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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, the making and missteps of the Academy Awards.
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Basu, Narrating: When "New Yorker" staff writer Michael Schulman was in his 20s, he became obsessed with the way that Meryl Streep gave her acceptance speeches.
Michael Schulman: Just 'cause they were all so funny and sort of grand, yet self-deprecating. And I started memorizing them because I thought, you know, not only is she the greatest living actress, she's sort of the greatest living acceptance speech giver at award shows.
Basu, Narrating: So, he started memorizing them. It became a sort of party trick. Name a performance, and he could whip out the words in the exact cadence with the same breathy sighs. His favorite was her Oscar speech from 2012 for "The Iron Lady."
Schulman: She got up and she said, "[SIGHS] When they called my name, it was like I could hear half of America saying, 'Oh, come on. Why… her… again?' But whatever."
[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Meryl Streep: When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, "Oh, come on. Why… her… again?" But whatever.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: Michael has a unique obsession for Meryl Streep, but it comes from his deep love for all things film and television. He's out with a new book called "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears." It's not a literal timeline of events. Michael picks and chooses big moments in the history of the Oscars, ones that signal a shift in the culture and industry. So, with the 95th Academy Awards right around the corner, Michael is exactly the person I wanted to talk to about how the Oscars have managed to keep us watching all these years.
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Schulman: The fundamental flaw in the concept of the Oscars is that you sort of can't rank art. There is no such thing as, you know, a best picture or best actor. It's completely subjective. So, everyone will always have different opinions. And if you look to the Oscars as a pure barometer of cinematic merit, they will always disappoint or infuriate. And there are so many examples throughout history of them getting it wrong. You know, whether it's "Crash" winning over "Brokeback Mountain," or going back to, you know, "How Green Was My Valley" winning over "Citizen Kane" in 1942. But I think that the reason why we keep paying attention is because they're fun. I mean, the Oscars are essentially a game. And it's, you know, it gives us all the opportunity as the moviegoing public to share our own taste and, you know, debate what's our favorite thing? What do we think is the best movie or the best actress or whatever? And that is what movies are for, to be talked about.
Basu: Sure, sure. Well, what about for you specifically? I mean, what's your relationship to watching the Oscars?
Schulman: So, I started watching the Oscars, I think, when I was 11 because I remember very clearly this was 1993. And this was the era of the Billy Crystal medley. He was such a great host of the Oscars. And he would start with these medleys.
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Billy Crystal: [SINGING OSCAR MONOLOGUE]
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Schulman: I do remember the one very clearly from '93 because that had these movies like "Unforgiven" and "The Crying Game."
[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Billy Crystal: [SINGING OSCAR MONOLOGUE]
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Schulman: And I was way too young to have seen any of these movies, but I still thought this medley was completely magical. And I loved seeing the in-jokes. I loved sort of seeing him tease Clint Eastwood in the audience and make jokes about how the director of "A Few Good Men" wasn't nominated.
[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Billy Crystal: [SINGING OSCAR MONOLOGUE]
Chorus: [SINGING OSCAR MONOLOGUE]
Crystal: [SINGING OSCAR MONOLOGUE]
Chorus: [SINGING OSCAR MONOLOGUE]
Crystal: [SINGING OSCAR MONOLOGUE]
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Schulman: It just felt like this big Hollywood party and kind of opened my eyes to the idea that Hollywood was this place, you know, full of celebrities, full of, you know, different relationships and humor and glamor and whatever. So, I basically became an Oscar devotee from that moment.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] You know, it's funny, I've been thinking about this, especially with that clip from the BAFTAs that went sort of viral with Ariana DeBose performing this sort of name calling clip where she like shouts out…
Schulman: "Angela Bassett did the thing." Yeah.
Basu: "Angela Bassett did the thing." I can't get that out of my head now.
Schulman: Oh, my gosh. Epic. [CHUCKLES]
Basu: But, you know, as you're pointing out, hosts have done this in award shows since forever. This is not a new thing, the kind of campy, fun performance of naming everybody that you possibly can name in a song.
