BONUS Marc on Movies - The Oscars
Guest:So, Mark, do you have an idea of how many years we've kind of focused on Oscar stuff on this show?
Marc:Probably since the beginning, I would imagine a bit.
Marc:Well, not guest wise, but I'm sure I've had something to say about the Oscars every year that we've been on the air.
Marc:That is correct.
Guest:Every year, it's one of the most constant things that we have.
Guest:You have basically every Thanksgiving, you do a little Thanksgiving speech for the listeners.
Guest:You acknowledge your sober anniversary on the air every year.
Guest:But every year, and I went back and I looked, we have Oscar stuff.
Guest:It's a constant thing.
Guest:We don't do that for any other kind of cultural thing.
Guest:It's all personal milestones.
Guest:But for some reason, we talk about the Oscars on the show every year.
Guest:And like you said, it's been that way since before we had guests on who were like Oscar nominees.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think we're even focusing on that.
Marc:I don't even know that we knew that we could get them necessarily.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:It just wasn't the nature of what we were doing then.
Marc:But yeah, I guess I always have something to say about the Oscars.
Marc:I realize this year I'm a little shy of seeing all the movies because it seems like this year there's more movies.
Marc:To see.
Marc:You know what's interesting about that?
Guest:There isn't.
Guest:There is not.
Guest:In fact, the first year we started doing this show was the first year they started having 10 nominees.
Guest:The entire lifetime of this show, it's been 10 nominees.
Guest:When I was a kid, it was like three.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:It was like two.
Guest:It was like a coin flip.
Guest:Well, do you think it goes back to... Do you think it's kind of elemental in your childhood?
Guest:It's always been there, and so you always acknowledge it when it happens?
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:I mean, I was just in New Mexico.
Marc:I spent time with my buddy, Devin Jackson, and we were kind of film nerds when we were in high school in the 80s.
Marc:I remember...
Marc:You know, being excited to go see Apocalypse Now when it came out.
Marc:I remember we used to go to the small arts theater and see stuff.
Marc:I remember us, you know, talking about movies in as real a way as high school kids could about the art of movies.
Marc:So at least since I was a kid, I always liked watching the pageantry.
Marc:And this, I think, goes back before high school where I just I like looking at movie stars.
Marc:And I think I say that every year.
Marc:And I still kind of do like looking at movie stars.
Marc:I like seeing movie stars, and I like seeing them all hang out together.
Guest:There's a lot of angling around Oscars.
Guest:There's a lot of money spent in getting Oscars.
Guest:There's a lot of public politicking for nominations and the awards themselves.
Guest:But then this year, you found yourself directly addressing this because of a movie you were in.
Guest:So I'm wondering, did that change anything for you in how you perceive it, or it just kind of was par for the course?
Marc:I don't even know that I knew about Oscar campaigns, really, until Rachel Weisz got hers.
Marc:Because I remember it was very publicly...
Marc:sort of documented this sort of full press campaign she was doing.
Marc:And I just kept hearing about that.
Marc:But I don't know, like, I don't really get into the game of anything.
Marc:I don't, you know, I don't sort of nerd out about the politics of this stuff.
Marc:I kind of, you know, take things for granted.
Marc:I knew that a lot of times the movies that were the best didn't win, but I didn't really realize, I think until, you know, embarrassingly recently, that it was all big fix, big game, a big payout.
Marc:and always has been, I'm slow to learn that kind of stuff.
Marc:I think I'm a romantic.
Guest:But I think it's also because it's tied up in the fact that it's not necessarily 100% rigged or a fix or a con game.
Guest:I mean, we can talk about the origins of the thing, and that kind of informs quite a bit of it.
Guest:But at the same time, like...
Guest:There's members in the academy that have to vote for this thing and they vote for the thing they like.
Guest:That's not nothing.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And but like we learn, though, in any given year, that does not necessarily mean that politics aren't involved.
Marc:I mean, I'm a voting member of something, SAG or whatever.
Marc:You can't see everything.
Marc:You know, a lot of times you're going to like check your friends.
Marc:You're going to like, you know, like, oh, I can get behind this movie.
Marc:But to answer your other question, to be involved in To Leslie and seeing what Andrea went through, which to me and to you and to journalists and to the Academy seemed like a legit campaign in the final paces of voting, you know, was...
Marc:you know, was accused of things, was, you know, the entire nomination became toxic because they hung the idea on her that two women of color were knocked out of the running because of her nomination.
Marc:And I just felt awful for her because, you know, she's not really a
Marc:a big award whore and she certainly is a contender and in and someone who deserves the attention but now the whole thing's a horrible experience should be a great experience yeah i wonder have you seen her since that or have you heard about her or heard from her
Marc:Not really.
