Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 7: Summer TV wrap up special and early Oscar gold!

It’s the TV season mid-year mark and we round up Spring’s biggest hits and misses! From the unbelievable finale of The Jinx, to the electricity of Empire - and looking forward - will True Detective season two live up the acclaimed first season? Time Magazine’s James Poniewozik gives us the lay of the TV land. And it's never to early to start predicting the Oscars! Sasha Stone, arguably the best Oscar tracker in the industry, shares who is leading the race post-Cannes! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 05 Aug 2015
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hi, I'm Kristina Yerling-Biro, thanks for listening. Well, it's never too early to start predicting the Oscars. Some of us have a poll to win. Later on, I'll talk to one of the four most awards experts, Sasha Stone, in what hopefully will be the first of a few conversations throughout this award season. As festivals, controversies and great new movies narrow down the winners in February of next year. But first, it's been a pretty nice spring on TV in 2015. Some great drama, laughs, performances and writing, a lot of which we've heard about here on the show. There are new shows like the Tina Fey produced Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Fox's Empire from Lee Daniels, that wonderfully soapy drama set in the hip-hop world and featuring what I think is the best new character on TV, Cookie Lion. There's some great returning shows that had amazing seasons inside Amy Schumer, Louis, last week tonight with John Oliver and the Americans, to name a few. And some sad goodbyes to Mad Men and David Letterman. And seeing that it's summer and critics are busy writing their mid-season reviews and articles, I wanted to talk to one of the sharpest, smartest pens in TV journalism. This TV critic James Ponewasek of Time magazine, to guide us through his best, worst and some very hopeful trends we've seen in 2015, as well as a few things to look forward to in the summer and the fall. Will True Detective Season 2 really measure up to that acclaimed first season? Well we'll see. James, thank you so much for joining me. Oh sure, thanks for having me. It's a good time for me to do it. We're doing our best of the year so far, features on time.com. So I've been coming up with my own list, so I've been doing a little bit of retrospection myself right now. So tell me, what are your biggest moments from the spring season so far? Oh gosh, you know, what aren't there? I've been looking back on the first half of the year and honestly, I'm finding it harder and harder to narrow it down this year than in some past years. So that's a good sign. We're talking about Empire briefly. And just the fact of that show and the explosion of it onto the air was definitely a big thing for me this spring. It would be hard for me to select a moment from Empire because Empire is basically a show that is all moments, which I think is, you know, it's sort of probably the best way to describe it and kind of an example of, you know, it's been significant in a lot of ways. But, you know, I think it's represented and maybe kind of perfected this kind of high acceleration storytelling that you've seen in different forms in TV lately. You know, Scandal is another example of that, you know, in primetime drama form. And Empire, you know, is just besides, you know, restoring the idea of musical drama to TV and having both, you know, incredible music and engaging characters, it's really restore the idea that you can actually have, you know, this kind of big, exciting, water cooler primetime network drama that we thought didn't exist anymore. I started selling drugs when I was nine years old. I didn't defeat myself. But it was music that played through my mind that kept me alive when I thought I was going to get shot. And it was the lyrics that I dreamt about that kept me warm while I was sleeping in the streets. Music saved my life. You got ALS? You are, though. Yeah, you do. How long have you got? Three years. Almost likely less. I want Empire to be here long after I'm gone. I need to start growing in a successor. People talk about the Empire effect that's going to come up. What is that? You know, that, I mean, there could be a few different things. I mean, one obvious thing is that Empire is an example in American television of how, you know, racial casting diversity has become number one more common, but you know, I would argue more importantly, has become more successful, you know, very, very successful. As we've seen, not just in Empire, but in successful and very good shows like Blackish on ABC, there was a time when I started covering television when, you know, there simply were not dramas with largely minority casts on network television. So number one, I think that we're going to see continuing effects, you know, and increased attention to diversity and casting on TV, which is good since we've seen so many seasons when television has been terrible about that. And, you know, I also think that we're going to see a growth in this kind of, you know, return to the prime time soap and, you know, these shows that are sort of, you know, high octane and built on a lot of plot acceleration. What about some of the other new shows? Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was, that was definitely one of my favorite, if not my favorite new comedy of the first half of the year. That was an example of another kind of Netflix effect in which this show that might never have, it was originally made for NBC, might never have seen the light of day there. And if it had, could very well have been too weird and quickly canceled, became, you know, a pop cultural phenomenon on Netflix. I try never to use the word hit in connection with Netflix because they will never tell you how, you know, they have some phantom numbers as to how many people watch it. Yes, exactly. So, you know, X number of people are watching it on Netflix, but it's certainly got a tremendous amount of attention and a guaranteed two seasons, you know, and had the room to be the kind of weird, extremely joke dense, but also very character based show that it developed into. So, you know, that was a fantastic one. Better call Saul, honestly, to me was, was a very pleasant surprise. I'm not sure if it's going to, you know, end up being one of my top dramas of the year, but I was a big fan of Breaking Bad and kind of thought, you know, I worried that this seemed like trying to milk that phenomenon, you know, building a show around a character who was a great character as a, you know, a diversion, a supporting guy on Breaking Bad. And, you know, actually, I likened it to, I don't know if you remember this, but back in the day when the X-Files was on Fox, they tried doing sort of a comic drama spin off of that called the Lone Gunman, which was built around a few sort of eccentric characters who were supporting players on the X-Files and Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and of Better Call Saul was actually the showrunner of that show. And so I worried it was going to be that, that again, you know, it's sort of like, you know, a meal made out of appetizers that didn't really work out, but they really reconceived the show in a way that, you know, made it not just, you know, like a DVD extra of Breaking Bad, but this sort of comic tragic story of this, you know, hard-working loser trying to find his way in life and the law of business. They had its own tone and its own setting and its own themes. And actually, I thought worked as its own thing, honestly, even if you'd never seen Breaking Bad, which, you know, was really an accomplishment. I mean, just, this is just an anecdote, but my wife, who is my sort of sounding board for a lot of my TV reviews and watched stuff with me, she always appreciated Breaking Bad but never got into it and didn't watch it past the first couple of seasons, but really enjoyed Better Call Saul, you know, it's, you know, and I think the best thing you can hope for with a kind of show like that is to have it succeed on some level as its own thing. Because you, you were saying that might not be your favorite, do you know which one is your favorite new drama for the beginning of the year? I would probably call my favorite new drama of the beginning of the year, Empire so far. I'm not, which wishes, it's funny, I sometimes talk about this with people. I might have to distinguish that from, you know, the, the best new drama because, you know, Empire has, it has its, it has its flaws, its narrative doesn't always add up, it kind of throws everything else at everything at the wall, but it's just incredibly exciting and I think that's a valuable thing in TV. My favorite drama of the first part of the year, although it wasn't new, I think was The Americans, which I think has been the best or close to the best drama on TV for the past couple of seasons and I think just really continued to mature in the first half of the year and is, is probably, you know, my best thing going of the year. Another thing that I would name, I don't know if you would call this drama, but we should probably mention just as a phenomenon of television this spring was, was The Jinx, which was, you know, a, a documentary, a reality show, whatever you would call it, an investigation on HBO into an, an alleged serial killer or multiple killer, Robert Durst, that both became a, a sort of fascinating, water cooler, true crime phenomenon and ended up leading to the actual arrest of its subject while the show was, was on the air, which, you know, was, was really just a bizarre convergence of television and life that you don't often see. She talked on the telephone with her husband, then she vanished and no one has seen Kathleen Durst sense. Durst was wanted for murder in Texas, he's a suspect for murders in Los Angeles, West Chester County, New York. He belongs to one of the richest families in New York City, might be a little eccentric. I think Bob is very smart. I mean, he's managed to get away with three murders. Do you see the serial Jinx trend coming up, the real life police work? I think people, I, I do not doubt that people will try to do that. I think there's a certain lightning in a bottle aspect with both of those that, you know, there's just, there, I hope only so many Robert Durst, for my own safety and just from the standpoint of drama, you know, maybe only so many stories that are going to come together like that, you know, in the sense of true crime. Likewise with, with serial, I think that there are, you know, other innocence projects, you know, investigating whether a person needs to be exonerated, a sort of stories that you can do, but they might not come together with that same sort of mix of fascination. Are there any other trends and themes that have stuck out for you this past half a year? I also think that we've seen a bit of a resurgence of women in comedy in particular on television. There was, there was the recent current season of Inside Amy Schumer has been fantastic. Broad City, which is maybe my favorite show