Schulman: Oh, yeah. Well, there's, of course, a long history of excessive bad taste at award shows. And one of the chapters in "Oscar Wars" is about the disastrous 1989 ceremony, which began with an 11-minute opening number that featured, infamously, Rob Lowe singing "Proud Mary" with a woman dressed as Snow White.
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Snow White: Oh, Mr. Lowe, I'm such a fan.
Rob Lowe: Really? I'm a big fan of yours, Snow. But, you know, there's so much I'd like to know about you.
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Schulman: At a replica of the Coconut Grove featuring dancing cocktail tables. You know, and this number was so long and over-the-top and campy and insane that it sort of went down in Oscar infamy.
[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Rob Lowe: [SINGING OPENING NUMBER]
Snow White: [SINGING OPENING NUMBER]
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Schulman: And basically ruined the career of the Oscar producer that year, a man named Allan Carr, who was…
Basu: Oh, my goodness.
Schulman: He had produced "Grease," and he was known for wearing fabulous caftans and throwing incredible house parties. And he had waited his whole life to produce the Oscars. And when he finally got the chance, it was like an Icarus story. He flew too close to the sun. He made sure everyone knew that these were the Allan Carr Oscars. And so, everyone knew who to blame when it didn't go well.
Basu: So interesting. Well, Michael, I thought maybe we should go way back to the beginning actually and talk about when the Academy itself was created in 1927. And I was kind of surprised at the reasons why the Academy was created. I didn't know this history, so can you explain that?
Schulman: Yeah. Well, it doesn't have anything to do with awards. Awards were kind of an afterthought. They were on a long list of ideas that the founding members had in 1927 when they created the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But there was really some other stuff going on. So, they… There were 36 founding members, and they represented basically a cross section of the powerful people in Silent Era Hollywood. And they wanted it to be a kind of League of Nations that would bring harmony to the industry and resolve disputes and promote motion pictures throughout the world. And that is all very well and good and lofty. But the undercurrent of that, the subtext of those reasons, are twofold. One is that there was an increasing movement toward unionization in Hollywood. And the studio heads were pretty nervous about the idea of the actors organizing. Actor's Equity was coming in from New York and trying to make inroads in Hollywood. And so, this idea of resolving disputes and bringing harmony was one way to basically preempt, you know, labor unions from forming. So, that was one major factor. The other was that, throughout the '20s, Hollywood was just besieged by a series of very salacious scandals like the rape and murder arrest of Fatty Arbuckle, a huge star at Paramount. And other… There were other murders and drug scandals and sex scandals. And so then, as now, there was a culture war in America. And the more conservative, sort of pious, religious side of the culture felt that Hollywood was a cesspool of sin and degradation. And because of that, there was this movement to create censorship laws for movies, which was, again, a big threat for the studios, the sort of emerging studio system. So, part of the Academy was to rebrand Hollywood, not as a cesspool, but as an academy. It's very lofty… and sort of promote the high moral principles of creating this art form, motion pictures. So, those are some of the factors surrounding the creation of the Academy, and it took them two years to actually get around to giving out the Awards of Merit in 1929.
Basu: So, tell us a little bit about how it started to evolve, especially those early years and into the decades after. How did this award process and award show start to evolve?
Schulman: Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting to see certain things get invented, you know. In the '30s is when people started calling it the Oscar.
Basu: Yeah. And why is that?
Schulman: Many different stories.
Basu: I feel like there's a lot of different stories. Yeah.
