Blank Check with Griffin & David · Blank Check Productions

Introducing Critical Darlings

·1 hr 26 min·5 clips

Wilmore describes a huge Brazilian crowd celebrating I'm Still Here outside a church after the Oscars.

1. Critical Darlings opens with Richard Lawson and Alison Wilmore framing 'the award season conversation' around the episode 'Introducing Critical Darlings.' 2. Richard Lawson and Alison Wilmore host the show, and Ben Frisch joins as producer for the Blank Check network episode. 3. The episode asks how awards season changes when critics, Academy voters, receptions, Twitter, and Letterboxd all shape the same field. 4. Lawson jokes that HBO sent him the season finale of Heated Ravelry right before recording, so he had to choose movies before prestige TV. 5. Lawson and Wilmore describe awards season as a cottage industry of parties, past apps, and photos with Robert Downey Jr., not just a ballot count. 6. Wilmore says she spent ten years on Little Gold Men at Vanity Fair, which put her inside the awards-party circuit. 7. Lawson and Wilmore say online discourse creates 'almost a whole other Oscar race' that plays out on Twitter and Letterboxd. 8. Lawson argues that the Academy now includes younger, more online, and more international members whose tastes are less predictable. 9. Ben Frisch recalls his first major Oscar memory in 1993, when his sister saw The Piano and he went alone to The Pelican Brief at age 10. 10. Frisch remembers opening the Boston Globe and seeing Holly Hunter holding her Oscar after The Piano won Best Actress. 11. Lawson cites the 1997 field of Titanic, L.A. Confidential, Good Will Hunting, The Full Monty, and As Good as It Gets as the year he locked onto the Oscars. 12. Wilmore says The Piano was one of the first R-rated movies she saw with her parents, which made awards feel like grown-up culture. 13. Lawson and Wilmore connect those memories to Entertainment Weekly, blockbuster-era cineplexes, and video-store moviegoing. 14. Wilmore says the point of awards coverage is not only who wins, but what Hollywood thinks it is saying about itself. 15. Lawson gives Green Book as an example of a Best Picture winner that reveals the industry's self-image in a given year. 16. Lawson says voting can be improvised 'on the fly,' which makes awards outcomes feel arbitrary even to people who care about them. 17. Lawson tells a Cannes story about Leonardo DiCaprio arriving in shorts, a baseball cap, and a T-shirt, then complaining that the music was not cool enough. 18. The episode turns to Brazilian film Twitter, where thousands of accounts reacted to New York Film Critics Circle results and to I'm Still Here celebrations in Rio and Sao Paulo. 19. Lawson and Wilmore close by discussing festival strategy at Cannes and Venice, where timing and talent availability can shape awards launches for films like Highest to Lowest and The Secret Agent. 20. Listeners who follow Oscar races, film criticism, and festival politics will get the most from this episode, while viewers looking for plot summaries or spoiler-heavy analysis can skip it.

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