The Ethics of Award Season

Matthew
Hello, I’m joined by my co-host for today, Andy Nelson. In just a few minutes, you’re going to hear an episode we recorded a few weeks ago about the ethics of awards shows. At the time we recorded it, that seemed like a pretty general question. We were talking about things like who gets to pick, who gets nominated, and what does the word “best” mean when it comes to best actor, best picture, or best costumes. We were talking in fairly general terms.

In between the time when we recorded and now when you’re hearing it, obviously there has been a fairly specific ethical controversy regarding an award show — BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. I felt like if you read the title, “Ethics and Award Shows,” and we didn’t talk about that, it would feel kind of weird. But also it just seemed like a good topic for us to dive into. So let me give a quick summary. I’ll try not to editorialize too much, but I’ll probably give you an idea of what I feel on this.

Then I’ll let Andy jump in and we’ll go back and forth a few minutes, and then get you to the main episode we recorded. For anybody who hasn’t heard the story or doesn’t know the full story, one of the films being nominated and talked about a lot at the BAFTAs is called I Swear, which is a film based on the life of someone with Tourette’s syndrome. The real-life person who was an executive producer of this film — and who has Tourette’s himself — is named John Davidson. He was going to be at the award show, and his tics tend to get a lot worse in high-stress situations. I don’t have Tourette’s, but I do have some emotional and physical tics, so I can understand that.

Frankly, being in a room with some of the biggest celebrities in the world while your life on film is being discussed — that’s a pretty high-stress situation. He knew he would probably be ticking, and that he does verbally tick and say things that can be really offensive to people, things he absolutely does not mean. So he had specifically requested that he be seated pretty far back. And by his own account, he was ticking throughout the show; most people were not hearing what he had to say, and it certainly wasn’t going out on television — until Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, two Black actors from the film Sinners, which won a lot of awards, were on stage. At that moment he shouted out the N-word, and he immediately saw the two actors respond quite viscerally, as you can imagine. He pretty quickly said to himself, “I need to get out of here. I don’t want to be here if people are hearing the kind of things I’m saying,” because he didn’t want to be hurting people.

What he later found out was that a microphone had been placed near him that was picking these things up, and that while a lot of his utterances were edited out for the broadcast — including him at one point saying “Free Palestine” and other things — this one specific thing was left in. Even Warner Brothers, which was part of the broadcasting team, had specifically told the BAFTAs they were editing that out. And that was something they did not want going out.

Andy
And to be clear, they had a two-hour window before it aired.

Matthew
This isn’t like a 30-second delay where someone had to be really quick. They had two hours to do all this. And so, as you can predict, a lot of people got upset online — for very legitimate reasons — about the racism of someone using that term. Some had a nuanced take, acknowledging an understanding of Tourette’s. Others did not.

People in the Tourette’s community started responding. And we had a whole bunch of ableism and racism charges being thrown back and forth, which more recently have coalesced into a lot of people realizing: look, we have two marginalized communities being pitted against each other, when what we should really be talking about is the BAFTAs exploiting all of these folks. I’m editorializing a bit here, but it’s caused all of us to say the word “BAFTAs” a lot more times than any of us ever thought we would. So, Andy — what’s your take?

Andy
Well, there’s a lot to unpack. I think it’s completely fair to recognize both sides of this. For John Davidson, who has dealt with Tourette’s his entire life, he understands and is frustrated and appalled by some of the things he says, and has had to deal with that his whole life. It’s a very difficult thing.

He reached out to Warner Brothers, which released Sinners, so he could get in touch with Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo to let them know: I meant nothing by this — it’s something I have no control over. He said “pedophile” at one point to Alan Cumming, who is a gay actor and was hosting. Cumming had been making a joke about Paddington and bringing home Peruvian bears, and John Davidson shouted out “pedophile.” So the N-word situation is the one people are gravitating to specifically because it didn’t get edited out — there were a lot of other things he was saying. And that’s what’s so frustrating.

It’s hard, because on one side you’re trying to understand how somebody with Tourette’s speaks, and trying to cognitively process hearing things that can hugely offend you, knowing it’s not necessarily something that person is intending at all.

On the flip side, the African American community — of which there were many in the crowd, not just because of Sinners — has faced one battle after another. To have that word shouted out is going to create a very difficult, uncomfortable situation for all of them. And I think what made it worse, speaking specifically to the ceremony itself, was when they had Alan Cumming come out afterward with a prepared reply. It wasn’t very strong. It was something like, “If anybody was offended, we hope that you’ll understand.” People were offended, and you need to be a lot cleaner about how you’re addressing that.

And after it was over, the BAFTAs’ official response was also light — not as strong as it needed to be. I don’t think I’d agree with you that the BAFTAs were doing any of this just to get people saying “BAFTAs” more and keep their name in the conversation, because it’s terrible news for them all around. They’ve already had a prominent African American board member resign because of how they’ve handled the situation. I don’t think it was intentional. I think they were trying to respond in a way that showed sympathy for John Davidson and the Tourette’s community, without recognizing — as strongly as they needed to — what they owed to the people who were on the receiving end of the harm.

Matthew
Things like placing a microphone near him when they had specifically told him they wouldn’t — and the fact that it was that one thing that was not edited out — it’s hard for me to think that wasn’t intentional in some way. Maybe it backfired on them. It’s hard for me to believe there wasn’t some attempt to get people talking about the BAFTAs. Obviously that’s a very cynical read; maybe it was just a series of unfortunate, coincidental mistakes that all lined up to create this perfect storm of controversy.

Andy
Well, to be clear, they do put microphones all around the auditorium. They’re not on every table, but they’re on many tables to capture live sound. But yes, they should have thought much more carefully about having one in front of John — that seemed like a terrible placement.

Matthew
And clearly John didn’t know it was there. That’s the more important point to me.