Schulman: Yeah. It's sort of unresolved. You know, Bette Davis claimed in her memoir that when she won the Oscar, she looked at… Its backside reminded her of her husband's, and his middle name was Oscar. I mean, the story makes no sense and is not true. Because even before, that had been referred to in the newspapers as the Oscar. Probably the most plausible story is that there was an Academy staffer who said that it reminded her of a neighbor she had growing up who had a very stiff, upright bearing and reminded her of King Oscar of Sweden and Norway. I mean, there is no definitive story. But it could've been that. You know, so it's interesting to just see certain things get invented like that, like, you know, award speeches becoming more political in the 1970s. You know, little traditions. The red carpet, it grew in the late '80s and then evolved throughout the '90s. And, you know, Joan Rivers came along and started performing her show, her commentary from the red carpet. And now, of course, the red carpet is as long and as attention getting as the actual ceremony.
Basu: Sure. Yeah, sure.
Schulman: And then Awards campaigning also had its own evolution, mostly thanks to Harvey Weinstein who kind of helped create this ecosystem of strategists and huge spending and nonstop Oscar season with nominees just going to event after event after event, leaving no stone unturned in terms of running it like a political campaign and reaching every single voter.
Basu: You know, to the point of campaigning, maybe I can ask you to tell us about what happened in 1999. This was the big Best Picture debacle when Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" lost to "Shakespeare in Love." So, what happened that year, and how does it connect to this idea of campaigning for an Oscar win?
Schulman: Right. Well, so this is thought of as the ugliest Best Picture fight of all time. And it was. It really was. So, "Saving Private Ryan" came out in the summer of 1998, and it was a gigantic success, a huge critical hit, commercial hit. And it was the first hit out of Dreamworks, which was the studio that Spielberg founded with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. So, it was these three big wigs starting, like, the first new Hollywood studio in many, many decades. And there was so much excitement around it. But it took them several years to actually have this big hit movie, and they really, really thought that they had it in the bag, essentially. That this was immediately thought of as the Oscar frontrunner. And it was also Spielberg's tribute to his father's generation that fought in World War II, the Greatest Generation. So, it was a really personal movie for him. Of course, some of this will start to sound familiar if you've been following this year's Oscar race, where he has another personal movie, "The Fabelmans." So anyway, at the end of the year, December 1998, along comes "Shakespeare in Love" from Harvey Weinstein's Miramax. And it was really a huge contrast to "Saving Private Ryan." It was funny and romantic and, you know, it was about love instead of killing and war and death. And, you know, that frontrunner fatigue had set in that we see a lot in the Oscars. And so, it really shook up the race. And then Weinstein just pulled every trick he had to really aggressively campaign for "Shakespeare in Love." I mean, blanketing the trade magazines with ads, blanketing the airwaves on the radio stations in Los Angeles. But what made it really ugly was that Dreamworks heard through the grapevine that Weinstein was saying to journalists that "Saving Private Ryan" was only really good for the first 25 minutes, the famous D-Day scene. And then it kind of became a standard World War II movie. And once that got back to Dreamworks, it became an all-out war. Harvey Weinstein denied, denied, denied that he had ever said this. I actually found more than one journalist who had heard it directly from him. And these two sides were just at it. There was so much resentment. Dreamworks was going to the press saying, basically, "They are negative campaigning. They're cheating. They're stealing this from us," essentially, in so many words. The Miramax people thought they were being tarred in the public square. And then when "Shakespeare in Love" actually won, it just hit everyone like a brick. And the head of marketing at Dreamworks at the time, Terry Press, says that she was watching from the mezzanine, and she felt like her face was on fire. That's how furious she was.
Basu: Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. I mean, can you explain, actually, what the rules are around campaigning? I mean, how hard, I guess, are the rules? How are they enforced?
Schulman: Well, the thing is, the rules are always evolving. And they evolve to catch up with stuff that people are trying to get away with. So, as Weinstein developed more and more aggressive tactics, the Academy had to start policing them. And, you know, it's interesting, at the time in 1999, there was an article by Nikki Finke in "New York Magazine" about everything that Miramax was supposedly doing, like throwing an illicit party. And one of the administrators from the Academy said, "Well, we don't want to be Big Brother." However, then the following year, Dreamworks basically adapted what was becoming known as the Weinstein Playbook and doubled it and, you know, outspent every other studio for "American Beauty," which then won. And then the next year, they did it for "Gladiator," which won. And then Miramax bounced back with "Chicago" two years later. So, it became an arms race, and suddenly every studio was doing what they thought Weinstein was doing because they didn't want this to happen again. And so, suddenly, there was a gigantic ecosystem, you know, a real cottage industry of campaigning, and the Academy had to just… It was like whack-a-mole, like trying to figure out what, you know, what people were doing and then, you know, banning them for the next year. And they're still doing it.