on, on Comedy Central right now, was I thought even stronger in its second season than in its first, you know, Unbreakable. Kimmy Schmidt is another example. And I think particularly seeing shows like Inside Amy Schumer and, and Broad City on Comedy Central is encouraging because for so long that, and often the world of TV comedy, like Comedy Central has been so like Dude Centric, that it's good number one to see them changing up that balance and number two for them to see that there is actually a, you know, a commercial payoff for it. It's like I said with the, the, the diversity issue on, on TV with, you know, Empire and Blackish and so on. It's great for people to have principles and, you know, believe in equity and fair chances and all that. But you, you also just really can't change happening in TV when people start to see it as good business. Okay. So before we go on, what has been your biggest disappointment then? Gosh, that's a good question. I, very recently, I would have liked NBC's Charles Manson drama Aquarius to be, to be better than it turned out to be, which was, you know, the, the sort of kind of cliche picture of the 60s that you often get when, when networks try and do that kind of period drama. I've watched Netflix's Sense8, the science fiction drama from the Wachowski siblings. If you know what it means to be, re-blown, the Sense8. Oh, what? Do so now. But that's just the beginning. What do you feel you? You're not really here, are you? You are no longer just you. You will start to feel strange things. Anchor, enjoy. Pain, pleasure, without any reason. We have seven other selves now, we can access each other's knowledge, language, skills. I found it to be a total mess, you know, just in terms of plots and dialogue and heavy-handed exposition and so forth. On the other hand, like some of their films, it's just fantastically gorgeous and ambitious and thematically rich. And so, it's the kind of disappointment that I'd like to see because I'd like to see something like Netflix going out there and taking big swings with something like that, even if the end result is disappointing to me. I'd like to take the last few minutes to look a little bit forward in your crystal ball. We didn't talk about the big ending of Letterman, for example. But what are you expecting from Colbert? What I suspect is that you're going to see elements of the same comedy, you know, in Stephen Colbert, that sort of surrealism, and I think there'll probably be certain news or political elements to it. You know, frankly, I think that even in the character of Stephen Colbert, the commentator, there was a real element of Stephen Colbert, the comedian, that he and his writers are probably just going to figure out how to, you know, frame as the real hymn rather than delivering it in the mouths of a fake hymn. But you know, whether he's going to be changing up the format of late night, you know, I don't really know yet. I'm not sure that, you know, he and his staff quite know yet because these things tend to come together very late when people are creating new late night shows. And you know, I'm very curious, but you know, I do think, I'm excited about him because I think he's one of the only people in late night who I think has the kind of combined level of intelligence and creativity and sort of spontaneous performance skills that he could do something comparably great to, you know, what David Letterman created. But that's going to be, I wouldn't even guess. And what else? What are you looking forward to? What have you seen? I'm looking forward to the muppets coming back to TV in April. I don't know if it's going to be good or not. I've seen a small, you know, presentation which looks funny enough. But although, you know, you know, speaking of trends, one trend that I haven't loved in TV is this thing of rebooting everything under the sun, you know, bring out a new full house and a new X files and a new this and a new heroes, which I'm not looking forward to in any way, although I have not seen that. But you know, the muppets, I'd say I love the movie that Jason Seagull did, you know, a couple of years ago. I think that that, you know, that is an endlessly renewable set of characters. And I'm guardedly optimistic about it. Um, but, but for fall, there's relatively little that I've seen. There's been a few, there was a few true detective reviews today I saw. Um... Oh, yes. Speaking of disappointments. Sometimes you're worse self. It's your best self. My strongest suspicion is, we get the world we deserve. This isn't me doing this. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. There's been a few, there was a few true detective reviews today I saw. I don't know. This isn't me. This girl is gone missing. Nobody cares. The interior is poisoned and suddenly with the billions, nobody cares. I've seen three episodes, I've actually just been writing my review for, for time. I liked the first season, qualified, I was, I was not a lover of it. I thought it, it, it was a couple of great performances. With some, you know, gorgeous direction and a certain amount of inspired audacious writing that was flawed by a lot of very flat characters and sort of, you know, in war cliches. But having seen the new episodes, it's kind of made me appreciate the first season better, you know, simply because we don't have Carrie Fukunaga as a director anymore. What they've put together is, it feels like a more conventional, you know, dark cable crime story that has kind of lost what made the first season feel electric and special while keeping a lot of the