Andy
Yeah. And I think this raises an interesting conversation about intent versus harm — which is what I think the BAFTAs also didn’t really understand. And I’ll say up front: I don’t have Tourette’s and I’m not Black. I think that’s true of both of us.

I’m going to use a very imperfect metaphor that is not the same, but one I keep thinking about. Early on, after I lost my leg and was using a wheelchair — I was new to it, I’d never used one before, and I had a pretty terrible one from the hospital — I went to a hotel that advertised itself as disability accessible. It turned out to have a very old elevator, the kind where you enter on one side and have to make a sharp turn to get in and out of it.

Matthew
Long story short, one day when I was trying to use the elevator, I went up kind of jerking around and knocked down an older person who was trying to get in.

Happily, he wasn’t harmed. But he was, understandably, angry about it. I’ve always remembered that as a moment when, yes, it was my fault in a way — there were voluntary actions I was taking, and that separates it from what John Davidson did. But it was also a time when I was doing everything I could to avoid causing harm, and the ableism of the world around me was making it far more likely that I would. And yet none of those things made it any less harmful to the person I hurt.

My only point with that metaphor is: I think the BAFTAs’ response — and some of the public response — amounted to “well, if you know the word wasn’t said intentionally, and now hours later he’s apologizing, shouldn’t it not be a big deal?” And that’s where I think it falls apart. I don’t think it was this guy’s fault at all, and whatever the microphone situation was — still, two Black men on stage at one of the pinnacles of their careers heard an incredibly insulting, degrading word being shouted at them. Of course they’re going to be upset. Of course it’s going to hit them hard. And I think that’s what the BAFTAs really missed — both in what Cumming said soon after, and in their later statement.

Andy
Yeah, I agree. And that’s why their board member resigned — because the way they handled it just wasn’t creating a safe space for members of the Black creative community.

And I think it’s tricky because for so many people, this is still a learning zone — people are trying to figure out where the line is, what they need to do. People inevitably make mistakes. And it’s really unfortunate that the people running the show for the BAFTAs didn’t have a better handle on that. Knowing that John was going to be a prominent figure in the auditorium, they really needed to have prepared more — knowing what to expect, what to bleep, how to run it more smoothly. And I just don’t think they had that handle. That’s the unfortunate situation.

Matthew
Yeah. I can understand people wanting to look at John and say, “This isn’t your fault, but you do need to be aware of the harm it could cause to others.” But John really did try to work with the BAFTAs — he asked to be seated in the back, he took precautions. He did not expect that his words would be heard up on stage, let alone broadcast to people who would be hurt and upset by them, particularly Black people. So yeah, I think that’s a good summary of where all this winds up.

Andy
And if anything, it’s created a huge outpouring of support for Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Hannah Beachler, and others who were involved in Sinners and who were there — and for the broader African American creative community in attendance. I think there’s been a big outpouring of love and support reflected in the other award shows that have happened since then. If there’s been any benefit at all, it’s that there’s clearly a lot of support out there.

Matthew
Definitely. I’ll just add, in closing, that I’ve been learning a lot more about this situation by listening to creators — particularly Black creators, creators with Tourette’s, and some folks who are Black and have Tourette’s. I’ll be linking some of those TikToks in the show notes, because Andy and I have our thoughts, but since we’re about to talk about the ethics of award shows, it felt important that we comment on this. That said, people who are more directly connected to this situation have perspectives that carry a lot more weight than mine or Andy’s.

Andy, any last things you want to add before we wrap up?

Andy
I think that’s all on this point, but there’s plenty to come.

Matthew
Now back to questions like: when someone says “best song in a movie,” do they mean the best song, or the song that best fits the movie? All that and more right after this.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, as you know, we love to talk about what happens on screen. We love to talk about what happens behind the camera. And we like to sometimes talk about what happens a couple of rows behind the camera — not just how the movies and TV shows we like get made, but how they get talked about, how they get critiqued, how they get praised, and as today’s subject will explore, how they get awarded.

We are in the midst of what I’ve come to learn is described as award season — particularly for movies, which we’ll be talking about today. We just had the Grammys a couple of nights ago. There are the Golden Globes, the Foreign Press Awards, all sorts of things leading up to the granddaddy of them all: the Oscars. And I’m here with podcaster extraordinaire — the person who first brought me into the TruStory FM network through the Marvel Movie Minute. He has a podcast resume a lot longer than I have time to describe, so I’ll let him do what he can. Andy Nelson. Andy, how are we doing today?

Andy
Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Matthew
My pleasure. I know I’ve heard you talk a lot about the problems with the way awards are given — how political it is, how the categories get chosen, and how sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. And in the age of streaming, all the discussion about what is a TV show versus a movie, and whether a Netflix movie should be in the Emmys or the Oscars. For me, that just leads to: well, then why do we care about any of it? And you do really care. I’ve tried to quit the whole thing, and like the Godfather, you keep sucking me back in. So let’s just start there. Why do you like award season? Why is it important to you?

Andy
I think award season is an opportunity. I’m one of those people who says I’m not really into football, so the Oscars are my Super Bowl. It’s an opportunity to celebrate the things you love, root for the things you’re really passionate about, and complain when your team loses — or in some cases doesn’t even get nominated. And in a broader scope, it’s an opportunity to celebrate something I love dearly, which is the movies — and for this conversation, all of the awards: movies, TV shows, all of that.

Matthew
And if you’re not a Kansas City fan, you probably believe the fix is in — as many of us do with the Oscars. I don’t think we’re going to get Bad Bunny at the Oscars this year, but we did have him at the Grammys, so that was another Super Bowl moment right there.

Andy
Exactly.

Matthew
So for you — I know you’re primarily a movie guy — but it sounds like you do pay attention to the Grammys and Emmys and such.

