Awards Season: Stan Twitter's Super Bowl

Everything has become stan twitter, and stan twitter has become sports fandom. Here’s how it’s affecting awards season. 

The 2025 awards season has finally come to an end. From discourse around Timotheé Chalamet’s Marty Supreme marketing campaign (and everything else about him), to stan wars erupting from the results of every major awards program, social media has become a hostile hellscape. But since when did social media have this much of an impact on major awards ceremonies? Why does the prestigious nature that these events seem to have had in the past no longer exist? 

Simply put, everything has become stan culture. While this may be a broad statement, it seems that the notion of shows like the Grammys and the Emmys have become hubs for fans of every individual nominee to fight and compare why their favorite nominee has to win and why any other nominee cannot. The Grammys in particular have become saturated with categories, leaving room for more nominees. It has become more embarrassing for your fave to not receive a nomination than it has for it to be an honor. 

Musicians such as Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish have developed intense fanbases that tend to believe in awards supremacy. Eilish, who holds 10 wins with 34 nominations with her career being less than a decade old, has slightly stirred the pot within the past few years of the awards. Evidently, becoming a darling of the Recording Academy rarely goes home empty-handed. In the 2025 awards, Beyoncé won Album of the Year, arguably the highest honor of the night, and stans of the 24-year-old musician were incredibly displeased. Arguments of who had more streams and track virality piled against Cowboy Carter, the winner of the award. Fandoms began to point fingers at one another, the Beyhive alleging racism against fans of Eilish for the outrage of her win, Eilish fans concluding that the award was paid for by Roc Nation. What neither seems to consider is that experts and knowledgeable members of the Recording Academy simply saw Cowboy Carter as the album of the year, plain and simple. However, fans could find some sense of peace after the 2026 ceremony, after Eilish re-released the track “Wildflower” as a single, well after its initial May 2024 release on the album. To have qualified for the 2026 Grammy Awards, music had to have been released between August 31, 2024, and August 30, 2025. Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft " was only eligible to be nominated for the 2025 Grammys, and she released “Wildflower” as a single on March 4, 2025, nearly ten months after it had already been released with the rest of the album. There are no rules against this per se, but the song won the “Song of the Year” award for the 2026 Grammys, which left some viewers upset with the snub of other songs in the category, such as “DtMF” by Bad Bunny and “Luther” by SZA and Kendrick Lamar. 

Alas, Eilish has now won a Grammy for the previously “snubbed” 2024 album. This culture of stans demanding higher numbers, more wins, and better statistics is highly reminiscent of sports culture. Variety reported that for the 2026 Oscars, betting on the awards has become a $100 million business, with bets wagered on who will win. Kalshi and Polymarket ads are difficult to ignore, with the amount of commercial time betting platforms had during the broadcast of the Super Bowl and when the latter partnered with the Golden Globes to integrate live odds into the ceremony. While online betting forums have been around for years, they gained massive popularity right before the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. Once players bet correctly on Trump’s win, sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket have entered the mainstream for various events. Online predictions do not necessarily count as gambling (which is regulated by a few states in the U.S.), which is why these sites are able to promote their platforms as heavily as they do. 

Stan culture and betting are intertwined has turned the awards season into a gamified event. Press and publicity have been around for as long as Hollywood has, but now more than ever can a potential smear campaign or just saying an ill-worded statement on ballet and opera can change the public’s perception of “deserving” the award. Chalamet’s Best Actor campaign for Marty Supreme was nothing short of interesting, to say the least. From standing on top of the Las Vegas Sphere as an orange ping-pong ball to tapping slightly into method press, becoming Marty, embodying greatness, and desiring to be at the top. Many have been turned off by his behavior as it drastically opposes his previously indie-darling persona from the late 2010’s/ early 2020s. Recently, he has found himself in hot water with his comments about ballet in opera while in conversation with former Interstellar costar, Matthew McConaughey. Major ballets and operas across the world have given their two cents on the matter, dissing Chalamet in any way they can. This event has caused a major setback in the public’s view of who should win Best Actor, leading many to one: root for and two: bet on Michael B. Jordan to win. Ultimately, the award went to Jordan, not without some ballet and opera jokes thrown Chalamet’s way during the ceremony. 

The prestige of the award remains partly in its title and the doors it may open for performers and filmmakers. However, the run and the “competition,” so to speak, is no longer a test of the “best performance,” it's a game of numbers. This is where I believe stans across the board would do well in sports fan culture. Once awards and streams became a commodity within stan culture, the direct correlation became blatantly evident. The awards season has now become an amalgamation of stan wars and morality olympics. Does Chalamet deserve an Oscar ever because of his comments? Should movies with bad characters playing antagonists win Best Picture? Can Beyoncé or Taylor Swift win another Grammy? They’ve already won plenty! 

Numbers have no place in the space of honoring art. If you want to bet on winners or compare stats, watch a sport.

