Lights Camera Accolade

This is the full release of 2025’s July bonus and spoils Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017). If you don't want to wait an entire year before listening to our full bonus episodes, consider supporting us on patreon

This is a preview of our June 2026 bonus episode. Celebrate Pride Month with us as we watch and discuss/spoil 1931's Madchen in Uniform, a(nother) German milestone in early queer cinema. Featuring an all female cast backed by predominantly women and queer creatives, Madchen overtly lesbian and anti-authoritarian themes led to its eventual banning in Nazi Germany. Luckily, distribution abroad saved...

This episode spoils 1943’s nominees: In Which We Serve, The Human Comedy, The Ox-Bow Incident, The More the Merrier, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heaven Can Wait, Watch on the Rhine, Madame Curie, The Song of Bernadette, and winner Casablanca. For the 16th Academy Awards, our nominees chiefly explore how the war impacted the lives of those at home, how communities (be they a ship's crew, Spanish gueri...

This is the full release of 2025’s June bonus episode for Pride Month and spoils the German movie Anders als die Andern ("Different from the Others", 1919), a film that challenged Germany’s anti-gay laws and feels as relevant as ever as it explores our understanding of sexuality, gender, and the harm that legal and social oppression inflicts on queer lives. If you don't want to wait an entire year...

For our second celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month we watched China’s 1948 film Spring in a Small Town -- an intimate movie about the interweaving lives of a family and their surprise guest trying to figure out how to navigate moving forward in a landscape where many of them can no longer envision a happy future in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War...

This is the full release of 2025’s May bonus celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, where we watched the 1930 Japanese film What Made Her Do It? -- a movie that takes the concept: “life is suffering and then you die” to the next level. But who's to say that you can't choose how you go out? If you don't want to wait an entire year before listening to our full bonus e...

This episode spoils 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Join us alongside a special guest as we discuss the movie that birthed a dynasty (of princesses). Snow White convinced Hollywood that animation was a viable medium for full length movies and propelled Disney animation and similar studios into a golden age of animation. Heigh-ho! If you don't want to wait a year before listening to our ful...

This episode spoils 1942’s nominees 49th Parallel, King's Row, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Pride of the Yankees, The Talk of the Town, The Pied Piper, Wake Island, Random Harvest, and winner Mrs. Miniver. America officially joins World War 2 which means Hollywood officially endorses it. This year's movies universally deal with the question of being steadfast and determined...

This is the full release of 2025’s April bonus and spoils the movie Misery (1990). For our April bonus, we let Chrysantha pick a birthday movie. What better than a feel good movie about a writer connecting with his number one fan? If you don't want to wait an entire year before listening to our full bonus episodes, consider supporting us on patreon

This episode spoils Dorothy Arzner’s 1932 film Merrily We Go to Hell starring Frederic March and Sylvia Sidney. We’re back to pre-Code movies as we celebrate Women's History Month this year, so of course that means the movie is going to tackle themes of infidelity; stooping down to the level of your philandering, alcoholic spouse; and recognizing when it's time to cut your losses. Technically the...

This episode spoils 1941’s nominees Sergeant York, Blossoms in the Dust, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, The Little Foxes, Citizen Kane, Hold Back the Dawn, One Foot in Heaven, The Maltese Falcon, Suspicion and winner How Green Was My Valley. This year had a little bit of everything: patriotism, biopics, scheming families, biopics, ghosts, biopics, private investigators, biopics, important discourse about...

This is the full release of 2025’s Women's History Month bonus and spoils the movies Suspense (1913) and The Blot (1921). Did you know women were directing Hollywood films years before they gained the right to vote? Neither did most of us, until we were introduced to Lois Weber. Listen to this preview of our bonus episode where we take a look at two of this trailblazer's most famous films. If you...

This episode spoils 1929's Hallelujah. For Black History Month, we’re revisiting King Vidor’s 1929 film Hallelujah (one of the first major studio productions to feature an all-Black cast). Celebrated for groundbreaking performances and sound design, yet complicated by stereotypes and studio-era framing, Hallelujah sits at a crossroads of representation, exploitation, and opportunity. We unpack its...

