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In the run-up to Oscar night, those exhibits will offer skillful investigations and predictions, a look at behind-the-scenes machinations, and reflections on pioneers of the past.
By Emma Dibdin
The 2024 awards season has been so hectic so far, thanks to the postponement of the strike-delayed Emmy Awards from their very fall broadcast date to January. To make sense of it all, and reveal the state of disorder of Hollywood today, those Five podcasts will offer a combination of specialized research and predictions for major ceremonies, original reports on industry trends, and the behind-the-scenes machinations that influence voting. And think beyond the Oscar favorites that probably shouldn’t have been.
This Vanity Fair series premiered in 2015, which means it’s had to chronicle some of the strangest moments in Academy history, like the 2017 Best Picture failure (when “The La Land” was mistakenly announced as the winner instead of “Moonlight”). Fix the silent Covid-era rite of 2021 held in a cavernous Los Angeles workout station and the slap heard around the world in 2022. But even if nothing’s happening So unusual, the research here makes awards season more interesting. Vanity Fair reporters Katey Rich, Richard Lawson David Canfield and Rebecca Ford, the verbal exchange is exhaustive and rich in experience, exploring not only the contenders for Hollywood’s biggest awards, but also the campaigns and methods that shape the race at film festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, there is no shortage of news and premieres to cover throughout the year, without forgetting the interviews; Recent visitors include Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Greta Lee (“Past Lives”).
Opening Episode: “Oscar Voters, Start Your Engines”
There’s a special category of films that are released with wonderful fanfare, get a lot of awards, and then disappear from cultural awareness without a clue (and without reward). Not all of the movies talked about in “This Had Oscar Buzz” fall into this category, however, as the name suggests, it concentrates on movies that had that animated aura around them, at least for a while. A first episode of “Cake,” a 2014 film starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman living with chronic pain. , exemplifies what works so well in this format: Aniston was praised for her countertypical functionality and campaigned intensely this awards season, but was snubbed the morning of the Oscar nomination. The hosts, Joe Reid and Chris Feil, don’t downplay the functionality. or the hustle, but instead use the hype around “Cake” as a jumping-off point to talk about Aniston’s career and fame more broadly, as well as the ins and outs of how precisely the buzz is generated in the first place.
Opening Episode: “Alexander (with David Sims)”
Though not a traditional awards season podcast with predictions or play-by-play recaps, “The Town” is an invaluable resource for anyone hoping to understand the upheaval in Hollywood. Delivered in snappy episodes that clock in around 30 minutes, Matthew Belloni, a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a founding partner of the digital media company Puck, shares insights and exclusive reporting on the industry, whether the issue is last year’s monthslong writers’ and actors’ strikes, Disney’s succession woes or the cost-of-streaming crisis. In a recent episode, Belloni and Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, went deep on the current state of the “unkillable” Golden Globes, which returned last year after a hiatus sparked by controversy surrounding its now-defunct unorthodox voting body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Traditionally the first awards show on the calendar — and the most chaotic — the Globes have proved to have more staying power than many predicted, and this analysis is a good resource for anybody wondering why.
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