Marc:I mean, like, you know, she was holding up.
Marc:I texted her, and she got back to me, like, a few days later, said, yeah, like, just sort of, you know, a little detached, sort of like, yeah, just crazy, you know, I don't know, you know.
Marc:I mean, obviously, there's...
Marc:There's politics, but this at least seemed more legitimate than usual, that the way that she went about getting her nomination, it's just actors rallying to an actor.
Guest:That's interesting, right?
Guest:Because I think what a lot of people responded to was this very suddenly very visible nature of it, right?
Guest:Because it was happening on their social media feeds and that.
Guest:And I just think most of the public is the way you are, that for most of their lives, including maybe right up until today...
Guest:They don't know that there's just massive dollars being spent on campaigns for this stuff.
Guest:And sometimes in the history of it, in the most cutthroat way possible, there's this guy, Michael Shulman, just put a book out this year.
Guest:Like it literally came out before the nominations were announced.
Guest:And then the two Leslie thing happened.
Guest:And he was like, oh, my God, it's like advertisement for my book because his book is called Oscar Wars, A History of Hollywood and Gold, Sweat and Tears.
Guest:And it goes back to the founding of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences, which was a bullshit union-busting scheme.
Guest:That was the reason it was invented.
Guest:To placate actors.
Guest:Well, it was less about placating them and more about... It was like a trick, really, by Louis B. Mayer.
Guest:And this I remember reading in Vanity Fair.
Guest:There was a piece by David Thompson back in 2014.
Guest:And he's obviously not the only one who's chronicled this.
Guest:That...
Guest:there were threats of union organizing within the studios that guys like Mayer wanted to squash because they were rolling in dough and they just wanted that money to keep coming in.
Guest:And so they were getting really worried about labor organization.
Guest:And they thought a way to handle that was to create an organization
Guest:operation that they controlled and it was as much a pr thing as anything and they literally invented it with the name academy of motion picture arts and sciences as like a bullshit cover to make it sound like classy like with that it had like history and distinction like oh yeah this sounds like something that albert einstein would be a part of arts and sciences right it's all horseshit yeah we're geniuses we're
Guest:Well, and this is a famous quote from Louis B. Mayer.
Guest:He said, I found the best way to handle them, them meaning actors and people, tradesmen, people within the movie business.
Guest:I found the best way to handle them was to hang medals all over them.
Guest:If I got them cups and awards, they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted.
Guest:That's why the Academy Award was created.
Guest:I mean, that's a...
Marc:That's not someone pretending he said that.
Marc:That's his quote.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, well, that also explains historically, like, why it's a hit-or-miss thing around who wins and who doesn't win.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because, I mean, look, no matter how much juice a movie gets, there's a couple ways to look at what makes a film art.
Marc:And more so than not, it seems that the Academy honors Hollywood-style movies.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a rare thing that, you know, something that takes, well, I guess that's not entirely true anymore, but, but it just always seemed like an inside job in a way.
Guest:Well, you know, in a minute I want us to play a little game and see if we can, if that tracks, if that tracks all the way through the history of it and, and whether or not we can come up with anything that, that counters it.
Guest:But, but I'll do that in a second.
Guest:What I wanted to point out first though, was like, I,
Guest:I you know, it took us a while to figure this out.
Guest:And like you said, we didn't get a lot of guests that had anything to do with nominations or the Oscars early on in the in the history of doing this show.
Guest:But after a while became a very regular thing, we'd get pitched guests who were, you know, going through the awards cycle and were up for things.
Guest:Maybe we have an impact.
Guest:Well, right.
Guest:And that's the thing that was the shocking thing to us was that all of a sudden it was one of two things that we were told are the reasons publicists reach out to our show.
Guest:And it's that we move books and that we have an impact on voting bodies, on organized voting for awards.
Guest:And I started to notice...
Guest:Like I said, oh, that's kind of interesting.
Guest:So that means we'll get people around the Oscars and that.
Guest:No, we get people for six months of the year all around voting for awards because, you know, you start in the summertime when they start trying to campaign for Emmys and then the Emmys go through the fall.
Guest:And then once the fall hits, you start picking up for the Golden Globes or anything else that's kind of early in the winter season.
Guest:And then you roll right into the beginning of the year, which is SAGs and Independent Spirits and Oscars.
Guest:And they're paying lots and lots of money to make these things happen.
Guest:And that, I think, is why the Two Leslie thing is such a kind of canary in the coal mine.
Guest:Right.
Guest:piss those people off who are in charge of consulting firms and get paid millions of dollars a year because they supposedly have the strategy that movie stars need to pay for in order to get their trophies.
