I'm Audie Cornish. This is the assignment, and today we're talking about the Oscars.

My guest is Megan Cruz, a TikTok movie critic who is part of the up-and-coming world of Paras Social Critique.

She's the perfect person to talk about this year's Oscars because it's been great for films and weird for discourse.

Like how Timothy Shalame went from frontrunner to the whole

back and forth in discourse about what he had to say about opera and ballet in the last week

of his Oscar campaign. Then there's the best picture duel between the crowd pleasers from the

same studio, Warner Brothers Sinners and One Battle After Another. And why, just as we're all going to the theater, Hollywood is worried about its future.

This is a fun one, so stick with us.

So, first of all, thank you so much for being on the show.

I'm so excited.

I love movies.

I love talking about movies. I'm like excited. I love movies. I love talking about

movies. I'm like a 90s baby. I want to talk directors. I love the whole thing. So thank you

for being an enthusiastic booster for film online. Oh, yeah. No, it's truly my pleasure. I kind of fell

into this industry. I feel like... Yeah, what was your day job? I went to film school. I just graduated at, like, the peak of the Great Recession. And, you know, life kind of took a few turns along the way. But the Internet, I don't know. It was weird kind of how it happened, but I'm happy. Yeah, no, that's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool.

It's funny because of the sort of decimation of newspapers and things like theater critics

and restaurant critics and movie critics are sort of, you know, disappearing, frankly.

I think that people have looked with joy, frustration.

It's like a mixed bag looking at the community of critics that have evolved online.

I've kind of tried to create a path of embracing the title of critic, which not a lot of,

not everyone does in the space. There's a niche for everything. And some people like to do more

...