same weaknesses, you know, the sort of, you know, pointedly hard-boiled characters and the, the, the broken men and angry women. It feels a little bit like somebody decided to create an actual version of "Darkness at Noon" which was the, the parody dark cable show they, they show snippets of "On the Good Wife". So, you know, there, there, it's not, it's not, I would say it's not altogether terrible. I think there, there's a decent premise, you know, about corruption in, in this, this infrastructure program in California, I think Colin Farrell gives an excellent performance in what is essentially the central role as this, you know, again, beaten down, broken, washed up, local cop, working under corrupt bosses. Rachel McAdams is quite good, although her role is sort of less developed so far. Vince Vaughn, to me, not at all convincing as, as a, as the mobbed up businessman character, but so far going on three, three episodes that, that goes into the disappointment category for me. But three is quite a lot. So that should say, when, what direction do you have to create? Oh, it's a pretty good taste to get. Yeah, it's a pretty fair taste. In a day and age now when we get entire Netflix seasons all at once, I always find as best as a critic to specify how much you've seen, you know, because somebody could be listening to this podcast two months from now and, you know, have seen, you know, eight episodes by then. And all of a sudden it's like, it's easy at the end. Yes, exactly. James, thank you so much. This was so much fun and good luck with your list now that you're making. Oh, sure, sure, the list's never end. The Academy Award ceremony is held once a year, but the Oscar year is an all-round thing. Every premiere, studios pushing their Oscar hopefuls, and all those major festivals Sundance, Telluride, Venice, Berlin, and Cannes just a few weeks ago, they're all early predictors for the Oscars. The ceremony isn't until February 2016, but for example, there are some already big names in the director category being talked about for potential Oscar gold. David O. Russell, Steven Spielberg, Todd Haynes, and many were hoping for Cameron Crowe, but some harsh criticism of his new film Aloha seem to have heard his chances already. Sasha Stone is one of the most influential voices in film Oscar award season reporting. She's written for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and is the founder editor of Awards Daily, which has really grown to be an industry essential. Sasha, thank you so much for joining me in what hopefully will be the first of a few Oscar prediction touchdowns leading up to the awards. Oh, thank you for that nice introduction. Thank you. It's sort of the halfway mark here of the film year, and it's never too early to start predicting the Oscars. And you were just in Cannes compared to sort of other major festivals. How important is Cannes to the Oscars, would you say, or predicting the Oscars? Yeah. It's not traditionally that important for the Oscar race because it tends to be just a little bit early, and by the time most of the films come out, the stuff that people saw in Cannes usually can sometimes get left behind and forgotten. But it's also a really good testing ground for movies that might be strong contenders, and if they do well there, and they never lose steam like the artist and new country for old men, both films got their starting can and ended up winning the best picture. It can be really helpful in that way. They don't have to make the biggest splash at Cannes, like for instance, blue is the warmest color did, but they are shown in front of an audience, and you get a general reaction right away, and you can tell sort of what people are thinking about the movie. And so in that way it can be vital for certain publicists to screen their movies there early just to get a gauge on how they're going to play in front of a crowd. Like the artist, you know, I watched that movie in Cannes, and then in Tell Your Ride, and it just never lost steam. It was the kind of movie that any time it played in front of an audience, they loved it. It didn't matter if the hype was built up or not, it just always delivered the goods. So last year we had a couple of hopefuls show up in Cannes, like the Holmes Men, Maps to the Stars, that sort of fizzled and didn't really catch fire, except for what Foxcatcher did, and that was a Cannes movie, and it kind of made its way. It won, I think, Bennett Miller, one best director, and it definitely had prominence in the Oscar race as the one dark movie that they kind of embraced, even though it didn't get a best-fiction nomination, it still had other nominations. But inside Lewin Davis played it Cannes, and everybody thought that was going to be a really big Oscar movie, and it sort of held its prominence throughout the race, and then when the industry had a chance to vote on it, they just completely declined, which sort of surprised everybody, you know. Do you have any ideas to why? Yeah, I do. I do have a theory, and the one theory is I think that they sold people on a different movie. They sold them on celebrating the folk scene, and T. Bon Burnett was out there with those wonderful songs, and everybody was listening to it, and the Oscar voters are primarily boomers, you know, they're of that generation, and those were their glory days, you know, hanging around Greenwich Village, you know, listening to, and inside Lewin Davis is a dark, depressing story about an unlikable guy who really hated what he was doing and wasn't very good at what he was doing. He was pretty