Guest:And here comes Andrea with her director's family, basically just reaching out to friends saying, hey, will you watch this movie and talk about it?
Marc:And it was impossible to see that movie.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Like, I mean, that movie would never have been seen by almost anybody.
Guest:Well, no, a hilarious thing is that became a complaint, right?
Guest:Like they were like, how could this movie get an award?
Guest:No one saw it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's like, you know, we made this amount of money.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's another problem with the idea of what is winning.
Marc:Money means winning on almost all levels in our culture.
Marc:And it's kind of disgusting.
Marc:Well, that's for sure.
Marc:Because it's destroyed the integrity of almost everything.
Guest:Well, I think it was Martin Scorsese who says he knew that his job was going to be much, much harder at some point in, I think, the late 70s when he was just watching.
Guest:He had the TV on in his house and Entertainment Tonight was on and they did the box office returns for that weekend.
Guest:And they ranked them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Guest:And it was the first time he'd ever seen that.
Guest:And he went, oh, shit, we're in trouble.
Guest:If this is getting ranked by the best movies, the one that wins the most money on the weekend, well, I'm
Marc:fucked well yeah well i mean i thought entertainment tonight ruined everything for everybody for different reasons it destroyed it was the beginning of the destruction of the mystique of the illusion makers you know like it was the beginning of almost clickbait in a way around movie stars lives and you know it was kind of a drag to me
Guest:Well, I mean, I guess that always existed with like, you know, Hedda Hopper and all the gossip columnists and that.
Guest:But the difference there was that was highly manicured gossip by the studios, right?
Guest:Like you watched Hail Caesar, you get a very good sense of that and how they were basically in concert with making films.
Guest:They were running these gossip mills as well.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think along the same level, this kind of bullshit idea of the creation of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences by Louis B. Mayer and the other studio bosses at the time, Hodley does have more integrity to it.
Guest:As much of like a union busting bit of bullshit as it was, like if you...
Guest:remember those oscars from what was it two years ago now during the pandemic when steven soderbergh produced them and they were in that like in the train station right and it was everybody kind of was like this is weird they're kind of all just they don't show clips and they gave little biographical details of all the people nominated oh this person first picked up a camera back in you know 1962 and
Guest:And I remember there was, it got a lot of complaints and people said it didn't feel like the Oscars.
Guest:It felt small.
Guest:And I remember you and I, like the night it happened, we were like, yeah, that was just an industry award.
Guest:Like that's what happens.
Guest:Like it would happen for any business that was doing some kind of award presentation in a conference room at a hotel.
Guest:And like humanized it somehow.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And like it's similar to what you're talking about, how something like Entertainment Tonight and the idea of winning through money kind of co-ops the whole process, because now this idea of winning an Oscar, it's not just about the actual awards and who wins them.
Guest:It's this entire ecosystem of entertainment around the sport like notion of winning these awards.
Marc:Well, yeah, almost everything in our culture is kind of devolved into some sort of sports betting framework.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:Yeah, it's the sports betting idea around it.
Guest:Like, you can win...
Guest:And your identity will be validated by being right about who wins the best actor award at the Oscars.
Marc:Like there's a that's definitely a thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I don't like I don't I'm not a stats guy.
Marc:I don't pay attention.
Marc:You know, I'm kind of like, you know, I take information and I build on it with my own brain.
Marc:But, you know, I don't really take on multilevels of.
Marc:you know, statistics and nuance around, you know, numbers and production and all that stuff.
Marc:I'm not, I guess I'm not that fascinated.
Marc:And when I read about it, I'm always sort of amazed and my mind is blown.
Marc:But this idea that somehow, and I see it in comedy too, and I see it in almost everything, that, you know, you are determined the winner
Marc:If you make the most money.
Marc:Right.
Guest:This other thing that that does, that idea of winning and that you have to somehow codify this in a kind of competition framework with betting and odds.
Guest:The fact that there are odds on Oscars that you would ask me throughout the season, like, hey, do you think Andrea would get an Oscar nomination?
Guest:And I go, well, let me go check the odds.
Guest:And I'd be like, nah, she doesn't even have a money line in Vegas.
Guest:That's crazy that that exists.
Guest:And that's also the kind of thing that makes the situation untenable for like these nominees who people said, oh, they, you know, they took her, they took their spots, you know, Viola Davis and Danielle Detweiler.
Guest:It's like, I feel terrible for those women because there were no spots that was made up.
Guest:There's no initial spots that then somebody slides in and kicks you out of.
Marc:That's a, that's a construct.
Marc:Everything's determined by degenerate gamblers and grifters and hype men.