Basu: Yeah. I mean, you're making me think about the conversation actually that's come up around this year's awards, specifically in the Best Actress category. Right? There's been some eyebrows raised over Andrea Riseborough's nomination. What do you make of all of that, everything that's happened this year?
Schulman: Yeah, well, it's been really fascinating to think about that in light of what I've been talking about with the Weinstein Playbook. Because in a way, this Andrea Riseborough campaign where, basically, during the nomination window in January, all these A-list actors came out in support of her on social media, all using the same language, you know, "'To Leslie' is a small movie with a giant heart." You know, they were obviously working off of a script and…
Basu: Yeah. And just to say, it really was a very small movie, right?
Schulman: Oh, yeah. It made practically no money. People hadn't heard of it. But suddenly they, you know, right during the nomination window, they were told, "Oh, you gotta check out Andrea Riseborough." And in a way, what's interesting to me is that when Weinstein was campaigning for, you know, "Shakespeare in Love," there was no Instagram or Twitter to use. So, they had to meet, the Academy Board of Governors had to meet and sort of look at this. People were wondering, "Are they gonna rescind her nomination?" But they didn't. What they're really gonna do is look at the guidelines again and see if they need to update them.
Basu: I mean, this all begs the question, like, how are we supposed to think about who gets nominated and who wins here? Like the process. How are we supposed to understand the process if, in some ways, it feels like just some big insiders club?
Schulman: Well, the Academy is literally an insider’s club, you know?
Basu: Yeah, yeah.
Schulman: The Academy is around 10,000 people who work in the film industry in various capacities. It's not like, you know, a Critic's Award or a People's Choice Award, something like that. So, the Oscars really reflect how the industry sees itself, which is an interesting story. But if, again, if you're looking at it as, you know, a pure barometer of what movie was absolutely best, it's gonna disappoint because there are all these other factors.
Basu: You know, we've talked about Harvey Weinstein a little bit so far. Obviously, he has left a lasting impact on the industry. For decades was such a huge player, and then was accused and found guilty of sexual abuse. And it's been, um… It's been over five years now since MeToo really broke out onto the scene and seemed like it demanded a sort of reckoning in Hollywood. How do you measure the impact of MeToo on the Oscars, on the Academy, on the industry at large?
Schulman: What's been interesting the last seven years or so is to see that there's much more conversation around whether voters should be factoring in the personal morality of the nominees, you know. And it's on a spectrum. So, of course, Harvey Weinstein is on one extreme end of the spectrum. But, you know, if there's an actor who was, you know, told some off-color joke at some point, do you factor that in or do you just ignore it and look at the performance, look at the craft?
Basu: Yeah. The whole separating the art from the artist conversation.
Schulman: Exactly. Exactly. And it's, you know, I'm sure many people listening will think, "Oh, no. You should ignore all of that and just base it on the quality. But, you know, in practice, I don't know. I mean, you know, 2017 ends with the Weinstein downfall, and that same year, 2017, Casey Affleck won Best Actor just after he was sued for sexual harassment from a movie set, which was settled. And, you know, it came up in the news because he was nominated for an Oscar and then won. Also, that year, "Birth of a Nation" was a big, promising movie that came out from the director Nate Parker. And then stories emerged about how he had been accused and then acquitted of rape during his college years and this very disturbing tale. So, suddenly, people had to reckon with, you know, should this really be in contention for the Oscars? And it wasn't. In the end, it didn't get any nominees. So, again, it's very thorny, and it's not a simple yes or no. Do we consider these things or not?
