Academy Vs Audience

While the gang takes a minute to catch up and prepare to get further into the 90s, we present a special mini-episode of Dan's Extra Credit Corner. A quick and dirty ranking of the Predator franchise, a look into why no film since our next entry has managed to win the Big Five Oscars, and for the feature presentation, an excerpt from Dan's deep dice into Francis Ford Coppola's Megalo...

It's another triple-header, as the Oscars went for the first Extra Long Kevin Costner Western, while audiences were split between Christmas hijinks and the first big Sexy Halloween Monster. Dances With Wolves managed to be the second western to win Best Picture, while flipping the script on the genre's treatment of Native Americans, but could Costner act and direct at the same time? Inte...

At the end of the 80s, the Oscars found themselves short on meaningful, artful, epics, tried to find some heartwarming story about ending racism, and settled for Driving Miss Daisy. Meanwhile, Hollywood began to pay attention to the worldwide box office instead of just the US, and we have our first split between domestic and international box office champions. Batman and Indiana Jones battled for...

It's the one Joint Champion of the 1980s, as neither Oscars nor audience can resist Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise teaming up for the road movie Rain Man, which also serves as perhaps the first major pop culture depiction of autism. Here to help Claire, Erin, and Dan break down the movie's efforts to examine neurodivergence is Dan's big brother Dr. Chris Gibbins, psychologist special...

In 1987, both Academy and Audience were making questionable choices in very different directions, so Kevin Weir's back to help Erin, Claire, and Dan get into it. The Oscar went to The Last Emperor, chronicling the uniquely tragic life of China's final emperor Puyi, and the gang accidentally watches the longest possible version. The audience goes far lighter with Three Men and a Baby, abo...

In 1986, Hollywood was in two minds about the military. Oliver Stone won an Oscar for his ground-level examination of the destruction and darkness of the Vietnam War, via one idealistic recruit being ground down by perpetual horror and atrocity. Tony Scott went another way, with whizz-bang planes that go fast and hot shot fighter pilots flying and fighting and erotically playing beach volleyball i...

It's 1985 and the tonal gap between Academy winners and Audience favourite isn't getting smaller. The Oscar goes to Meryl Streep and Robert Redford's languidly paced, ill-fated romance in Out of Africa. Returning guest Gina Stewart joins Erin, Claire, and Dan to explain how the actual Karen Blixen's memoir of life in colonial Africa was mutated into an Oscar-bait romance. The a...

It's buddy cops and classical music frenemies as Academy Vs Audience reaches 1984! First off, the Oscar goes to Amadeus, a film version of the what-if story proposing a deadly rivalry between composers Mozart and Salieri... a rivalry only one of them knows about. Erin, Claire, and Dan dig into it, the music, the wig-game, and if it's as gripping as film reddit insists. While that happene...

It's 1983, and the big movies are all about difficult parent/child relationships. The Oscars went to Terms of Endearment, a mother/daughter story conceived, written, and brought to the screen by men, and Erin, Claire, and Dan have a lot of questions and notes on its success. Audiences, however, needed to see how Han Solo got out of the carbonite, and flocked to Return of the Jedi, which would...

While Erin and Claire are busy with the all-new theatrical experience of Riverona, travel back with us to 1944 and what Dan insists against all opposition is "one of the three most criminally underrated Best Pictures in history," the cask-stength comfort viewing of Going My Way. But first, for All 80s Summer, Erin has a speed-run review of George Miller's Mad Max saga, since we don&...

While Erin and Claire are bringing a fresh new work to what lucky audiences are able to catch it, we turn back the clock to one of our earliest episodes, in which Dan invited Erin, Claire, and you, the listener, to join him in his Yancey Cravat Madness. Followed by some love for Charlie Chaplin! And since this is All 80s Summer, some quickie 80s movie reviews from the one co-host not getting a pla...

It's 1982, and the rift between Academy and Audience grows ever farther. The (many) Oscars go to Richard Attenborough's lengthy biopic Gandhi, bringing you the greatest hits of Mohandas-then-Mahatma Gandhi, managing to fill over three hours of runtime with few insights beyond "Gandhi: Nifty." Meanwhile Steven Spielberg re-conquered Hollywood with the simple tale of a boy and hi...

