceremony begins, Schulman hopes for an unexpected seatmate. “I always pray for someone really random to sit next to me, because then they become part of my piece. One year, it was a TikTok correspondent. Another, it was the wife of a guy who worked on the technical crew.”
If the ceremony is about who wins and who loses, the after-parties are where Hollywood lets loose. “There’s always a point at the Vanity Fair party where they bring out In-N-Out burgers,” Schulman says. “The red carpet there is like a celebrity slip ‘n slide. You’re lined up behind Emma Stone or someone else, and then they get pushed onto the slide, suddenly hit with a battalion of photographers snapping photos. It’s a little bit insane.”
Schulman has spent years chronicling the Oscars. His 2023 book, “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” charts the Academy Awards’ long history of personal rivalries, unexpected upsets, and offstage dramas.
When it comes to predicting winners, Schulman likes to be surprised. “I like to be wrong,” he says. “The Best Picture race is really up in the air this year. Last year, it was such a lock for “Oppenheimer,” which was deserved but kind of boring to just see it happen. This year, I really don’t know.”
Still, he paused to surmise. “Adrien Brody is going to win Best Actor. Demi Moore has a good chance for Best Actress, but I’m not 100% sure. The supporting categories seem like a lock for Zoe Saldaña and Kieran Culkin—but both are category fraud, because they’re actually co-leads in their movies.”
By the end of the Oscars, the stars will have toasted, danced, and debated the merits of the winners. Schulman will have filled his notebook with revealing celebrity and non-celebrity encounters, overheard conversations, packed up his tuxedo, and notebook, and boarded his flight back to New York—where the illusion of Hollywood fades, but the stories linger.
