But on a night that began with host Conan O’Brien acknowledging the Bond news to zing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, it also felt like a somewhat defiant celebration of the era when two producers could still run a billion-dollar franchise based on gut instinct and ego rather than algorithmic data. For better or for worse, in holding the line for their conception of Bond—who, as they saw it, could potentially be Black or gay in the post-Daniel Craig era, but would be non-negotiably written as British and male, and live only on the big screen—Cubby Broccoli’s kids were walking in the obstinate footsteps of Irving Thalberg, who’s said to have once overruled a screenwriter’s objections by saying “I, more than any single person in Hollywood, have my finger on the pulse of America. I know what people will do and what they won’t.”

By contrast, back in February, the day the Bond news broke, Jeff Bezos tweeted “Who’d you pick as the next James Bond,” implying not just that Amazon is 007’s new boss, but that they’re open to giving us whatever James Bond we’d like to order from the Everything Store. My timeline filled up with mordant jokes about James Bond acting as a streaming giant’s tuxedoed corporate enforcer, but the idea that the character’s destiny will now be up to the most vocal portion of the audience on X.com is somehow way more sinister; if I learned one thing from trying to play GoldenEye nine beers deep in college it’s that males 18-24 cannot be trusted to control James Bond.

As Halle Berry put it on tonight’s show, Bond evolves. He evolved in response to the end of the Cold War that defined him, political correctness, and casinos letting guys wear shorts to the roulette table, and he’ll evolve again. We’ll get a more woke Bond, or a less-woke Bond, James Bond in a multiverse of madness. We may even get some pretty good James Bond Extended Universe stuff down the line, the way the Disney+ Star Wars machine occasionally spits out an Andor, and there’s a quantum of solace in that. Never again will we go hungry for movies about James Bond, some of them even theatrically-released.

But because they will not be shaped, for better and for sillier, by two British people with deeply-held convictions about what their dad’s old friend James Bond would and wouldn’t do, they will be something other than James Bond movies in what is now the old sense of the term. No matter how British he might have been, the James Bond that existed in the 63 years between Dr. No and last month was also, symbolically, a creature of Hollywood, and on some level we will not see that guy again, and it was pretty crazy to see the Oscars poke Big Tech by acknowledging that—in true Oscar fashion, with a big old flashy dance number.