good, but he had a different life waiting for him, which was to be a father and to live a normal life and have a normal job, quote unquote, and he stuck to this road of fame that he didn't even really want that much, and, you know, he left the cat in the car, and nobody liked that. So it's too dark, is what you're saying, right? Yeah, too dark. They were expected. For what they were expecting, if the reviews had been more designed to say, yeah, it's a really dark movie than that would have been. People would have kind of knew what more to expect, but they got all offended because people love folk music and Greenwich Village, and they didn't like to see it made fun of. Do you have any of the movies you saw there this year, or that were there this year that you have that feeling about that will stick around all the way until the end of the year for the Oscars? In general, the Todd Haines film with Kate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, that one is going to get a really hardcore push, and a lot of people really love it, and Rooney Mara won best actress, and I think that film will-- That's Patricia Heistmith. Yeah, Patricia Heistmith who wrote "Challenger Mr. Ripley," yeah, "Strangers on a Train." So that's, that's Carol. It's not as kind of twisty and creepy as those two movies. It's more of a traditional love story. But it's about LGBTQ issues and kind of about not so much a tragedy as in, you know, they had to live in secret and it destroyed them, more like, "This is how you live with being gay at a time when you couldn't be gay, but she wasn't going to live a lie," you know, and so it's sort of a triumphant movie in that way. And you're music. Ah, thank you. Thank you. Enjoy. I'm starved, Bon Appetit. What do you do on Sundays? Nothing in particular. What do you do? Nothing lately. I mean, if you'd like to come visit me sometime, welcome to, at least there's some pretty country around where I live, would you like to come visit me this Sunday? Yes. You're a strange girl, you are. And Todd Haynes has long overdue for any kind of awards recognition. He's just been making the greatest movies and, and been completely ignored by the industry. So with the Weinstein Company pushing him and, and that movie, how beautiful it is, I think it's going to do really well to the Oscars. The best actress or best supporting for any of the two. Yeah, that's, that's again, I just wrote about that today. That's going to be tough between the two of them. I would, I would instinctually say it's Kate Blanchett for lead and Randy Mara for supporting just because of their stature within the industry, but they're equally strong parts. They're both leading roles. It's just, usually two leading roles don't get in from the same movie, although it happens. It's just rare. The other movie I think I'll do really well is called youth. It's, it's. Sorentino? Yeah. Sorentino. It got kind of mixed reception from some of the people I knew, but I have a feeling it's Fox Searchlight's pushing it and it's right up Oscars wheelhouse. It's got Michael Kane and Harvey Keitel and two really great performances. That's for, Oscar not for best foreign. You think it'll be best picture? Okay. So, it could, they, they, you know, they only will run it in foreign if it's actually a foreign language. Do you see that mountain over there? Everything seems really close. That's the future. And now, everything seems really far away. That's the best. Sometimes I feel like from my hands up in the air, I know, I know. I just feel, you know, checkups with the doctor to help you get back and check. I just don't care. I just don't care. He's merely a waste of time. And they're still directing or composing much, but no, no, no, no, I'm retired. What about Mad Max, who seemed to make a splash at Cannes? Any Oscar chances there? It really made a huge splash. Um, well, and Thompson, you know, who writes for IndieWire, um, she seems to think that Mad Max has a really good chance with Oscar voters. I think Charlize Theron has a good chance as actress. I, I loved the movie myself. Um, I don't know. It's just one of those things where by the time Oscar season rolls around and all the serious movies have come in, movies like that tend to get sidelined, you know, but, um, but I don't think you should discount it just yet. I think it's an important movie and people will pay attention to it. Son of Saul is the one that probably will win the Oscar foreign language film. It didn't win the poem, but that's going to be a good, see, Cannes is really great for bringing in the foreign film language category, which is sadly only five films and it doesn't anywhere near reflects the kind of movies that are being made in other countries. So I would love it if the Academy expanded that category to 10. And before we move on, I just was wondering in general about Cannes this year because it seemed to be this pretty great year of the woman. Yeah. Most of the films in main competition were about women and you know, that was surprising. I don't think that that audience, including and most including the American journalists, have ever sat down to so many films where the central figure was a female, whether she was older, young, it just, that blew my mind every time I sat down, I was like, wow, another woman. That's incredible. So while the awards were all focused mostly on the male centric films like they always are, the fact that the committee there had gone out of their way to really represent women, I thought, I thought that that deserved some attention and I didn't see them getting the credit