Re-Visiting Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Filmed Adaptation of Wuthering Heights: A Conversation About Adaptations

Emily Brontë’s sole published work, Wuthering Heights, is not a beautiful story. It’s barely even a love story, much less “the greatest love story of all time” as the tagline for Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation goes. Brontë wrote this story to showcase the brutal ugliness of humanity by exploring the devastating fallout of generational abuse, racism, and classism. As Peter Bradshaw writes for The Guardian: “Director Andrea Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan strip the story ruthlessly down to its bare essentials: pain, anger and love.” 

Arnold’s greatest strength in this film is her decided lack of romance. The Earnshaw family home is not a picturesque country house, but a grimy farmhouse smack dab in the middle of nowhere, bombarded by brutal rainstorms. According to Jeannette Catsoulis for NPR: “Captured with ravishing naturalism–from eye-straining candlelight to painfully harsh daylight…the film has a melancholy, sinister atmosphere only partly explained by its lashings of rain and banks of gray fog.” Catherine (Shannon Beer as an adolescent, and Kaya Scodelario as a young adult) and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave as an adolescent, later James Howson as a young adult) do not go on Bridgerton-style promenades across a flowery, green landscape, but hike their way through harsh, windy, grassy terrains that leave them caked in dirt. 

Arnold’s aesthetic may not be the most conventionally attractive, but it shows a clear understanding of the text’s Gothic nature and immerses the viewer in the world that Brontë herself was drawing from. The Earnshaws themselves are portrayed as rough, middle-class farmers, especially in comparison to the wealthy, upper-class Lintons. There is meant to be a clear class divide between Wuthering Heights and the neighboring estate of Thrushcross Grange, as shown in scenes of Catherine and Heathcliff sneaking across the moors to peek into the Lintons’ windows. Where the Lintons are well-dressed, educated, and sophisticated, the Earnshaws must work in fields and can only afford to send one person–Hindley (Lee Shaw)--to university. 

Another highlight of Arnold’s film is the attention paid to Catherine and Heathcliff’s shared childhood. When Heathcliff is first brought to the Earnshaws, he is around six or seven years old, while Catherine is five and Hindley is fourteen. Their connection is one that is innocent of the societal divides that await them in adulthood. It may surprise newcomers to know that Catherine’s narrative action is confined to the first half of the novel until her death halfway through. Consequently, Kaya Scodelario is not given as much screen time as audiences may have expected from such a well-established actor. However, part of Wuthering Heights’ tragedy comes from the juvenile naivete of its characters. By the time Edgar Linton (Jonny Powell when younger and James Northcote when older) proposes to Catherine, she is fifteen while he is only a few years older (but likely still a teenager). Catherine’s life is cut tragically short before she ever truly gets a chance to grow up. 

Of course, the most standout choice that Arnold makes in her film is the decision to cast Black actors in the role of Heathcliff. Despite Heathcliff’s explicit description as “dark-skinned” along with numerous assumptions about his race which strongly imply that he was not white, almost every adaptation before the 2011 version–and including the upcoming movie–has cast a white actor in the role. Racism in Wuthering Heights was not an afterthought, but a prominent part of the story, especially where Heathcliff was concerned. Characters such as Nelly Dean and even Catherine herself constantly refer to his darker complexion and features, while Hindley calls him Romani slurs. Bradshaw writes that this casting choice leads to Heathcliff being “confronted with overt and brutal racism from those of his new family who resent the outsider, and are determined to treat him like any farm animal.” Heathcliff’s race is part of the overall theme of “othering” that is present throughout the story; he is not like these white people, and he is mistreated because of it.  

A major criticism of Fennell’s film is her decision to cast Australian actor Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff. This backlash was further fueled by her casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, defending the choice, remarking that “you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life”.  However, this book is meant to reflect real life, and that includes England–and Yorkshire’s–complicated history of racial prejudice that is a catalyst for the abuse that Heathcliff suffers as a child. Frankly, it is frustrating how many filmmakers have chosen to simply ignore the explicit references to Heathcliff being non-white, considering that it is made very clear in the text. There are only so many times a filmmaker can say it’s an “interpretation” when one of the first things readers learn about Heathcliff is that he is “dark-skinned.” 

Unfortunately, for all the things that Arnold gets right in her adaptation, there are several areas in which she falls short. As Roger Ebert points out in his November 2012 review: “What she hasn’t done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel’s passages, particularly from the later chapters, it’s dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted.” Like many past iterations, Arnold cuts out the narrative framing device of Nelly Dean telling the story to Mr. Lockwood, along with the second half of the story, which follows the children of Catherine and Edgar and Heathcliff and Isabella. Additionally, dialogue is incredibly sparse in this film, which quickly wears out as the film goes on, which creates confusion rather than intrigue. 

Arnold’s film is far from perfect, and to an extent, it is unfair to pass harsh judgment on Fennell’s film before it comes out. However, if future filmmakers wish to adapt the challenging Gothic text, they should look to Arnold’s gritty, naturalistic version for a blueprint. Frankly, a movie that bluntly showcases the wildness of the moorlands and the intense connection between Catherine and Heathcliff is what Brontë herself would have wanted.

