The celebration of indie films at the Oscars last month might have seemed straight out of Miramax’s ‘90s heyday, but the discourse that led up to it was distinctly 2025. How effective is A24’s awards campaign strategy? Does it matter who Sean Baker follows on Twitter? Having answers to questions like these is how a person signals that they are smart, impressive, unproblematic, worldly. If a man’s Hinge profile says “I won’t shut up about: 20th Century Women,” my peers on the apps wonder, how bad can he be?
I think he can be bad. Or at least not harmless. Like generations of indie snobs before me, I’ve started to worry that the more performative newcomers are loving an art form—that I uniquely love in a completely pure and singular way—to death.
I’m told it was like this with music in the 2000s. Back then, a T-shirt from the indie record label Sub Pop was something like the Criterion Collection tote bag of today. I asked writer Matt LeMay, who gave Chutes Too Narrow a rave review the year before Garden State finished the work of rocketing the Shins to stardom, what defines the moment when an indie phenomenon goes mass.
LeMay told me there’s a golden ratio of ownability and shareability that indie culture can strike—an ideal combination for the young, whose primary aims are delineating an identity and attracting like-minded friends. “There exists this moment when the shine of discoverability is still on a thing, but it’s well-known enough to broadly confer a sense of having ‘good taste,’” he said.
As for why music, in particular, was the locus of indie tastemaking in the 2000s, Mark Richardson, a Pitchfork writer since 1998, described a confluence of technology-driven democratizing conditions. Music got digitized through the mp3, Napster made it downloadable, and broadband made it shareable. “After 1999, suddenly, if you were plugged in and interested, you could access an unbelievable amount of music that used to cost money,” he said.
So: technology democratizes access, and democratization necessitates curation? That sounds familiar to me.
I was seven years old when Netflix debuted video-on-demand streaming. I came of age with a galaxy of media at my fingertips but, as a young person with ambitions of becoming an aesthete, I needed a trusted guide to help me navigate beyond the major studios’ regurgitated IP. Enter A24. My friends and I snuck into Spring Breakers as tweens, drove two towns over to see Moonlight in high school, streamed Minari in our locked-down dorm rooms. If a movie was A24, we knew that it would be distinctive, subversive, and uncompromising. Maybe Letterboxd made us film bros—and helped us get into Neon, Bleecker Street, Focus, and the older canon from studios whose names we no longer recognize. But it was the imprimatur of A24 that made us moviegoers.
And it turns out we’re the only ones reliably going to the movies. The 30- to 60-something art house crowd that was once bread and butter for studios like Neon has largely retreated from cinemas since the pandemic, perhaps wooed by the efficiency of streaming while folding laundry. The commercial viability of the indie now sits more squarely on the shoulders of the Letterboxd crowd. For an indie to bring in a theatrical audience today, as Jeff Deutchman, Neon’s president of acquisitions and production, recently asserted on a festival panel, the film has to be an event.