Guest:It's kind of a parasitic organism that's feeding off of these award shows so that they can run a year-round racket on this.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's what you were telling me and what we learned was that, you know, one of the reasons that Andrea and the movie and how she got...
Marc:the votes caught so much flack, is it because it kind of, out of nowhere, they get blindsided by this little campaign.
Marc:And these are the people that are running these year-long businesses, this business infrastructure that's directly tied to consultants and the studios and the film industry in and of itself.
Marc:So if somebody like Andrea comes around the side like that, it kind of diminishes the
Marc:You know, their position in the whole in the whole business.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Now, I also want to point out, though, that is a sidebar on that is like that is not discounting at all.
Guest:The fact that there are structural disadvantages, particularly within this Academy of Motion Pictures.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Virtually all areas of society, there are structural disadvantages for people of color and most in particular women of color.
Guest:And so it is not a thing to gloss over of the fact that there was no groundswell of of support for Danielle Detweiler and Viola Davis and any number of hundreds of other actors.
Guest:And every year there would be no groundswell of support for people, just like there wouldn't have been one for Andrea if Mary McCormick hadn't started a campaign.
Marc:But what's interesting, though, is that how, you know, all of these actors trust the studio game.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And maybe they're personal publicists who are connected to the studio game.
Marc:But the fact that none of them thought to to campaign like that is peculiar.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, or the fact that they were sold on the idea of like, we're going to get you your nomination.
Guest:Don't worry about it.
Guest:We'll get this taken care of.
Guest:And then there was no, but I don't think it's a crazy thing to look askance at the fact that there was no Instagram campaign for Danielle Detweiler, who is as equally an unknown actor as Andrea, a movie that had equally been unseen by the
Guest:the general public, that's unfortunate.
Marc:And also, like, the fact is that it seems that, you know, the Academy Awards and the possibility of Academy Awards is insulated to who this system decides.
Marc:Because, you know, the Indie Spirit Awards, they don't even have a network anymore.
Marc:They're streaming on YouTube, and it's almost like no one gives a fuck.
Marc:The assumption is, is that good luck finding those movies.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:And so that, not like anything, not unlike everything else, it's almost a tribalization.
Marc:It's almost like a marginalization that, you know, this is big show business and the rest of you do whatever you do trying to get your things distributed and getting a deal on a streamer of this kind or that.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, you know, I've never had any problem with us, what we've done in terms of talking about the Oscars.
Guest:I never thought we were doing anything that was complicit in a bad system.
Guest:I thought we were just talking culturally about something that interested us.
Guest:And I think maybe the reason I didn't think that we were kind of putting any...
Guest:importance on it other than some kind of fun conversation was because I distinctly remember when this happened for me that I was probably about 15 and I went into my high school French class and I asked the French teacher who I knew was a serious movie guy.
Guest:In fact, he would show us a lot of French films in class, ones that he could without getting in trouble, I guess.
Guest:But I remember asking him, oh, who do you think is going to win the Oscars this year?
Guest:And he was like, you know, that doesn't mean anything.
Guest:And I couldn't understand that.
Guest:That doesn't mean anything.
Guest:What are you talking about?
Guest:You win an Oscar, you're the best movie.
Guest:And it was the first kind of like crack in the armor of it that then I just kind of kept seeing it year to year after that, where I would see like, wait, that movie is the best?
Guest:That doesn't seem right.
Marc:It is a celebration of a very tight relationship
Marc:Knit industry.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's really an industry celebration where they can all parade their bullshit.
Marc:It's like what it's exactly what Louis B. Mayer wanted.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Like, you know, this is a celebration of the people we've selected and the movies we've selected to make money.
Marc:in the future and in the past.
Guest:It's why it's so often that a movie that wins best picture is a movie about movies.
Guest:Like we're about to do something here and we're going to go through the list of best picture winners.
Guest:And you're going to notice how many of them are about the wonderful power of Hollywood.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And that speaks to the egos of the voting academy.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:You know, but like when you really think about the movies that move you.
Marc:But oddly, in the last few years, there have been some challenging movies in that top ten.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:And some of them hold their own, you know, as art and as art.
Marc:art that takes risks.
Guest:So to play a little game here, here's what I'd like us to do.
Guest:I've already looked at the Best Picture winners going back through the history of the Academy Awards.
Guest:Let's go through the decades, all right?
Guest:And we could go back, let's just go back through the 60s, times where at least one of us was alive.