Andy
Loosely, I’d say. I know they’re happening, I know things are getting nominated. But we live in a world where the award shows have expanded exponentially — the number of different shows, the different types. It’s almost as difficult to keep up with all the award shows as it is to watch all the things that get created. I don’t watch all of them. I’m always curious about the Tonys, like what’s big on Broadway this season, and same with the Grammys and the Emmys. But I’ve always been more of a movie guy, so I mostly pay attention to the movie-specific awards, while staying curious about what else is happening.

Matthew
Well, let’s do kind of a survey, because award season has become more and more of a thing, and a lot of talk revolves around “this thing won these awards, so now it’s a good shot for the next one,” and so on. Growing up — and this is a very American perspective, which I’ll acknowledge — I thought of the Big Four: the Oscars for movies, the Emmys for television, the Grammys for music (and also spoken word and podcasts — maybe one day I’ll win a Grammy, who knows), and of course the Tonys for theater. As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I understood that New York theater is the only theater that matters, and that’s kind of what the Tonys are.

And then the Golden Globes came along. What are the Golden Globes? I think this is confusing to a lot of people.

Andy
The Golden Globes are just another awards group — they cover both TV and film, and now podcasts have been added. And they’re specifically — you’re stumping me here on the exact name, but it’s an international group…

Matthew
Yeah, it’s the Foreign Press Association or something like that. That group has had some controversy over the years with Hollywood Foreign Press, as far as being too focused on nominating people they like to party with. There was a huge outcry about the lack of diversity in their membership around 2022. They restructured the whole thing and then started up again. They’ve theoretically gotten back on track as far as being a bit more serious about nominations — though they still nominate some things that make you scratch your head. That’s the Golden Globes for you. But they do seem to be on a better path now. And they do separate awards for comedy/musical versus drama for both TV and movies. The topic of category fraud — which we will get into — certainly invites a lot of conversation there. Anyone who saw The Bear win for best comedy knows that debate well.

Andy
And for films — or The Martian, you know? They still make jokes about that. At this past Golden Globes, somebody was joking that Matt Damon beat them for best comedy performance when The Martian is very debatable as an actual comedy.

Matthew
It was very funny, but it was science fiction — a survival story.

Andy
Yeah. Sci-fi action film with funny moments for sure. But that’s always the trick.

Matthew
And the topic of who gets to vote is going to be important, because the Big Four are all industry-based — the people who are part of the Motion Picture Association, people who work in motion pictures. The Golden Globes is a press organization. What are some of the other big ones people follow during award season?

Andy
There’s generally a whole run of them. There are awards held by various critics associations — the New York Critics Association, the LA Critics Association — those are earlier in the season and start giving people a sense of where things are leaning. Then as it goes, you start getting the BAFTAs, which were announced, I think, right before the Oscars this year. You also have the Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Matthew
BAFTAs is the British Academy, right?

Andy
Yeah, British Academy, correct. And the Film Independent Spirit Awards are, obviously, more focused on independent films — the ones not held by big studios. That ceremony happens like the Saturday right before the Oscars. Those two are kind of right there on that last weekend. You follow along with all of these different groups as they go, and that raises another question that’s often asked: why are some of these organizations giving their awards out early when the year hasn’t even ended? A lot of it is because they’re critics who’ve likely had a chance to see everything already, so they can put their votes in ahead of time.

Matthew
That makes total sense. And I know there are also a number of community-specific awards — ones focused on racial or other communities. I believe there’s a specific Black-focused award…

Andy
The NAACP awards. And I think GLAAD, or one of the other big LGBTQ groups, does an award show as well. And you bring up timing — that’s particularly important, because one thing you often hear is how much one set of awards either predicts or even influences the later ones. Are all these other award shows happening after people have already voted for the Oscars? Or can someone see the BAFTA results and think, “Maybe I should reconsider my Oscar ballot”?

Oh, there’s definitely a sense of overlap. The critics awards and all these different groups create early buzz before anything else. Same with the National Board of Review and the Critics’ Choice Awards — you start getting those announcements and the conversation rolling before nominations are even finalized. The Golden Globes happened in mid-January, and the Oscar nomination announcements didn’t come until late January. I think it landed right around the cutoff for when Oscar ballots were due — so all those people submitting their Oscar ballots had already been influenced by all the promo and press around the Golden Globes nominees.

Matthew
That makes sense. And I want to ask about the nomination process. But first, to get more of your background: I know you’ve worked as a professional in the film industry at various points. Have you ever been — or are you now — a voter for the Oscars or any of the other big award shows?

Andy
I never was for the Oscars. There was a point where I was voting with the Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Matthew
Let’s focus mostly on the Oscars, though we’ll cover others as well. How much do you know about the nominating process? Because I think a lot of times even just who does or doesn’t get nominated — one thing I’ve learned from you is that the studios sort of push different people forward. How does all that work?

Andy
Well, anyone who’s involved with a project — especially if it’s a bigger studio film that might lean toward nominations — they’re probably already paying attention to that during production, already putting together a marketing plan for Oscar time. So the whole process kicks in early.

When it comes to the actual voting with the Oscars specifically — for example, best costume — it’s only people who are members of the Costume Designers Guild who can vote on those initial nominations. The Guild has, I don’t know, maybe a couple hundred members. They’re the ones who get the full pool of films being considered, and their members vote on what should get nominated for best costume. The Academy then takes the top five and announces them at the nomination ceremony, which happened just about a week or so ago.

So it’s the specific guild who’s involved in that craft. Now, best picture is different — everyone gets to vote for best picture. So costume designers get to vote on costume and best picture. Writers Guild members get to vote on best adapted screenplay, best original screenplay, and best picture. And then everybody who’s a member of the Academy gets to vote on the final nominees across any category.

Matthew
Okay, that makes sense. And I’m guessing the logic is that I, as a viewer, can say “those costumes looked great” or “those costumes looked okay.” But a costume professional can say, “This one might look nicer to the average person, but this one I know was much harder to make — it shows a higher level of skill, technicality, or historical accuracy.” Is that part of the idea? That sound professionals will have a better sense of what deserves best score or best sound editing?