It’s 1981, and one of the most iconic adventure movies ever takes on a movie with one iconic piece of music that they use a little. The Academy goes with Chariots of Fire, about the 1924 UK Olympic track and field team and the obstacles both great and very small they faced, while the audience flocks to see Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’ latest offering, a rogueish archaeologist named Indiana J...

Welcome to Academy Vs Audiences All 80s Summer! The hits get bigger and the Oscar winners get smaller, and nothing spells that out quite like 1980. The Oscars go with Ordinary People, Robert Redford's film about a family in turmoil after a tragedy, and the different ways we successfully or unsuccessfully process grief. The audience, however, just really wanted to see more of Luke, Han, and Le...

It's 1979, nearing the end of the era of serious dramas for adults ruling the box office, and Dustin Hoffman's divorce and custody drama becomes one of our more unlikely joint champions. Erin, Claire, and Dan dig into Ted Kramer's attempts to juggle two lives: raising his son alone after his wife Joanna disappears into the night, and a career that doesn't care for him having ot...

It's 1978 and the tonal gulf between Oscar winner and people's champ has, if anything, widened, as has the gap in host reactions. The Academy goes for Michael Cimino's home-from-Vietnam story The Deer Hunter, which has some stellar performances but also very strange and off-putting pacing, and an iconic, definitive scene that maybe does more harm than good. Meanwhile, audiences floc...

In 1977, a long time ago, you might say Academy and Audience's tastes were far, far away. Claire, Erin, Dan, and returning guest Munsi Parker-Munroe strap in to take on one Woody Allen in his seminal hit, Annie Hall, asking how well it's aged and how challenging it is to deal with the Woody Allen of it all. That accomplished, it's time for our first dip into the Skywalker Saga, as G...

The Oscars have happened, Award Season is done for now, and we take a look at the ten candidates for Best Picture of 2023, with returning guest Oscar enthusiast, and greatest living fan of Zardoz, Olav Rokne. Dan and Olav saw all ten, as is their wont, Erin's seen six, and Claire's here for the vibes as we speed through reviews of nine great movies and also Maestro. What were their stren...

It's 1976, and audiences and the Academy are united in loving one man: Rocky Balboa. A nine film franchise spanning six decades has a small and simple beginning as a struggling young Sylvester Stallone writes himself into stardom as a simple palooka trying to prove to the world and himself that he can go the distance with heavyweight champ Apollo Creed. Erin, Claire, and Dan dig into Rocky&ap...

It's 1995, and we have cuckoos and sharks coming your way! The Oscar went to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, second film ever to achieve the Oscar Grand Slam, as Jack Nicholson's anti-hero McMurphy squared off with Louise Fletcher's icily villainous Nurse Ratched. It's hailed by a classic, but how does it hold up? And what do other versions of the story do better? But the...

Two years after The Godfather dominated the box office and snagged the top Oscar, Francis and the Corleones are back for one of the most lauded sequels ever, The Godfather Part 2. Gina Stewart's back to join Erin, Claire, and Dan in unpacking the rise of Vito and the fall of Michael, and the sad story of Fredo and the career of the man playing him. But the sequel didn't fully wow the cro...

It's 1973, and we take a break from Coppola's mafia movies for... more crimes, of legal and spiritual nature! First up, Paul Newman and Robert Redford are back together for new crimes in a new century, as 1930s con men out for payback on a vicious gangster in Oscar winner The Sting. But as popular as the Butch and Sundance reunion was (very), audiences were even more drawn into horror cl...

It's 1972 and Francis Ford Coppola had an offer neither Academy nor Audience could refuse, with all-time-classic mob movie The Godfather. Erin, Claire, and Dan dig into the suspense, the twists and turns, who the best Corleone kid is and why it's Tom Hagen, and Gina Stewart is back to tell us all about how Mario Puzo's novel was adapted (by Puzo himself and Coppola). Get yourself a...

It's the holiday season, so while taking a brief break, Erin, Claire, and Dan look back at the hits, possible nominees, and other random movies they've seen over the course of 2023. What were some Oscar History highlights? What were the weird trends of 2023 movies? What's the most unfortunate trend? Are we headed for the first Joint Champion in two decades? Probably not but maybe we...

1971 brings us another year where you have to ask if someone wrote the winners down wrong, as the Academy goes with the cop thrillers and audiences decide they're not  quite  done with musicals. Best Picture goes to The French Connection, with Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle, a cop on the edge in world he never made, fighting French drug traffickers with... racism and mostly inept surveillance?...