Meet the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: a house divided against itself, yet somehow still standing. The 2019 version of the Academy is not America; it’s actually whiter, older, and more male, although strides have been made in all three of those areas. But the ways in which it balances competing appetites for revolution, retreat, incrementalism, and compromise among its different voting constituencies are very now, very us.

We don’t yet know what this year’s race will look like—what the controversies will be, or what ideological fault lines this fall’s movies will reveal. But we do know that the Academy, and Hollywood, are both in a state of existential anxiety. The Academy is expanding; the industry is contracting.

This year, one mega studio, Disney, devoured 20th Century Fox and released a slate of movies that were responsible for over 35% of all ticket sales—and included not a single film that seemed interested in being a best-picture nominee rather than a brand extension. (Yes, there will be a size-matters push for Avengers: Endgame—but it wasn’t a changemaker the way Black Panther was, and we’re not yet at the stage where the contest includes an automatic “Marvel slot.”) The company with the largest slate of best-picture candidates, Netflix, has been the target of ire from traditionalists about whether streamable movies are movies. (Verdict: They are, but don’t look for them in the country’s two largest theater chains, which are still refusing to play them.) And business for indies—the film category that supplies the lion’s share of best-picture nominees now that the studios have largely given up the game—is down 45% year-over-year.

In other words: The sky is falling, and doing so at precisely the moment the Academy finally got conscientious enough about its historically imbalanced membership to institute reforms that have started to make a difference. What happens now?

Immense trepidatious uncertainty is, of course, a good place to begin any Oscar race. The three early-fall festivals that serve as the season’s unofficial start (Venice, Telluride, and Toronto) generated good buzz for a handful of movies—Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, was probably the most praised. But no film has been anointed the front-runner, as Green Book (accurately) and La La Land (memorably not) both were early on. On paper, at least, one outcome that looks possible is a retreat. Last year, two films dominated by women, Roma and The Favourite, led the nominations.

By contrast, 2019 could reprise a more familiar Academy dynamic, in which actors get nominated for playing Judy Garland and Harriet Tubman while their movies are elbowed aside in other categories by alpha-guy epics like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman; James Mangold’s Christian Bale-Matt Damon vehicle, Ford v Ferrari; Sam Mendes’s World War I drama, 1917; and Todd Phillips’s Joker, which is likely to be flypaper for the season’s most contentious movie discourse. Even the surprise festival breakout, the Catholic Church drama The Two Popes, is…a buddy movie? A bromance? Green Book, but without even a wife waiting at home?

Collectively, then, the 2019 slate is not what you’d call rich with a variety of roles for women. It actually brings to mind a Tina Fey joke about a meeting with Martin Scorsese: “This is my chance to be kicked to death in a movie!” Even the biggest Oscar contender to open so far, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, is in many ways a love story between an aging cowboy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his faithful wingman (Brad Pitt). A victory for Tarantino would not be a shock, since it would tick the “He’s due” box and also continue a long tradition of Academy voters choosing to look inward (see: Argo, The Artist) when outward is just too upsetting.