Andy
To a certain extent, yes. But even there, there’s campaigning. They’re pushing within their own groups for what they think deserves to win. Take costumes — Deborah Scott has been working with James Cameron for decades. She won an Oscar for Titanic. She’s been doing the Avatar films, all three of them. And people questioned: what are you even doing for costumes when it’s mostly CG characters? So it was something of a surprise when she got a nomination for Avatar: Fire and Ash. But the thing is, she and her team are physically making costumes — they design them, make them, and then the digital artists scan them in to put on the Navi characters. On top of that, they’re making the actual costumes the actors wear on set.

Even with all of that, they still get the body scans — just adding elements to help the actors feel a bit more like they’re of the Navi world. So they’ve been pushing to get recognized for years. They didn’t get nominations for the first two Avatar films, but they finally did for the third. That kind of sustained effort — getting out there, making sure other costume designers recognize all of that work — is what drives it.

And specifically in that field, the history has largely ignored present-day costumes and celebrated period costumes. Period pieces are seen as so much more work. But then you have a film like Clueless get released, which has brilliant costume design — top-notch work — and it didn’t get recognized at all because it was a contemporary film. I think Clueless might actually be something of a turning point where the field started paying attention to: there’s more great work happening in costumes than just period pieces, and we need to recognize that.

Matthew
No, that’s a perfect microcosm — it opens so many of the doors I want to talk about. And the first question, which is really more of a comment: I really appreciate hearing that, because one of my major problems with award shows — especially the Oscars and the Emmys — is that I’ve always thought animation gets a short shrift. And I feel like that’s true in society in general.

The Avatar movies aren’t animated the way we typically think of animation — like K-pop Demon Hunter or a Disney movie — but they are certainly computer-drawn. And one thing I’ve heard sometimes is that the acting performance in an animated movie can be truly incredible. But then the question comes up: who would you nominate? Would you nominate just the voice actor? Because the facial expressions and body movement of the animated character are also a big part of how we judge actors in live-action. So should the animator be part of that? It feels like this could open a door to larger conversations about how, as our technology changes, we update our categories to recognize that these things are happening in new ways that don’t quite fit the old boxes.

Andy
Yeah, that’s the trick. Organizations like the Oscars have been around since the late 1920s, and they evolve, but it takes time to add or change categories. That’s just part of the process when you have an institution like this. We are getting a first new category this year — best casting, for the casting department. That’s a big and exciting addition. Although there’s already a lot of complaint about this first set of nominees, because it feels like it’s largely a repeat of best picture nominees. It would have been nice to see it feel more distinct.

And there are a lot of complaints about the lack of a best stunt team award. That’s the one I hear the most about at the Oscars. It could be the way for Tom Cruise to finally get an Oscar.

Matthew
Well, yeah — but so often these things take time to evolve, and it takes time to add new categories or to change them. And that’s just part of the process. We’re seeing that with animation and motion capture. James Cameron has been a huge proponent of pushing for his actors to get recognized — whether or not you think the Avatar performances warrant nominations, he’s genuinely been pushing. This year they released a ton of material about the work behind the scenes, about how the actors are creating these performances. And still, no one doing motion capture has gotten a nomination this year.

But because of complaints like that, we get things like the Annie Awards, which is the animated awards — they work on nominations in a variety of categories including character animation, best picture, best TV show, best voice performance, and so on. They’re getting all of that in there. And the Taurus World Stunt Awards have been around for several decades, awarding stunt work across a lot of different categories. So when there’s enough of a world of complaint, we do see other groups come together to try to promote what they think are the worthy ones.

And I love that. I do think if they ever include motion capture in the Oscars, the first award has to retroactively go to Andy Serkis for Gollum. When Lord of the Rings came out, a lot of people were saying the voice acting was incredible, the body work was incredible — it was incredible acting and physicality. But it didn’t fit any category they had then, or really even now.

Andy
He’s really become the grandfather of the whole thing, and certainly warrants recognition in some capacity. If anything, it would be a lifetime achievement award, because of not just the work he did in those films but because he became the father of an entire world of actors doing mocap performances. That’s led to many other great performances — I’m blanking on his name, but one of the main guys who also ended up appearing in the Planet of the Apes films with him.

Matthew
Oh yes, I know who you’re talking about.

Going back to the costumes question, and a direction it leads me that I think is really important: what do we mean by “best”? If someone asks me what’s the best movie I’ve ever seen, the first thing I’m going to say is, “Do you mean the one I enjoy watching the most? The one that most affected me? The one that was most important? The one that’s the best technically?”

So when these people get a ballot that says “vote for best costume” — is there like a paragraph that goes with it explaining what that means? Like, the costumes that most evoke what the movie is trying to say? Or the costumes that are most visually breathtaking? Or is it literally just “best costume,” and each voter defines that however they want?

Andy
“Best” is really just a label. It’s shorthand. It doesn’t mean objective truth — it means the best of the year according to this group of voters in this moment. You could call it “most acclaimed” or “most celebrated.” I think the Emmys actually use technical language like “outstanding achievement” for some of their categories.

Matthew
Yeah, right. That kind of framing.

Andy
But I think the important part isn’t the word — it’s just a marker. A lot of people get frustrated because they call it “best picture” and they think, “That’s not the best picture.” But people accept it because it’s shorthand for what got the award that year.

Matthew
But there’s no criteria given to voters — like, “when we say best costumes, here are the factors we want you to judge by.” It’s really just up to each voter to decide for themselves what “best” means.

Andy
Yeah. And going back to costumes specifically — the initial voting is by the Costume Designers Guild, and they’re going to have a different view of what “best” means. And every person is going to be different anyway. On top of that, they’re also getting marketing materials, going to parties, being pushed in certain directions. They might lean toward Deborah Scott for Avatar just because they had some great events, got to talk to her, saw the costumes up close and thought, “I can totally see what you’re doing — you should get nominated.” But then you take it out of the Guild’s hands and put it in front of the entire Oscar voter pool, and they may have a totally different perspective on what “best” means. There are no guidelines — no criteria list anyone is looking at. They’re just going to vote for what they like most, what they think works best.