The Black Guy Dies First

The “black guy dies first” line has become shorthand for a long-standing, maddening expectation in American horror: Black characters show up, they warn us of danger (or crack a joke), and then, too often, get dispatched before the final credits roll. That shorthand isn’t just a punchline; it’s a pattern with roots in Hollywood’s representational habits, and it carries cultural meaning about expendability, narrative function, and who is allowed to survive fear on screen. Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris’s book The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar traces how that pattern evolved, how it persisted through decades of genre filmmaking, and how Black filmmakers and writers have worked to contest it as horror itself changes.

What the trope does (and why it matters)

At first glance, the gag, “the black guy dies first”, reads like a lazy shorthand for a disposable side character. But Means Coleman and Harris show that the trope operates on multiple levels: it’s a symptom of industry casting and storytelling economies that limit the emotional and narrative investments audiences are allowed to make in Black characters, and it’s also a recurring cultural signal that mirrors broader social hierarchies. When a single demographic is repeatedly positioned as expendable, the pattern reinforces assumptions about whose lives are narratively (and sometimes literally) less valued. The Black Guy Dies First situates this trope historically, from early low-budget genre pictures to contemporary Oscar-winning works, and explains how Black horror has been both shaped by and resistant to those conventions. 

A turning point: Black horror, agency, and survival

Means Coleman and Harris chart a Black horror lineage that moves from “fodder” roles to films that insist on Black interiority, agency, and survival. The book argues that when Black filmmakers claim horror spaces, they can rework the rules: survival, sacrifice, and resilience come to mean different things when viewed through the lens of Black lives. Rather than accepting the function of Black characters as setup or comic relief, recent films insist on complexity and on whom the camera treats as central. The book employs close readings of numerous films to demonstrate how representational shifts in horror cinema reflect broader social and cinematic developments.

Enter The Blackening: a subversive joke that trusts its fear

Tim Story’s 2023 horror-comedy The Blackening (written by Dewayne Perkins with Tracy Oliver) is an explicit answer to the trope: it stages a classic “cabin in the woods” slasher scenario populated almost entirely by Black characters, then asks, in effect, “So who dies first now?” The film was conceived from a sketch about Black horror logic and expanded into a movie that both honors the mechanics of slasher films and pulls the rug out from under genre expectations. Story and the writers intentionally built the film around Black cultural knowledge games, jokes, and references, and then made those things matter for survival. Critics and interviews with the director/writers stress that the point was to flip the expectation and to celebrate Blackness rather than allow it to be shorthand for expendability.

How The Blackening does the work (mechanics and tone)

Several choices in The Blackening make the subversion work on screen. First, the cast is predominantly Black across a range of personalities and archetypes, which denies the film an “other” to kill off for easy stakes. Second, the movie makes Black cultural knowledge part of the plot. Questions about who “really” knows certain cultural touchstones become matters of life or death, so Black identity isn’t a background trait but the engine of tension. Third, the film blends genuine scare mechanics with comedy in a way that both honors horror’s beating heart (real stakes, real peril) and allows the audience to relish recognition rather than grief. In interviews, Story explains that he wanted to remain respectful of horror’s scare imperative while using the film’s comedic voice to interrogate and invert old tropes.

Where the book and the film meet: critique and possibility

Means Coleman and Harris’s historical frame helps us read The Blackening as part of a larger corrective arc. The book documents how representation in horror has grown from disposable roles to films that foreground Black life, fear, and agency and The Blackening performs one such corrective by using genre mechanics to make the audience question why they expected a Black character to be expendable in the first place. The film doesn’t simply laugh at the trope; it stages a narrative test that forces characters (and viewers) to reckon with assumptions about knowledge, authenticity, and survival, the very assumptions Means Coleman and Harris map across horror history.

Limits and tensions: parody vs. politics.

Subversion by satire is powerful, but it’s not a total cure. Means Coleman and Harris emphasize that representational change requires structural shifts in casting, authorship, and industry power; one clever movie won’t erase decades of patterns. The Blackening pushes back effectively by centering Black joy, humor, and competence, but the book reminds us to look beyond single texts: are Black creatives consistently given the chance to shape horror’s center? Are Black characters allowed complex survival arcs across mainstream cinema? These are the longer-term questions that link the film’s playful subversion to the book’s deeper intervention.

Conclusion 

The “black guy dies first” trope survives as a cultural shorthand precisely because it was never just about one character’s death; it was about who filmmakers assumed audiences would care about. The Black Guy Dies First gives us the vocabulary and history to see why that matters; films like The Blackening show one way storytellers can flip the script literally and figuratively. By centering Black experience as integral to the story’s stakes rather than incidental to them, contemporary Black horror both honors genre traditions and makes space for a new rulebook: one where survival, irony, and satire are tools for rethinking whose stories get to matter at the end of the night.