On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen of The Ankler to preview the awards season and give you tips on what to check out (spoiler: Hamnet’s gonna be a big one this year) and discuss the exquisite art of Oscar prognostication. (If you enjoy this episode, make sure to check out The Ankler’s Prestige Junkie newsletter and show.) For the record, you can see my nomination guesses here at the Ankler Pundits site.
One of the things we delve into is the weird position Oscar pundits find themselves in, as they are torn between portraying the world as it is and trying to subtly change things to reshape the world in their image, as the predictions themselves have been known to shape the outcome of races. And that’s why I am staking a claim here: Delroy Lindo deserves a god-dang Oscar nomination for his work in Sinners.
Look, don’t get me wrong: Lindo has deserved Oscar gold for some time. He absolutely deserved it for his work in Da Five Bloods, for instance. But I celebrate the man’s entire body of work. I would give him a lifetime achievement award simply for his pronunciation of “sesame cake” in Congo. The man’s a damn legend and it’s about time the Academy gave him his due.
But he especially deserves it for the work he does in Sinners, a movie that seems lined up to snag a whole boatload of Oscar nominations, including best picture. Yes, yes: Michael B. Jordan’s dual performance as Smoke and Stack is the showcase of the film. But Lindo’s turn as Delta Slim embodies the soul of the movie; he is the embodiment of the life of a musician, of a black musician, in the American South at a time when simply being black could mark you for death. And he’s just funny as hell in the role, delivering these slightly off-kilter line reads that no one else could have pulled off.
Give the man his Oscar gold already! At the very least, give him the nomination. The people demand it! Leave your favorite Lindo performance in the comments, if you would. I’d like to prove that this man deserves his plaudits.
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Crafting an Iconic Horror Movie Mask
Hey, so, I wanted to pull an episode from the archive this week because it’s relevant to the big movie hitting theaters this weekend: Black Phone 2 follows up the surprise 2022 hit, The Black Phone, resurrecting The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) and his iconic mask. Back before that movie came out, I talked to Jason Baker of Callosum FX Studios about helping design the mask for that movie (as well as for WWE stars and the band, Slipknot) and his work with the legendary Tom Savini. We also discussed Jason’s documentary about Savini, Smoke and Mirrors, which you can rent for just 99 cents from Apple (or buy for just $1.99) or stream for free on Tubi. And if you enjoyed this re-run, please share it with a friend!
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How Orwell Helps Us Remember Truth
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) to discuss his new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5. We talked about his upbringing in Haiti and having to flee a dictatorial regime there, how social media and AI manipulations help degrade the idea of objective truth, and what can be done to combat this scourge. If you enjoyed the episode, I hope you check out his documentary: it’s playing in New York City and Los Angeles now, and you can find showtimes here. It should be expanding across the country here in the coming weeks, including showtimes in Dallas, Atlanta, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and elsewhere.
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How an MTV Prank Helps Explain the Internet
Hey, before you listen to this week’s episode, do me a favor and watch the short film we’re going to be discussing. It’s only 17 minutes long, and if you’re between the age of 31 and 45 or so, I think it’ll trip a lot of your nostalgia circuits. (It’s fun for all ages, but Yourgo said this was the age range that best responded to the movie.) Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snpT2i7B6Mk
Fun right? OK, now you can listen to the episode. It’s a good chat about the nature of online trolling and a simpler time when we believed our votes (for the top songs on Total Request Live) really mattered. If you enjoyed our discussion, share all this with a friend, would you?
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How Movies Can Better Prep Us for the AI Threat
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Nate Soares to talk about his new book, cowritten with Eliezer Yudkowsky, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. It’s a fascinating book—some will say fearmongering and sensationalist; I, frankly, think they’re overly optimistic about our ability to constrain the development of general intelligence in AI—in large part because of how it’s structured. Each chapter is preceded by a fable of sorts about the nature of intelligence and the desires of intelligent beings that look and think very differently from humans. The point in each of these passages is less that AI will want to eliminate humanity and more that it might do so incidentally, through natural processes of resource acquisition.
This made me think about how AI is typically portrayed in film; it is all too often a Terminator-style scenario, where the intelligence is antagonistic in human ways and for human reasons. We talked some about how storytellers could do a better job of thinking about AI as it might actually exist versus how it might be like us; Ex Machina is a movie that came in for special discussion due to the thoughtful nature of the treatment of its robotic antagonist’s desires. If this episode made you think, I hope you share it with a friend!
Sonny Bunch hosts The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, a new podcast featuring interviews with folks who have their finger on the pulse of the entertainment industry during this dynamic—and difficult—time.
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