I always think an interesting one is best adapted screenplay, because it raises the question: is it the screenplay that was adapted best from the source material? Should you look at the source material and then look at the film to see how well they adapted it? Or did they make changes that made it work even better in cinema? Or is it just another kind of best screenplay? Especially because given some of the source material —

Matthew
Right. Like if someone took The Martian — which was written maybe ten years ago — and a couple of years later a studio bought the rights and adapted that book into a screenplay. That’s a pretty straightforward process.

But if someone makes a movie of Romeo and Juliet today, they’re going from Shakespeare’s script — however many hundreds of years old — and it’s been told many, many times over. Well, if they’re trying to tell a fairly literal version of Romeo and Juliet, okay. But what about West Side Story or Ten Things I Hate About You, where it is a clear retelling beat-by-beat of the story but in a new setting with completely new dialogue? I imagine that kind of thing would drive you crazy trying to figure out — how broad or narrow are we defining “adapted screenplay”?

Andy
Yeah. It’s a tricky line. Like what’s the difference between the 1968 Romeo and Juliet that Franco Zeffirelli directed versus Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, or Robert Wise’s 1961 version, or Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story? We’re looking at adaptations. And then the interesting question is: is Spielberg’s West Side Story an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, an adaptation of the 1961 film, or just a new adaptation of the musical? Where is the line?

Matthew
Yeah. Where is the line for that chain of adaptations? Obviously that’s more of a Writers Guild thing to determine authorship and credit, but I think it comes down to —

Andy
What do you owe the original, and what do you owe the new audience? Each generation that adapts it is reinterpreting different themes. The story itself is kind of this communal thing we all have access to, and so the translation across time and culture — the way they do it — can reveal new meanings. So I think what they have to look at is: how is the adaptation recontextualizing the story for the time in which it’s told? West Side Story isn’t stealing from Romeo and Juliet — perhaps you could say it’s arguing with it, creating a dialogue, pushing the elements in a new direction. And even Spielberg’s version I think is doing something different from Robert Wise’s. When you look at a low-effort remake that is adding very little, that’s when you start asking: well, why do it?

Matthew
Yeah. I think that’s a great example. Ten Things I Hate About You is a completely different time and place with completely different dialogue — but a fairly faithful retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. And West Side Story literally changes the ending. Forgive me spoilers for something 560 years old, but at the end of Romeo and Juliet, they both die. At the end of West Side Story, Maria lives — and that’s a pretty fundamental change. So yeah, I like that idea of adaptation as a discussion with the original, not just a reproduction of it.

Andy
Yeah. And I think adaptation is partly about brand recognition — it’s something already out there, with a chance of drawing in a familiar audience. But there can be a kind of gross feeling when an adaptation is made only because of brand recognition. That becomes more of a problem for me. Or when it’s a low-effort adaptation that doesn’t do anything with the material. And when it feels designed to minimize risk and maximize profit — that’s when I think there’s a problem. But when they’re doing adaptation as interpretation, I really like that. That’s when it’s contributing something, not just consuming something.

Matthew
Like you mentioned, Clueless not being nominated for costumes. I also don’t think it got nominated for adapted screenplay, but I feel like it probably should have been — because not only is it a great adaptation, it’s not from Shakespeare. It’s from the novel Emma. I think that’s Jane Austen. Could be Brontë, but I’m pretty sure it’s Austen.

Let me go back to one other thing on this “best” question, because I think this year we have a particular example of how people define it. I’m thinking of best song. What I’m about to say is very subjective, and many people may disagree. The general consensus I’ve been hearing is that there are two real leaders in that category, fulfilling different ideas of what “best” means.

One is “Golden” from K-pop Demon Hunter — an incredible song, a ton of radio play, people really love it, and it does an important job in the movie. The other is “I Lied to You” from Sinners — some people think it’s a fantastic song in its own right, but a lot of people say it’s not what they’d put on for casual listening. However, in terms of the role it plays in the movie, it’s just breathtaking — maybe one of the best scenes people will see in 10 or 15 years. And Sinners has another interesting song in “Rocky Road to Dublin,” which is not an original song and therefore can’t be nominated. So how do you look at something like that — is it the best song in a movie, or the song that best helps tell the story of the movie? How do you approach it?

Andy
It’s funny, because Pete and I just had a conversation about this on our show The Next Reel — about something similar when we were talking about the score for Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant. That score is so much fun, it’s a delight to listen to, and it fits the movie really well. I felt like it should have been nominated for an Oscar. It’s a strong score that works very well in context of the film, but it’s a difficult one to just listen to on its own. And that began our debate: what’s more important?

Obviously if somebody is composing music for a film, their goal is to write something that works well in context of the film. Same thing with songs. “Golden” has high replay value — it’s pop-cultural, it has that standalone hit energy. “I Lied to You” is integrated into the narrative. It has an emotional and tonal function. It’s a little harder to listen to on its own.

So that becomes: are we awarding the best song, or the best film song? And I don’t think there’s a specific answer. Maybe the musicians who are voting in the early rounds are thinking more in context — but by the time you get to the entire Oscar voter pool, you have to ask, how is everyone else going to think about this? I think people largely vote based on how it works for them personally. Some people are going to think about how it works as something they can listen to — those people will probably vote for “Golden.” Others are going to remember that scene in Sinners, the “I Lied to You” sequence — one of the most powerful scenes they saw all year — and they’re going to vote for that. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking either way about it.

Matthew
And I think that’s true. And I think you’re being generous, and rightly so, about why people vote the way they do. But I also get the sense from talking to you and others that for some people, this vote is really about wanting K-pop to get more respect in culture. Others want to make sure Sinners gets the recognition it deserves. Or as you said, some people went to the K-pop Demon Hunter party and had a better time than they did at the Sinners party. And it is interesting to me how the question of which movie wins becomes a much bigger thing.