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Basu, Narrating: Coming up, the Academy gets called out for a lack of diverse nominees and what it was like to be at the Oscars in 2017 for that shocking moment when the wrong Best Picture winner was announced. That's just ahead.
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Basu, Narrating: Hey, listeners. I've got a quick favor to ask you. If you listen to "In Conversation" and you love what you're hearing, please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, and rate and review us. It only takes a few seconds, and it really helps other people find our show, and it helps us know what you're liking and want to hear more of. Subscribing also means that you'll know every time we drop a new episode. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.
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[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: One of the big, defining moments for the film industry that Michael Schulman writes about in his book was launched by a hashtag, OscarsSoWhite. It first came up in 2015, when all 20 nominees in the lead and supporting acting categories were white. Writer and activist April Reign tweeted, "#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair." It got some play at the time. But then, in 2016, when for the second year in a row the acting nominees were again all white, Reign's hashtag came back, and it went viral. There were talks of actors boycotting the Oscars. And all of this set off alarm bells at the Academy.
Schulman: The Academy had an emergency meeting, and they had been discussing a plan to open up the membership more and diversify. And they really just put the pedal to the metal and announced that they were going to really make an effort to bring in a lot more people who were people of color, younger people, more women, more people from around the world.
Basu, Narrating: And to make space, they decided to shift some voting Academy members who hadn't been active in the industry to "emeritus status."
Schulman: This was an obvious euphemism for, you know, "You're irrelevant. We're not letting you vote anymore."
Basu: "You've been retired."
Schulman: Yeah. And it affected very few people in the end, but it just, it made people crazy because the one thing people in Hollywood don't want to be is obsolescent, you know? So, it just hit a nerve and there was a lot of outcry and pushback and a lot of discussion about what the Academy was doing.
Basu, Narrating: This was the backdrop of the 2017 awards when, as you might remember, the wrong film was announced for Best Picture.
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[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Warren Beatty: And the Academy Award for Best Picture…
Faye Dunaway: "La La Land."
[CROWD CHEERS]
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: And Michael was actually there at the Oscars that night.
Schulman: So, that was my first time going to the Oscars to cover them for "The New Yorker." And I was sitting in the press room, which is sort of adjacent to the theater. It's this big kind of hotel conference room situation where there's long tables and about a hundred journalists from around the world. There are Academy librarians in the back with binders in case anyone needs to, you know, ask a reference question. And then they…
Basu: Oh, wow.
Schulman: And then they bring in the winners after they win to meet the press, and you're watching on monitors. And so when that happened and the camera did a closeup of the card that said "Moonlight" after we all thought "La La Land" had won…
[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Oscars Presenter: This is not a joke. "Moonlight" has won Best Picture.
[SCATTERED CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
Oscars Presenter: "'Moonlight,' Best Picture."
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Schulman: Everyone screamed. I still remember that moment. You know, everyone in the press room just screaming collectively because something was actually happening. You know, something totally unheard of and unplanned.
Basu: Yeah, yeah.
Schulman: No one knew at first why this had happened. It really took a couple hours to piece together exactly what had happened. And, you know, even several years later, in the book, I found new details, new factors that made this perfect storm of errors happen.
Basu: Yeah. I have to say, when I read the details in your book, up until then, I mean me, I'm talking just for myself and my cynical heart, I truly felt like it was a manufactured moment. It did not feel real to me. It felt like it was manufactured to make some kind of statement, to make some kind of political and cultural statement. And I remember just feeling like, "Ugh, ugh. Why did they make this moment up like this?" But tell us what you found. Tell us the new details that you found because for me, that really kind of hammered home that this felt like a true accident.