This episode spoils 1940’s nominees The Grapes of Wrath, Our Town, All This and Heaven Too, Foreign Correspondent, The Long Voyage Home, The Great Dictator, The Letter, The Philadelphia Story, Kitty Foyle and winner Rebecca. This year brings us some of the highest highs and the lowest lows. It’s the year in which the looming world war becomes more real and Hollywood has to start acknowledging it....

This is the full release of 2025’s February bonus and spoils the movie Within Our Gates (1920). We honored Black History Month by viewing the oldest existing feature film from a black American director; Oscar Micheaux's 1920 classic: Within Our Gates, a landmark of early Black cinema that confronts racism, violence, and hypocrisy in Jim Crow America head-on. Unfortunately, the type of narrative th...

This episode spoils the pre-code movie Baby Face (1933). Join us as we discuss one of the movies credited with causing the enforcement of the Hays Code. A woman sleeps her way to the top, and gets away with it relatively unscathed? Can't say the same for the men she leaves in her wake or William Hays's ghost. If you don't want to wait a year before listening to our full bonus episodes, support us...

This episode spoils 1939’s nominees Dark Victory, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, and winner Gone With the Wind. Widely regarded as the strongest year for movies in Academy history, the lingering effects of the nominees and winners can still be felt to this day— for good and for bad. It’s the...

This is the full release of 2025’s January bonus and spoils the movie M (1931). The otherwise cinematically dismal year (1931) is salvaged by the 11th hour intervention of a groundbreaking German thriller: M. Listen to us discuss the morality of capital punishment and the potential origins of true crime in film. If you don't want to wait a full year before listening to our full bonus episodes, con...

This episode spoils Netflix’s hit Christmas movie My Secret Santa (2025). Join us as we yet again take a simple, feel-good movie way too seriously and dissect every part of the movie worth talking about. We also may or may not go down a rabbit hole looking at Netflix’s version of manifest destiny and how monopolization and the corporatization of the internet ruined everything. Normal Christmas con...

This episode spoils 1938’s nominees The Adventures of Robin Hood, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Boys Town, The Citadel, Four Daughters, La Grande Illusion, Jezebel, Pygmalion, Test Pilot, and winner You Can’t Take it With You. It’s a confusing year for the Oscars. Big Opera is officially overtaken by Big Tobacco, America shields its eyes to tensions continuing to rise in Europe, Robin Hood is a confir...

This is the full release of 2024’s December bonus— join us as we discuss our most technologically advanced movie yet: Hot Frosty (2024). If you don't want to wait a year before listening to our full bonus episodes, consider supporting us on patreon

This episode spoils 1922’s silent film Nanook of the North. This is a preview. Become a subscriber to listen to the full episode at patreon.com/lightscameraaccolade This proto-”documentary” helped invent documentaries… and also helped invent faking them. The movie vividly portrays elements of Inuit life as it follows “Nanook” and his “family” through many of their traditions and survival tactics....

You asked, we answered. In this episode, we all learn a little bit more about the origins of film, the structure of the Academy, what the Hays Code was, and some (fun?) trivia about Hollywood's most and least expensive films up to 1930. We also get to share what each of our favorite eras of film is-- and it turns out there might be a right answer to that question. This will be a recurring bonus se...

This episode spoils 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein. It's alive! Or, technically, undead. This episode we're spoiling the movies that launched Universal's cinematic Monsters universe which defined what cinematic horror could be. Find the full episode at patreon.com/lightscameraaccolade

This episode spoils 1937’s nominees The Awful Truth, Captains Courageous, Dead End, The Good Earth, In Old Chicago, Lost Horizon, One Hundred Men and a Girl, Stage Door, A Star is Born and winner The Life of Emile Zola. We’ve finally made it to the double digits! We’re still in the 30s, but we’re already starting to see big changes in Hollywood this year— primarily the swan song of Big Opera’s cho...