Gianluca Sergi has been obsessing about movies since he was a child growing up in Milan. Now a 54-year-old professor at the University of Nottingham, he founded a film club in his hometown when he was 13, moved to the U.K. for college in 1991 to study the subject, and has dedicated an academic career to analyzing the industry—specifically its social currency and power. The guy loves movies, and his enthusiasm is contagious.

After writing three books and presenting a new research project on film innovation, his work caught the attention of Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who invited Sergi to present his findings at a board meeting of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences back in December of 2016. It was a particularly fraught time in the movie business: Sean Parker had recently launched his Screening Room proposition—a never-materialized concept that would have allowed consumers to watch new movies at home for a premium—and a string of sure-fire hit sequels and reboots had recently failed to connect with moviegoers. (Zoolander 2 was not a fever dream.) It seemed movies were once again doomed for extinction. Sergi was brought in as a salve to the Academy’s wounds.

No, the academic said to his worried audience, the movie business wasn’t imploding. Rather, via his studies of ticket sales from 1980 to 1999 and again from 2000 to 2016, the numbers were relatively stable: 1.2 billion tickets sold versus 1.38 billion in the next 20 years. Rumors of the movie business’s demise were, yet again, premature.

In Sergi’s mind, movie-going had, in recent years, become an even more vital contributor to the overall health of society. His findings, based on user data published by the Motion Picture Academy of America, the National Association of Theatre Owners, the British Film Institute, and other countries’ film organizations, indicated that of the leading cultural activities, more people go to the movies than attend theater or dance events. While Sergi believed the business was still healthy, he warned that its demise would mean not just the shuttering of movie theaters, but a collapse of social mores. And this was even before Netflix declared its intent to spend $8 billion on content in 2018 alone. (The streamer actually ended up spending more like $12 billion in 2018, and could spend up to $15 billion this year.)

“That’s the bottom floor,” he said. “If you remove movies, people will be culturally starved. There is no country on earth that can afford that. It would be catastrophic.”

Sergi was so convincing in his reaffirmation of the work the Academy does that he prompted the group on that December night to create a task force to investigate the future of film. Headed by Little Miss Sunshine producer Albert Berger, the committee would be a study group of sorts, with the mission of speaking to various people within the Academy about where the business is going, and how they can adapt to the changing landscape. As audiences fragment, streaming services grow, and filmmakers experiment with format and form, it seemed as if this group might be able to define what even qualifies as a movie in our increasingly anarchic content economy. This was, after all, the body that oversees the various bylaws for Academy Awards. The question seemed destined to come up.

As of this week, they are still looking into it—though many thought the issue would come to a head last week, when the Academy met to discuss its bylaws. After all, rumor had it that Steven Spielberg himself was planning on proposing a rule change that would prevent films that are primarily streamed online from being eligible for Academy consideration—i.e. Netflix movies.