Guest:And I want us each to kind of pick the movie we think in that decade was
Guest:was the best one like if we were trying to enshrine a movie as the best what we would pick because I do I am interested to know if we can come up with you know a list at the end of this and feel like wow that's diverse that is a creative and uh useful list for for history and you know it might uh
Guest:be different we might have picked all different uh choices so uh let's take a look let's start with the most recent ones in fact i'll take the ones from the 2020s since there were two and just put those in the in the 2010s to save us some time okay but so that would going backwards that means we got coda nomadland parasite green book
Guest:The Shape of Water, Moonlight, Spotlight, Birdman, 12 Years a Slave, Argo, The Artist, and The King's Speech.
Guest:So of all those movies, which one would you pick if you had to kind of enshrine it as the best?
Marc:Okay, well, I didn't see The Artist, but it would be between...
Marc:Parasite, Spotlight, and Moonlight.
Marc:And for me, I would say Spotlight.
Guest:That's a good pick.
Guest:That's a good and kind of a surprising pick.
Guest:And I do really love that movie.
Guest:I picked Parasite.
Guest:What would you say is your reasoning for picking Spotlight?
Marc:Because I thought it was...
Marc:you know, as a compelling unfolding of a story, you know, in that in the world of journalism, like like, you know, all the president's men.
Marc:But I thought the way it handled, you know, systemic sexual abuse and, you know, the way the script was was written and, you know, all the levels, you know, when you've got, you know, the Catholic Church and the state government and
Marc:And the knowledge of this going on for probably centuries.
Marc:I just thought that there was a lot there that revealed something about something true that I didn't know the nuance of.
Marc:And I certainly didn't know how the story was broken.
Marc:And I think it sort of did it in a very filmic way.
Marc:And I just...
Marc:I found it compelling, well-acted, well-scripted, and satisfying.
Marc:And I was surprised when it won.
Marc:That was one of those ones where I was like, wow, they picked the right movie.
Marc:I mean, I loved Parasite in the way that it was clearly an art film in its framework.
Marc:And it was one of those ones that...
Marc:you know, didn't explain everything for you and you had to have, you know, reactions to, you know, filmmaking, poetic and narrative decisions that the director made.
Marc:But I see them as almost, you know, they're entirely different genres of films.
Marc:But, you know, I found it satisfying as well.
Marc:But I think that Spotlight's probably more wired into my Hollywood sense of what a movie is.
Marc:That's interesting.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:Well, I like that we kind of both picked them because then as we go on here, we'll see if it stays kind of that diverse.
Guest:So in the preceding decade, it was The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men,
Guest:The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, The Lord of the Rings, Chicago, A Beautiful Mind, and Gladiator.
Marc:Again, weirdly, as much as I love...
Marc:No Country, I'm going to go with Slumdog.
Marc:Interesting.
Guest:Because I had No Country.
Guest:I didn't even spend five seconds thinking about it, of those movies.
Guest:But Slumdog Millionaire, that's interesting.
Guest:And is it just because you've seen it less, or it feels fresher to you?
Marc:No.
Marc:It was because...
Marc:there's something about India and there's something about the pace of that film and there was something about exploring the class structure of India and also honoring a sort of Bollywood kind of sensibility around it, which I don't see often.
Marc:I thought it was, again, sort of plays into my Hollywood sensibility, has a satisfying ending, showed me a world that I have no familiarity with
Marc:And it was an uplifting story.
Marc:And I just and I love the way the movie looked.
Marc:But like, again, I've seen No Country for Old Men a million times and I love it and I love where it went.
Marc:But if I'm just thinking when I look at those things, all those movies.
Marc:Um, you know, it would be between no country and, and, and slum dog either way.
Marc:And I love no country, but in, in terms of a movie experience where it was simple and, and satisfying and, um, and it looked different than anything I'd ever seen before.
Guest:So then the next decade is American beauty, Shakespeare in love, Titanic, the English patient, brave heart,
Guest:Forrest Gump, Schindler's List, Unforgiven, The Silence of the Lambs, and Dances with Wolves.
Guest:This was extremely tough for me between two movies.
Oh, boy.
Marc:You know, I got to go with Unforgiven.
Marc:That was between that and Silence, and I picked Silence.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:It was really hard, but I had to really like, you know, think if, if both of these were on at the same time and I could only watch one, which would it be?
Marc:I mean, to be honest with you, I will watch The Unforgiven anytime I come upon it and I'll, and I'll watch it on purpose at least once a year.
Marc:Because, again, Hollywood, studying film, you know, Westerns in general, it's like one of the most satisfying movies ever made.
Guest:Yeah, well, and very, very rewarding from that perspective as a deconstruction of the tradition.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Smart movie.
Marc:But Silence, I like that movie.
Marc:I love it.
Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I noticed, too, is that I think I'm a bit of a sucker for like the performances within movies that have hooks.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like I will go back to that movie over and over again because I just want to see what Hopkins did.
Guest:I want to see what Foster did.
