The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood

The Oscar nominations dropped yesterday morning and I grabbed our favorite Oscar prognosticators, Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen of The Ankler’s Prestige Junkie, to chat about what it all means. Does Sinners’s 16 nominations mean it could upset One Battle After Another for best picture? What does it mean that Wicked: For Good took home zero nods? Perhaps most importantly: Will Delroy Lindo get his dang Oscar, as we demanded back in October? All that and more on this week’s episode, including a SHOCKING prediction by Christopher at the end of this podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out their podcast. And please share this one with a friend! (And Delroy Lindo’s agent, we gotta get him on this show to talk about his career, amirite?)

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Chuck Klosterman to discuss all things football and his new book, aptly titled Football. (Please buy a copy for yourself and your friends; you’ll thank me, and then your friends will thank you.) We hit on an array of topics, including but not limited to the potential demise of the sport, the ways in which television and football are a perfect match, why streaming services are spending billions to acquire the rights to NFL and NCAA games, how gambling and fantasy football have fundamentally changed our relationship to the sport, and trying to think through how we think about football and why it matters.

On this week’s episode, I’m pleased to be joined by W. David Marx, author of the new book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century. Alongside Marx’s Status and Culture, this book is one of the key texts to understanding how and why the culture has shifted so radically so quickly: the combination of “poptimism” (we discuss what, precisely, this is early on) and cultural omnivorism (the merging of all genres and all forms into a sort of equally viable mass entertainment) and the internet’s flattening of culture have led to a stagnant culture and a revanchist counter-counterculture eager to exact revenge and facing no real opposition in that effort. 
If you enjoyed our conversation, or simply want to understand how we wound up in the world we wake up to every morning, I strongly recommend picking up Marx’s book. And if anything was unclear from our chat, drop me a line in the comments and hopefully I can help clear things up!

On Monday, Sam Stein DMed me and asked if we could put together a little livestream event celebrating the work of Rob Reiner; he described it as sitting shiva, and I was happy to take the lead on putting this group of mourners together. I was joined by my colleague Bill Kristol, The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield (whose great column on Reiner you can read here), and Semafor’s Dave Weigel (whose book on prog rock is a must-read for fans of the genre).

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Vulture’s Nicholas Quah to discuss his and Savannah Salazar’s piece on what Netflix might do with Warner Bros.'s tie-ins with Universal Studios and Six Flags, and then expanded the conversation to consider the vast universe of WB’s entanglements. The studio also owns an enormous video game company, the second-biggest comic book company in DC Comics, and all sorts of other stuff. What is Netflix going to do with all these disparate pieces? Who knows! But we do some rank speculation.