that they deserve for that. Okay. So moving forward, we're heading into summer. What are the other big movies you expect to see getting some Oscar buzz? I'm really looking forward to Joy with Jennifer Lawrence directed by David O. Russell. You know, he's not my favorite director, but I love the fact that she's going to be the star and I think she's going to be great in it. I think it's about the woman who created the mop, actually. Oh, really? Oh, so it's a biopic. Something. Yeah, it's a biopic, but it's a woman and how often do we see those hardly ever, right? Yeah, because there's a few, there's both Steve Jobs and Snowden coming up, right? Yeah. I don't know. Well, that's it. Oscar season is like great men doing great things. Oh, that's what it's all about. It's, you know, what we have. We have Whitey Bulger, you know, and we have Bridge of Spies. These are all in the heart of the sea or in the heart of the ocean, the Ron Howard movie, that's in Trumbo, you know, these are all films with a central male figure, all of them. And so it's nice that in that mix, there's going to be Joy, which is about a woman, which I'm really happy that that that's coming up. Do you have any feeling of the best director or who's going to be in the running? Todd Haynes is going to be in there. Tom Hooper is coming back with the Danish girl, Steven Spielberg's in there with Bridge of Spies. But I'm not really sure about, oh, and Danny Boyle for Steve Jobs, which was originally going to be David Fincher, but it got, he turned it down and it went to Danny Boyle. I'm not seeing any like, you know, big directors jumping out at me right away that I think will take the race. One big director that seems to not be having any chances is Cameron Crow. What happened with Aloha? You know, how do you make a bad movie like that? I don't know. I mean, maybe he is sort of a little too committed to doing a certain kind of film or to being Cameron Crow, the Cameron Crow that everybody knows and loves rather than challenging himself in different directions and failing, but at least trying to do something different. Like, you know, I don't know, a black and white period film or, you know, a very dark depressing drama, you know. I mean, you have to wonder like, did he change or did we change? Like, I think about Jerry Maguire now, and I imagine it opening and how would people in this day and age even respond to that? Like, would they hold Scientology against Tom Cruise? Would they attack the movie viciously because of that? Would they think that, you know, Koopa Gooding Jr. was a racist portrayal? You know, it's hard to tell. Is it the right time in the right place for a movie? Is the movie actually bad or is it really just a reflection of who we are at the time, you know? And Lassie, what about documentary? I think the one I saw at Cannes was Amy, which I know they're going to have a big Oscar push. I'm not sure how the Oscar voters will respond to the Amy Winehouse doc. You know, it's a tragedy to watch because throughout the film, you just hear her singing and she's such a great singer and she had so much talent, you know, to just see it thrown away like that, sad, but, um, so I think that one, you know, is going to be the one. Oh, it's been upsetting at the end, isn't it? She was highly intelligent, the most intelligent person I knew. She was so utterly authentic. Amy, let's give us a smile and then we can turn the camera on. Do you promise? She has such emotional relationships, music. They're becoming an artist in the public eye. The more people see of me, the more they realise that all I'm before is making music. And the Grammy goes to Amy Winehouse, she was one of the truest artists I ever heard. The world wanted a piece of heart. So when is your busiest time? Well, it really starts right then, you know, tell your ride. That's when things start to shift into high gear and then it's just nonstop until the end. So that's, I get, I get summer off, I get to take a break in summer and vacation, have a nice life and actual life and come Labor Day, it's, you know, every day knows to the grindstone working hard on the race and checking out the movies and, you know, seeing how everything shakes down. But I think I have to say that I think watching the Oscars at home and your PJs, you know, having an Oscar party with your friends is the way to go. I have a big Oscar party for the past 15 years, we're about 15, 16 people, journalists and all kinds of people here, so you can come by Sweden, if they, can I move in? Absolutely. If they don't give you a ticket, we're all over here in our PJs. Well, Sasha, this was so much fun. Thank you for taking your time. Oh, thank you for asking me, it was fun. Anytime. Good, well, then maybe I'll call you again right sometime around there before the Oscars to get the last predictions. Absolutely, feel free, after Tell Your Ride would be a good time, then you can get real crystal balls to go. Thank you so much to the guests on the show and to you for listening, please let us know what you think and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or all of the above. This show was edited by Tom Hanson, music by Call Boy, and produced by Renee Vittishtatt and myself, Christina Yerling-Biro, until next time. Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Valanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. Even that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win. Why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work? This is the Oscars, what were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]