I’m forgetting the exact year, but I remember a couple of times there’d be two big movies that were both truly good and both Oscar-worthy, but they were about two different causes — maybe one about racism and one about sexism, or classism or immigrant rights. And the debate over which one should win becomes a debate over: well, why aren’t we paying more attention to sexism? This is the movie that should win. Or: there haven’t been enough people of color getting nominated, so it should be this one.

As someone who’s very political and who takes an ethics approach to media, I completely get that. But I also imagine for people who really just love the art, it must be really frustrating — because sometimes an issue might be more important, but a different movie might just be better.

Andy
Yeah, and I think that’s generally the problem that comes up when you have two big issue movies going head-to-head. The issues themselves may be very important — one might be more pressing than the other — but the other film might be getting favored simply because it’s a better film. And that absolutely happens.

I think that’s definitely something we run into with particular years and particular films, and people complaining about how they could ignore the performance in this film. Some people — including me sometimes — might say, “Well, the film itself isn’t as strong as a lot of people make it out to be.” But they’re frustrated because the issue is very important to them. Some people think the film is so important because the issue is such a key one that they might not recognize when it comes up against other films that don’t carry that weight. And it doesn’t even have to be two issue movies competing — it can be one issue movie versus a non-issue movie, and the non-issue movie just happens to be a better movie. But people who are fighting for the cause behind that issue are very frustrated when they see the other film getting more recognition.

Matthew
Yeah, I think that’s really right. And I’ll cut myself a bit of slack here too — it can go the other way. If there’s a movie about an issue for a group I’m not part of, I might not fully understand why it’s such an important issue, and I might underrate it. And these things can also apply to your own personal experience. I know the year my mother died, I watched a movie I had never been able to see before — because it was about someone whose mother had died. Do I still think it’s got a great soundtrack? Yes. Do I think it’s probably not as good as I thought in that moment? Also yes. But did I cry through the entire movie because it spoke to me on such a personal level? Of course. And if you’d put a ballot in my hand two weeks after I saw it, I’d have voted for it for best picture, and someone would have wondered why on earth Mamma Mia Too got nominated. Yeah, all of this stuff happens.

Andy
Yeah, very much the case. And you can see that with some other things — not necessarily awards, but every decade there’s a major poll done by filmmakers and critics where they get to name their top ten films. Certain things always rise to the top, and as they expand the pool it changes. This past round, Jeanne Dielman, a French film — a three-hour film following a woman at home cooking and cleaning — ended up at the top of many lists. But then you look at something like Quentin Tarantino’s list, and it’s always things that no one else is voting for but that he loves. And I think that’s what’s fun to look at with those lists — to see what people are pushing.

Matthew
I think that makes a lot of sense, because one of the biggest problems with these awards discussions is the idea that we’re getting to some objective “best,” and the fact that there’s no such thing. It’s always going to be subjective. There are technical aspects we can look at, and we can look at large consensus over time — but things that acknowledge themselves as purely subjective are a lot easier to appreciate.

Just to go back to Sinners one more second: I’m definitely one of the people who thinks Sinners was the best movie of the year and I want it to win everything. And among people who feel that way and who are worried it might not win — and maybe it will, we’ll see — I think it has a couple of strikes against it in terms of traditional Oscar history.

The biggest, obviously, is racism. I think there are going to be people who are uncomfortable with the film because of the racial story it’s telling. That’s much less of an issue in Hollywood than it was twenty or even ten years ago, but it’s definitely still a thing. And then there’s the fact that it’s a genre film — it’s a vampire movie, a horror movie — and those are traditionally not done well at the Academy.

And I do think it’s worth noting, as sensitively as I can, that I’ve been seeing an interesting conversation online about people who are simultaneously very aware of the racism issues and very aware of that kind of bias — but who also genuinely want to get into the conversation about genre. And then there’s the argument that Sinners isn’t really a horror movie at all. It’s a movie that uses horror as a plot device — as a metaphor — to tell a story about racism and classism. But still, that genre bias comes in.

Andy
Yeah, and the genre element has definitely shifted over the years. It’s been a slow shift, but we have seen genre films getting nominated over the decades. Star Wars got nominated in 1977. E.T. five years after that.

Matthew
The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Silence of the Lambs — a horror film — and the Lord of the Rings films. District 9 was nominated. And more recently there’s been a wave of horror films getting nominated and recognized — Get Out being a great example. I think we’re seeing more of that. I hate using the term “elevated horror,” but it is a term that started about ten or fifteen years ago for horror films that were taking on more serious themes. And I think those are the ones the Oscars are recognizing — films that are trying to say and do a little more. Not just a straight-up slasher. There’s more meat to it. And I think that’s what’s being recognized.

I’m curious to see how this plays out, because Sinners is my favorite film of the year too. And I know you’re not as much a fan of One Battle After Another, but I equally love that film. I think it’s fantastic and just as worthy of winning all of its awards. There are two amazing films, and it’s great to see them up against each other — I think it’s going to be a genuine surprise as to how it shapes the Oscars.

If it were me, I would give everything to Sinners. But I don’t know if that’s exactly how it’s going to go. And here’s another interesting thing: sometimes Oscar voters like to spread the wealth, and sometimes they don’t. You just never know. Especially when there are surprises — I think everybody wanted Delroy Lindo to get an Oscar nomination finally, but I don’t think his chances had seemed that high initially. So it was a great surprise when he got nominated. That threw a shift into the whole conversation — like, whoa. We were kind of debating among Stellan [Skarsgård] and Scar [character from One Battle After Another] for best supporting actor, or one of the guys from One Battle After Another — maybe Mescal or someone — and then suddenly Delroy Lindo is in the mix. And it’s like, okay, now what?