Marc:And what about Levine?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Ted Levine.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, like I it was weird because I remember having a conversation with some woman who thought that, you know, Anthony Hopkins was so interesting in that movie.
Marc:And I'm like, what about Ted Levine?
Marc:And she's like, oh, gross.
Marc:And I'm like, what?
Guest:but i i mean i will say i think i'm somewhat like there's there's part of me that i'm buttressing up against the fact that like for a long time i like friends of mine and i would like do the buffalo bill voice to each other and and i start to wonder am i like am i enjoying this for the wrong reason like do i just like it because i want to be able to go is he a great big fat person to somebody else
Marc:Well, I just, there were moments in his performance that were truly what they would call cringe now, but in retrospect, you know, showed a profound, disturbing vulnerability.
Marc:Like, I really think he stepped on the wire.
Marc:He was out on the wire with that performance.
Marc:Whereas, you know, as interesting as Anthony Hopkins was, you know, he was an alpha monster.
Marc:Whereas, you know, Ted is this strange, you know, amorphous, sexually fucked up person, you know, trying to complete himself in some weird way.
Marc:To me, I was like, wow.
Marc:And Jodie Foster is genius.
Marc:And I love that movie, but I have to be honest.
Marc:I mean, I watch The Unforgiven over and over again if just that watch, you know, Clint Eastwood walk into that bar and shoot that guy.
Marc:He didn't do anything.
Marc:And dumb little, what's his name?
Marc:Oh, Saul Rubinick.
Marc:Yeah, Saul Rubinick.
Marc:You know, I'm shot.
Guest:I'm shot.
Guest:Didn't you see that guy like on the bench outside your hotel or something?
Marc:Yeah, he wasn't very nice.
Marc:He said, I'm a big fan.
Marc:He's like, eh, all right.
Marc:Sorry.
Marc:And this was like a few years ago.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Well, now we're getting into the 80s here.
Guest:You've got Driving Miss Daisy, Rain Man,
Guest:The Last Emperor, Platoon, Out of Africa, Amadeus, Terms of Endearment, Gandhi,
Guest:And Chariots of Fire.
Guest:Oh, wait.
Guest:Nope.
Guest:I left one out.
Marc:Ordinary People.
Marc:It's odd who it's between, but I'll go with Amadeus.
Marc:That's mine.
Guest:That's our first similar pick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was between that and Rain Man, to be honest with you.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's definitely one of my favorite movies of all time is Rain Man.
Marc:It's a great movie.
Marc:And that's a deconstruction of the Hollywood story in a way.
Marc:Oh, sure.
Guest:And of movie star, of Tom Cruise.
Guest:Like it's a great breaking down of that guy's persona and making him have to be a human.
Marc:I don't know that he's ever really achieved that again.
Marc:Yeah, that's true.
Marc:But Amadeus, like just for that moment,
Marc:where Salieri's looking at the music.
Marc:Just with every page, you know, Forman, Milos Forman, cut to the music.
Marc:So with every turn of the page, you know, you identify because of the sound, because of these choices around the music, how different all the pieces of music are.
Marc:That's a brilliant device.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had this interesting conversation with Don.
Guest:My son wanted to hear some Mozart.
Guest:And we were playing it and we started talking about the movie Amadeus.
Guest:And I said, I remember seeing that movie very young.
Guest:Like, I think I was probably five, six years old when I first saw Amadeus.
Guest:And I accepted it as...
Guest:a point of fact in the film that Amadeus was a hero and Salieri was bad.
Guest:That what he was doing was wrong, that avarice was wrong, that envy and being jealous of someone else's position and talents.
Guest:I could read what I thought the movie was trying to tell me as a little kid, like, oh, that's bad.
Guest:And this funny guy who's laughing a lot and is a genius, he's the hero, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dawn said, I saw that movie for the first time when I was in high school and I really related to Salieri.
Guest:You're at this age where you're like, I don't know why I am not as good as these people.
Guest:I can't understand it.
Guest:I'm angry at God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought to myself, wow, what an amazing thing that like you could take two young minds at two different stages and have them relate to the opposite characters in that film.
Marc:I don't know when I first saw it, but it was probably when it came out.
Marc:When did it come out?
Marc:84.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So I'm already in college, but I just love that Mozart drove that guy crazy.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I just thought that was like, look at this guy.
Guest:Nothing he can do.
Guest:And also drove him crazy for like all the reasons someone would drive you crazy today.
Guest:Like just like.
Marc:But, you know, I've had to accept those kind of things.
Marc:You know, I know, you know, talented people that, you know, transcend anything that I can do.
Marc:And eventually you're going to have to suck it up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, then the other added thing is that he was really annoying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like that was the other point that drove him crazy was he's like, this guy is vulgar.
