The news has arrived from the hills of California, and it is exactly as tiring as I expected. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released its list of nominations for the 98th Oscars. To the surprise of absolutely no one who understands how this tragic theater works, a movie about vampires has broken the record. Ryan Coogler’s film 'Sinners' has snatched up 16 nominations. Let that sink in for a moment. Sixteen. In a world where millions of people are struggling to pay for eggs, the most important thing we can find to talk about is how many gold statues we should give to a movie about people who drink blood. It is a perfect summary of our modern age.

I have spent years watching this industry eat itself, but this is a new level of self-indulgence. When a single movie gets 16 nominations, it is not a sign that the movie is a masterpiece. It is a sign that the people voting have stopped looking at anything else. It is a sign of a creative desert. The Academy is like an old man who finds one flavor of ice cream he likes and decides to buy the whole factory. They aren’t celebrating art; they are clinging to a life raft. 'Sinners' is that life raft. It has a big-name director and a genre that everyone knows. It is safe. It is comfortable. It is also a very clear mirror of the people who are giving out the awards.

Think about the irony here. A movie about vampires—creatures that live forever by sucking the life out of the living—is being honored by an industry that has been doing the exact same thing for a hundred years. Hollywood is the ultimate vampire. It finds a fresh idea, drains it until there is nothing left but skin and bone, and then looks for the next victim. Now, they are giving 16 nominations to a story that literally describes their own business model. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. I told you years ago that the well was running dry. This record-breaking list is the proof. They have run out of things to say, so they are just saying the same thing sixteen times.

Let’s talk about those 16 categories. It is almost the entire list. Best Picture, Best Director, Best everything. This is what happens when a bureaucracy becomes too lazy to function. The voters probably saw the name Ryan Coogler and the word 'vampire' and just checked every box on the ballot while they waited for their lattes. It is much easier to vote for the thing everyone else is talking about than to actually watch the hundreds of other films that were made this year. This is how records are set in the modern world. It isn’t about being the best; it is about being the most obvious.

We are now approaching the 98th year of this ceremony. Nearly a century of people in expensive clothes telling us how important they are. And what is the peak of this century of progress? A vampire movie. We have gone from the silent beauty of early cinema to a record-breaking obsession with fangs and shadows. It shows a deep disdain for the audience. The elites believe that we only want the same toys we played with as children. They think if they put enough shiny gold on a vampire story, we will forget that we have seen this a thousand times before.

I find a certain joy in deconstructing this incompetence. The Academy wants to stay relevant. They want people to watch their show. So, they create a 'moment.' A record-breaking 16 nominations is a marketing dream. It creates headlines. It makes people talk. But it doesn't make the movies any better. It just makes the statues more crowded on the shelf. The tragedy of the situation is that there are likely hundreds of filmmakers out there with new, strange, and beautiful ideas who will never get a single nomination because they didn't make a movie about monsters that the voters recognize.

In the end, 'Sinners' will win its awards, and the records will be written down in books that no one reads. The stars will cry on stage and thank their agents and their cats. They will act like they have changed the world. But tomorrow, the sun will come up, and the vampires will go back into their boxes. We will be left with the same empty feeling we always have after the Oscars. The industry will continue to suck the blood out of every good idea until there is nothing left. I would say I’m disappointed, but that would require me to have had expectations in the first place. I told you so. It’s all just a long, expensive walk to nowhere.