And I think that leads into two things. First, to reiterate what you were saying about the casting award: Sinners is a great example of why a casting award is needed, because frankly Delroy Lindo is probably the most obvious choice, but Miles Caton and the actor who played the vampire are both standout supporting performances too. And there are three great women who could be supporting actress nominees in that movie. So hey, I’d love to see it win best cast.

But that also leads me to two words you taught me that I want to hear you talk about more — because we’ve talked about problems with awards, but not in this specific way. Category fraud. What is it?

Andy
Well, it’s a frustrating one. We touched on this when we talked about the Golden Globes, which have best drama and best comedy/musical — and the complaint when something is in best drama but it’s a musical and should be in comedy/musical, or vice versa.

But it’s become a much more prevalent issue in the lead versus supporting actor categories. What used to happen is that Bette Davis and Anne Baxter would both get nominated for best actress — something like what happened with All About Eve. And what started happening is that people would say, “Well, they cancelled each other out and a third person won.” Now, who knows if that’s actually what happened — but this has been the complaint forever. In 1950, Bette Davis and Anne Baxter both lost best actress to Judy Holliday. They were in All About Eve; she was in Born Yesterday. And people said: well, it’s because they were competing against each other.

So now you’ve entered this world where studios and campaigns push only one person as lead. In The Favourite, for instance — Olivia Colman won for it, but Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz really had just as meaty roles. They gave Colman the lead nomination and the other two went in as supporting, when all three had very close to equal screen time.

And then there’s Green Book — probably a frustrating example to bring up, but Mahershala Ali won best supporting actor when he’s just as much a lead in that film as Viggo Mortensen. And that’s frustrating.

Sometimes the actors themselves make the call. Viola Davis — I think she said she was getting frustrated with either not getting nominated for lead or losing the lead race. When it was Fences, I think she chose to campaign as best supporting actress. She ended up winning. But should she have been in lead? I don’t know. That’s what ends up frustrating me the most — the lead versus supporting battles and how campaigns are determining where to put people.

Matthew
Now, I think that’s really important. And I’ll just say: the two lead actresses from All About Eve competing against each other for the same award so that neither one wins is incredibly on brand for that movie. Look at that.

Who decides, by the way — is there a formal process for determining whether a performance is lead or supporting?

Andy
I think a lot of conversation happens at the studio level. I’m sure it’s become much more complicated now — I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a whole marketing department at each studio evaluating the likelihood of who should be pushed for which nomination, and who has a better shot.

Another interesting thing that falls into this — which we didn’t mention — is that they’ve stopped allowing actors to compete against themselves. And so, for example, I know this is something you had brought up: you thought Timothée Chalamet should have been nominated for Dune Part Two instead of the Bob Dylan biopic. But as an actor, you’d pick the one with the best likelihood of success — because it’s not a genre film.

Matthew
Yeah, it’s a biopic. And so he probably chose to push for that one instead of Dune — probably made a choice about what he was going to get behind in this process. He could probably signal to the studios, “I want to get behind this one, so don’t put me in for that one.” And if Dune’s director Denis Villeneuve and the whole team had started putting together an awards marketing plan and then Chalamet said, “I won’t support it,” they’d probably just say, “Okay, let’s just drop it and push for other things.” Is that about right?

Andy
Yes, exactly.

Matthew
So the studios are officially putting things in for nomination, but it’s very strategic. And I imagine there are sometimes conflicts of interest — if a studio makes two movies and thinks both have a great actor, but Movie A has a better shot, so they put Movie A’s actor in for best actor and Movie B’s actor in for best supporting actor.

Andy
Yeah. And then you have situations where the studio isn’t even the one behind the push. My understanding — and I might not have all the details — is that with Kate Hudson getting nominated for A Song Sung Blue, there wasn’t as much of a push from the film’s team. I think a lot of it was her — she made herself visibly present, put herself out there. I think she was going to karaoke bars and singing Neil Diamond songs, really getting into the spirit of it, trying to get people to recognize her performance. I think that’s awesome. And then sometimes people really surprise you. I can’t remember the actress’s name who won for Precious — or Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, or whatever the full title is — but she did no campaigning at all, and her performance was just enough to stand out on its own.

This is also an interesting thing that speaks to ethics: the movie To Leslie, which came out a few years ago with Andrea Riseborough starring in it. She got an Oscar nomination, and then suddenly there was a whole controversy because Kate Winslet and some other industry figures had been holding private screenings of the movie to try to get people to recognize her as deserving of a nomination. And in some way, those screenings violated Oscar campaign rules. The Oscars said they were going to pull Andrea’s nomination — which created its own massive blowback, because if you watch the film, it’s an incredible performance and she absolutely should have been nominated. The problem is it’s a small film and didn’t have the big budget that larger studio films do. And so it helped to have some industry insiders pushing for it. But it didn’t go through the right channels.

Matthew
I mean, I’m someone who’s very politically involved and has been pushing for campaign finance reform for a long time. Maybe we need to extend that to Hollywood.

And I’ve also been thinking this whole time that what the Oscars really need now is exit polling — so we can understand why people voted the way they did.

Putting humor aside, though, we’re only an hour in and I don’t want to take too much of your time, so I’ll ask one last question and then let you hit a few things. And this is very dear to my heart — and I know it’s an area where we disagree.

For me, some of the best movie-watching experiences I’ve ever had have been on a screen at home. And when I was growing up, even maybe twenty years ago, the line between Emmys and Oscars was clear and bright. There were what we called “made for TV movies,” but they were always understood to have much lesser production values and budgets — nothing that would ever be thought of as Oscar-worthy.

Today, that’s not the case. There are some great movies being made for streaming, and some things on Netflix and elsewhere have gotten nominated and won awards. I want to talk about that generally — but I’ll ask you specifically about what I honestly think is one of the best movies of the year, up there with Sinners, that didn’t get any nominations. And I know there are some specific reasons why. That’s Wake Up Dead Man — the third Knives Out movie, which is a Netflix film. It came out very late in the year, which I think is part of it. And I know some other things happened. Why isn’t Wake Up Dead Man anywhere in the Oscar conversation?