Schulman: Well, the symbolism of the moment is part of it and sort of why I wanted to write about it. But the technical reasons why it happened are just incredible. Because everything had to go wrong in the exact right way. So, essentially, the main thing that happened was that, and people did not know this at the time, which is why there was so much confusion, the only people who know the winners before they're announced are two accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers. One is stationed on each side of the stage, and each of the accountants has a full set of envelopes. Which means that there's duplicates because, you know, if there's a presenter who enters from stage right, they take, you know, the Best Supporting Actress envelope. What's supposed to happen is that the other accountant on stage left then puts the duplicate into a briefcase. What happened that night was that Emma Stone won Best Actress for "La La Land," but the accountant on the other side of the stage didn't get rid of the duplicate for the best actress card. And so, he was holding the Best Picture envelope and the duplicate Best Actress envelope, and accidentally gave the Best Actress duplicate to Warren Beatty.
Basu: [WHISPERS] Oh, my God.
Schulman: The reason is that he was trying to show Warren Beatty, like, there was a new tape that was used on the envelope to seal it instead of a wax sealer. And so, the accountant was trying to show him how to open it. There was also some talk afterward about how the accountant was a bit distracted. He had just tweeted a picture of Emma Stone backstage and was maybe a little starstruck. But mainly, it was just that he was showing Warren Beatty exactly how to open the envelope. And then in the midst of that, just gave him the duplicate Emma Stone Best Actress envelope. So, when Warren Beatty opened it on stage, he saw something inexplicable, which was "Emma Stone, 'La La Land.'" And he had no idea what was happening. So, then he was presenting with Faye Dunaway and showed her the card, like, "Can you make any sense of this?" And Faye Dunaway just looked at it and saw the words "La La Land" and said, "La La Land." And that's when everything just turned into absolute chaos 'cause nobody knew what was happening. Backstage, the accountants realized that something had gone wrong. They had to tell the stage managers. They had to tell the producers. They had to figure out what to do. It was all happening, you know, people were giving speeches for "La La Land" on stage while this was happening.
Basu: Yeah. It felt like a lot of time was passing while all of that was going on.
Schulman: I mean, it was just, again, an incredible confluence of events. And for that to happen at the very last moment of the show. And, in a way, that was very symbolic of this year of racial reckoning that the Academy had just gone to, that a movie like "Moonlight" about a poor, queer, Black kid from Miami could win Best Picture. It was, you know, it was a real moment. You know, it was a really important moment in the evolution of what a Best Picture winner looks like and who's represented in them. And so for it to happen in that way, just astounding.
Basu: Let's jump ahead to last year's awards, which had another unplanned moment that I would not say was exhilarating. I think was really shocking for a lot of people. Which was the slap, Will Smith getting up on stage and slapping Chris Rock unscripted. I understand that you were at the awards last year as well for this.
Schulman: I was, I was. [CHUCKLES] Yeah, I know. Yeah, my first time at the awards was envelope-gate and then, you know, five years later…
Basu: I'm starting to think this is a "you" thing, Michael.
Schulman: I mean, what can I tell? I needed a new ending for my book. And Will Smith gave me one. No, I was in the balcony, way up in the cheap seats. I saw it happen. I'm very nearsighted, so I really couldn't tell what was happening, but I could hear it. I could hear Will Smith scream…
[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Will Smith: Keep my wife's name out your [CENSORED] mouth!
Chris Rock: I'm going to. Okay?
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Schulman: And I immediately thought, "You can't say that word on network TV." And also, he sounds very, very angry. You know, the feeling in the room was like if you're in a bar and two people get into a brawl. You know, that sort of unsettled, dangerous energy. And yet a lot of people had no idea. They thought it was a comic bit because there was really nothing like this had ever happened before. And it was sort of hard to process. So, I left my seat, I ran to the lobby and started interviewing people, trying to capture the chaos of the moment. And it slowly, or I guess quickly, dawned on people that mind-bending as that was, it was about to get even more mind-bending because, in all likelihood, Will Smith was about to win Best Actor and give a speech.
Basu: And he did.