Marc:But Salieri is respected to some degree, isn't he?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Well, and that was always the knock on the play first.
Guest:And then the movie after was that Salieri had a much better reputation.
Guest:Historically had a much better reputation than the story lets on.
Guest:But hey, this makes for better drama.
Marc:I do love that movie.
Marc:And I think I've been thinking about watching it again.
Guest:So here's the movies of the 70s that won Best Picture.
Guest:Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter, Annie Hall, Rocky, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Godfather Part II, The Sting, The Godfather, The French Connection, and Patton.
Marc:Well, if I'm going to be honest with myself...
Marc:It's got to be Godfather 2.
Guest:Hmm.
Guest:I started out basically with the same phrase in my head after looking at those names and said, if I'm going to be honest with myself, I got to pick Godfather 1.
Yeah.
Guest:And here's what I will say.
Guest:If you really pushed me between two movies, it would be between The Godfather and The French Connection.
Marc:Interesting.
Marc:Because I was just thinking that, you know, and I'm a huge fan of Cuckoo's Nest and Annie Hall as well.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Some of these are foundational movies for you.
Marc:I think it would be, you know, it would be Godfather and probably Deer Hunter.
Yeah.
Marc:just because of the metaphor, the filmic metaphor, the cinematic metaphor for the Vietnam War kind of manifested through that Russian roulette business is kind of a genius.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I mean, like you think about that in all of these films, they all have some semblance of that type of reflection, right?
Guest:Of the war of reflection.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:War or just where, how we got to America in the seventies.
Guest:I mean, that's really the whole idea of the Godfather and talk about, you know, real Hollywood, um, honoring the tradition of Hollywood, but also putting things on its head.
Guest:I mean, that's really what the first Godfather is to me anyway.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:It's just to me that the Godfather two was the movie that brought it all together.
Marc:You know, with all those amazing flashbacks and that amazing casting of, you know, De Niro as the young Vito.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And and just, you know, the kind of evolution of Michael.
Marc:But look, man, I mean, I the French Connection is the best.
Marc:But it's really the best for, you know, for innovation and the antihero cop.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also the sort of antihero and cuckoo's nest is, you know, all of this is like real.
Marc:It looks, you know, and Andy Hall's nothing.
Marc:Nothing was ever like Andy Hall.
Marc:I mean, you know, I mean, there's, you know, an aversion to talking about him now.
Marc:But that movie, nothing was ever like that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That movie.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And as a true, it's a true work of comedic genius.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, and it was a stylistically was a work of genius.
Guest:Like it was, you know, when you're saying nothing was ever like, it wasn't just the jokes and it wasn't just the script.
Marc:It was right.
Marc:It was the way he put it together and shot it.
Marc:And, you know, the devices, I mean, they're all kind of standard comedic devices now.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But they were there first.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:Yeah, I have no problem saying Annie Hall deserved to win over Star Wars.
Guest:Like, that's the, you know, everyone's big complaint.
Guest:And absolutely, it deserved to win over Star Wars.
Guest:All right, let's check out the 60s.
Guest:And then we'll have our little list here of the last, you know, more than half century.
Guest:So you're going backwards.
Guest:You start with Midnight Cowboy.
Guest:Then Oliver.
Guest:Then In the Heat of the Night.
Guest:A Man for All Seasons, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Tom Jones, Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story,
Guest:And The Apartment.
Marc:Well, it's got to be in the heat of the night.
Marc:Hmm.
Marc:Even though I love The Apartment.
Marc:And I love Midnight Cowboy, but it's a pretty inconsistent movie, really.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But in the heat of the night, having watched it recently, you know, it's sort of a monumental thing.
Marc:And after reading Mark Harris's book, you know, it puts it into a different light.
Marc:But The Apartment...
Marc:is also a kind of astounding movie.
Marc:Yeah, great.
Marc:But it's definitely between those two for me.
Marc:For me, it was between The Apartment, but I choose West Side Story.
Marc:What year did The Apartment win?
Marc:1960, and West Side Story was 61.
Marc:And when was, you know, in the heat of the night, 67?
Marc:67, yeah.
Marc:But, you know, the balls of...
Marc:of the apartment is sort of, you know, I mean, that really is a look at a type of toxic masculinity.
Marc:I mean, you know, in a very early manifestation of it without the weight that is sort of tied to it now.
Marc:But clearly, you know, Shirley MacLaine's portrayal of a victim and then, you know, Jack Lemmon's kind of upright stance is...
Marc:You know, it's ahead of its time and unique and, you know, kind of there's a lot of humanity to it.