Andy
Because I don’t think it’s as good as either of the first two Knives Out movies — and I think that’s partly it. This speaks to personal taste. I thought Wake Up Dead Man was the weakest of the three. I know a lot of people loved it. But for me, the first Knives Out was the strongest, and I think they’ve chronologically gotten a bit weaker.

But to your point — yes, anything that streams, if it wants to get into the awards conversation, has to have a theatrical release of a certain length in certain cities, generally LA or New York. It has to play for like a week or two in theaters in order to be considered. That’s why so many films get those releases. Even movies that don’t reach the middle of the country until January — if they’re awards-contending films, they were usually released in LA and New York back in mid-to-late December. That’s the qualifying release requirement.

Netflix has decided to get into the game by releasing everything long enough to qualify, and then it’s off of streaming from there. They did the same with most — I shouldn’t say most, but certainly a lot of their contenders. Films like A House Full of Dynamite. Train Dreams played in theaters. So these Netflix films get a qualifying release. And I think Wake Up Dead Man just didn’t catch the attention of as many people as, say, Train Dreams obviously did.

Matthew
Okay, that makes sense. Maybe I’m mixing something up, but I thought you had mentioned to me that Netflix had specifically decided not to put that movie forward for nominations for particular reasons.

Andy
I mean, I have no idea what they were actually pushing. I don’t know the specifics of which things they were putting behind for awards. But they still release them in theaters. If they decide they’re going to push something and put the marketing money behind it, it already had its theatrical release, and I think that’s largely why Netflix does it that way. They really never know until the conversation starts happening about something.

Matthew
Okay, that makes sense. And I guess that goes back to the studio strategy thing I was mentioning before — if Netflix thinks Movie A has a better shot, maybe it’s not going to push Movie B as hard, even if there’s no official policy. I thought if nothing else, Josh O’Connor might get a nomination for acting. But I understand that. And perhaps with both him and Daniel Craig — who plays Blanc — I could imagine there’d have been a debate about who’s lead and who’s supporting.

Andy
Yeah. And for me, that’s part of my frustration with that film: it’s been Benoit Blanc’s story through the series, but then he’s really just a supporting player by the time we get to the third one. That was a strange structure for me. But I enjoyed Josh O’Connor. For me it just wasn’t as fascinating as some others — though again, it all boils down to personal taste in so many ways.

Matthew
No, that’s very fair. All right — any last things we didn’t get to that you want to hit before we wrap up?

Andy
I just think it’s important to know that awards aren’t perfect. They’re biased. They’re political. They’re human. But they’re one of those systems that can help redirect attention toward craft and storytelling — instead of just popularity or clicks or box office. They allow us to get a conversation going about what else is out there and what people should watch. And I think the value I take away from them is looking at things that represent the zeitgeist of a particular point in time. What were people interested in? What were they talking about? What wasn’t worth talking about ten years later? You can really capture a moment in time with these. And especially today, where movies can vanish overnight, I think it’s still worth something.

Matthew
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. You can look at Hollywood as a barometer — an imperfect one — but there’s something interesting about tracking conversations around race by looking at when movies made by or starring people of color start getting nominated. I could imagine that thirty years from now, if you wanted to teach a political science or sociology course on America during the Gulf Wars, you could look at when The Hurt Locker got nominated and won — I think it was one of the first really substantial anti-war films about those wars — and then suddenly a number of similar movies got nominated going forward. Some of which I think were quite good, and others of which I think were just Hollywood saying “we hate these wars” and showing particular love for anything that reflected that. So yeah, it’s interesting to look at what wins and what doesn’t — and to ask: what does that tell us about where things are going right, and often where a lot of things are going wrong and what we need to change?

Andy
Yeah, absolutely — it’s a helpful glimpse into the past and present of how things are shaped.

Matthew
Yeah. One of the most interesting conversations I’ve heard — and it’s pretty tangential to the Oscars themselves — but in terms of masculinity, standing up for Black women, and all of that, was the conversation sparked when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. That led to a lot of nonsense, racism, and sexism — but also to a lot of really great conversations that I think were genuinely interesting to hear.

Andy
Yeah, I don’t think that was a great moment for the Oscars or for Will Smith or for many things. It was a very problematic moment. But yeah, that’s a whole other conversation.

Matthew
It really is. It launched a whole other set of conversations that I found interesting.

And I will admit — as serious as all of this has been — I have come to love on TikTok the people who go through and both praise and rip apart the red carpet looks.

Andy
Yeah, there are a lot of those. That’s a whole other world. It’s crazy how that’s created its own universe.

Matthew
All right, Andy — thank you so much. I assume most people here know you, but for those who don’t, where can they find you?

Andy
People can find me and the shows I’m a part of over at TruStory.fm — that’s T-R-U-S-T-R-Y dot F-M. I’m on The Next Reel with Pete Wright. I’m on Movies We Like with Pete Wright. I’m on Cinema Scope, which is a solo show I do. And I’m producing a lot of the other shows on the network.

Matthew
Awesome. Well, thank you again so much. Please check out all the great things happening at TruStory.fm.

Of course, I have another podcast here on this network called Star Wars Generations, where a grumpy Gen X-er, a millennial, and a Gen Z-er get together to talk about Star Wars — why we love it and what we have problems with from our different generational perspectives. The new trailer for the Maul show has just come out and we’re really excited about that. We’re going to be putting out an episode talking about that trailer, but also about the first time Maul comes back in the Clone Wars — when we learn that yes, he didn’t die in The Phantom Menace, but he’s still around and still going to be a big character. So check all of that out.

Please check out all the great things Andy is doing, and most importantly, on behalf of myself and all the great people here in Minnesota — F Ice.