Schulman: And he did. And I remember crowding around the bar in the lobby on the ground floor, and just all these people… like I was with Rami Malek and Beyoncé was behind me. And everyone was just, like, rapt in attention watching on the monitor because we all wanted to see what would come out of Will Smith's mouth. And of course, it was this very raw, emotional, conflicted speech where he talked about protecting, you know, protecting people, protecting his family. And this is what he had learned from playing Richard Williams and in "King Richard," the movie that he was winning for.
[START OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Will Smith: Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world. I'm being called on, in my life, to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.
[END OSCARS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Schulman: And, you know, that was a very odd statement. Like, I mean, immediately Twitter broke out in, you know, debates. You know, is protecting your wife from an off-color joke reason to get up and hit someone? But it was just, you could tell that Will Smith was going through something and realizing in that moment that he had simultaneously reached the pinnacle of his career and also kind of ruined his career at the exact same time.
Basu: So I wanna turn to this year's awards. What are you gonna be watching for this year?
Schulman: Well, a couple things. Obviously, I'm curious about how they're gonna handle the slap. It's the obvious subtext. I'm also really interested in the Best Actress race. You know, it's really come down to Cate Blanchett in "Tár" and Michelle Yeoh in "Everything Everywhere All at Once." I have no idea who's gonna win. That's a real nail biter. Best Actor is also a little bit unsettled. You know, I think it's sort of a three-way race between Brendan Fraser in "The Whale," but I really think it's between Austin Butler in "Elvis" and Colin Farrell in "The Banshees of Inisherin." I'm predicting, and you know, if I'm wrong, just forget I ever said anything. I'm predicting a good night for "Everything Everywhere All at Once." People love an underdog movie, and that movie really came outta nowhere. It's a non-franchise movie, a little weird indie movie that made a ton of money and that people just love, and there's a lot of love for it.
Basu: It's so, so unique. So, so unique and bizarre.
Schulman: Incredibly unique and weird and also heartfelt and also a spectacle, a kind of visual spectacle. So, I think it has a lot going for it. And I think it'll win a bunch of stuff and possibly also Best Picture.
Basu: Yeah. Is there a must-watch film, or maybe two, if people… I don't know when people are gonna listen to this. They won't have much time left before the awards. So, is there one or two last-minute watches that you would say you gotta try and see before the awards?
Schulman: Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, my personal favorites this year were "Tár" and "Triangle of Sadness." Both of those are pretty polarizing movies, actually. I've heard from a lot of people with a lot of opinions on both of them. And also, another one that I think is nominated for Best Picture, but not enough people have seen, is "Women Talking," the Sarah Polley movie. I really thought that was great. And I was glad to see it nominated.
Basu: You know, I think that so many examples, actually, that you've given already of moments in Oscar's history, they show how there's one track of the show, the produced show for TV, and then this other track of the unplanned sort of magic in a bottle that you kind of can't put your finger on that becomes part of the cultural conversation for so long. And to me, maybe the magic of the Oscars is actually thinking about how that mix fits together and how to get that mix exactly right. I don't know. Does that theory make sense to you?
Schulman: Exactly. No, it does because, you know, when you think about it, every year has elements of the impromptu and spontaneous because people don't know who's gonna win. And sometimes, you know, there's a surprise win. Or even if there's not, someone, you know, suddenly is giving an Oscar speech and we don't know what they're gonna say. So, there's always an element of the unplanned and unscripted. However, there are certain moments that are really in their own category. Going back to, you know, Sacheen Littlefeather coming up to decline the award for Marlon Brando for "The Godfather." I mean, that was… Or the streaker in 1974. You know, these moments that are just completely out of left field. And then going up all the way to envelope-gate and the slap. And I mean, as a lover of Oscar drama and chaos, I live for those things.
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Basu: Michael, thank you so much. Thanks for giving us so much to think about as we go into this year's Awards.
Schulman: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
Basu, Narrating: You can read Michael Schulman's book, "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears" on Apple Books. You'll find a link on our show notes page. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review for this show on Apple Podcasts.
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