Marc:But I still find the tension, the racial tension in The Heat of the Night, which I think has been kind of hacked a lot since then, you know, to be...
Marc:uh, you know, provocative and, and, and well thought out.
Marc:And, you know, just the idea that a black's life in Philadelphia, you know, you know, versus what was still going on in the South at that time, I thought was a, uh,
Marc:A tremendous device.
Guest:Well, so after looking at all these, we have a list here of 11 films because we only had one overlap.
Guest:So that's fantastic.
Guest:And let me just read back what our 11 films, like our little WTF Best Picture Film Festival is going back to 1960.
Guest:Parasite, Spotlight, Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven, Amadeus, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, West Side Story, and In the Heat of the Night.
Guest:you know it does give me the like going back to when we started doing the show in 2009 and we talk about the oscars every year this is why because you come up with these movies and you're like oh my god these are great like there is a reason to honor these things there is a reason to be like yeah these are the best let's keep them up there and i don't care if crash wins one year or green book or whatever like
Guest:These things stand the test of time.
Guest:And you could go back through it and go like, hey, look, there's there are more movies here than you can see in a lifetime.
Guest:But go back and watch some of them.
Marc:But but do some of them stand the test of time because, you know, we know they want because they were put into our brain this way.
Marc:I mean, certainly now because of the proliferation of of quality stuff.
Marc:Movies, even small movies that just disappear.
Marc:Like, I often wonder, you know, was this posited in my brain as such?
Guest:But here's the here's what I would push back against that with is there are there's no shortage of films from any year that any of these movies won that could have also won and been, you know, in in that same position.
Guest:But they didn't.
Guest:They didn't, but they still are to you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you haven't like discounted the ones that won because you're like, well, no, that's bullshit.
Guest:Like, I think that, you know, once upon a time in Hollywood should have won over Parasite.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But Parasite is a movie I picked on this list.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Even though I love once upon a time in Hollywood more.
Guest:If anything, I think what this tells us is, you know, we don't have to feel guilty about talking about the Oscars because the bottom line is we love movies.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And they do wind up honoring great movies that we love.
Marc:I tell you, I mean, like this year's bunch, you know, I have to watch All Quiet on the Western Front.
Marc:I kind of want to watch it.
Guest:That's worth watching once, I think.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, it's very good, but it's a tough sit, and it's supposed to be.
Guest:You're not supposed to think war is good.
Marc:I watched Triangle of Sadness.
Marc:You know, that's almost a Yergo Zanthimos movie.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Except it's a lot more politically driven.
Marc:But there are moments in it where I'm like, oh, my goodness.
Marc:I haven't watched it, but I've seen that guy's other movie, The Square, which is very good.
Marc:Tar, Elvis.
Marc:I watched part of Elvis the other night on TV on HBO or something in the hotel room.
Marc:The Fablemans, which maybe I need to watch again because I think it is a bad movie.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:I haven't seen it yet.
Marc:Yeah, but, you know, for my money...
Marc:You know, the ones like, you know, everything everywhere all at once to me is an Oscar winner.
Marc:That's a worthy movie.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And, you know, the rest are kind of great movies.
Marc:But, I mean, that one is exciting.
Marc:It's interesting.
Marc:It's something we haven't seen before.
Marc:It's a deep story.
Marc:It's, you know, eclectic.
Marc:It's got, you know, it represents the Asian community in a way that's unique.
Marc:All right, man.
Marc:Well, we, we will, I'm sure watch the thing.
Guest:I think I'm going to be traveling.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:You're going to, are you, you're flying on Sunday?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, you'll probably get into New York by the evening, right?
Marc:What time's it on?
Marc:Five o'clock here, about eight o'clock there?
Marc:Eight o'clock New York, yeah.
Marc:I'll just make sure I get there and watch some of it, I guess.
Marc:Yeah, well, I'm sure there will be less physicality this year.
Marc:I'll tell you, I never forget.
Marc:I think one of the greatest moments in Oscar history was when fucking Jimmy Kimmel brought that busload of people in.
Marc:Oh, I love that.
Marc:That was great.
Marc:That was just like, it's so effortlessly took the fucking wind out of the whole goddamn thing.
Guest:Well, that's hilarious.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:Cause we're talking about how going back to, even when you were a kid, you just liked the movie stars and you liked the pageantry and the pomp and that, but all it took with these people with cameras and it's like, just like he wanted to take selfies with Denzel.
Guest:Like that, that just made the whole thing worth it.
Marc:Well, it forced them to,
Marc:the celebrity culture to play along with something that half of them won't even do on the street.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Loved it.
Guest:All right, buddy.
Guest:All right, man.
Guest:We'll, we'll, we'll watch and we'll see what happens.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And we'll talk about it after.