Oscars Outsider Archive

The 98th Academy Awards are in the books — and we've got thoughts. One Battle After Another holds on for Best Picture, Michael B. Jordan upsets Timothée Chalamet for Best Actor, and Sinners walks away with 4 wins from 16 nominations — the most losses in Oscar history. Did it get robbed? We break it all down. We also get into Conan's hosting, the ceremony's surprise technical issues, th...

It's the final reckoning. The Oscars Outsider crew is back one last time before Hollywood's biggest night to go through EVERY category and give you our ultimate predictions for the 2026 Academy Awards. The big question: Can Sinners pull off the upset and become the first horror movie to win Best Picture? Or does One Battle After Another hold the line? We break down the Sinners surge, the late-voti...

The SAG Awards may have just blown the Best Actor race wide open. Michael B. Jordan wins. Sinners surges. And suddenly Timothée Chalamet doesn’t look so inevitable anymore. In this episode, we break down:What Jordan’s SAG win actually means for the Oscar raceWhether “front-runner fatigue” is realIf Sinners is building unstoppable momentumWhether Best Picture is suddenly back in playAnd as part of...

In this episode of the Oscars Outsider Podcast, we go back to 1929 to unpack why the Academy Awards were created in the first place. The Oscars weren’t born as a pure celebration of art. They emerged during a moment of labor unrest, censorship pressure, and a rapidly changing Hollywood industry. We break down the real institutional motives behind the founding of the Academy, the first ceremony at...

At the 1991 Academy Awards, Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture — a decision often called one of the biggest Oscar snubs in Academy Awards history. In this episode of Oscars Outsider, we revisit the 63rd Oscars and break down why the Academy made the choice it did, how the Gulf War and early ’90s cultural climate shaped the vote, and whether this was truly an Oscar robbery. We also...

This week on The Oscars Outsider Podcast, we talk through the changes we’d make to the Academy Awards — from category structure and voting rules to the bigger philosophical question of what the Oscars are supposed to reward in the first place. We also review Best Picture nominee Frankenstein, breaking down what the film is trying to do, how it works as a Best Picture contender, and where it fits i...

This week on The Oscars Outsider Podcast , we break down the growing evidence that Oscar season might be getting messy — from tabloid stories and anonymous mass emails to trade reporting connecting the dots behind a possible smear campaign targeting Marty Supreme . Then we shift gears to a classic Oscars gimmick: each of us reveals our Top 5 favorite Best Picture winners of all time … and, because...

Sinners just broke the all-time record for Oscar nominations — but what does that actually tell us? We start by taking the temperature of the current Oscar race, digging into what the nominations and BAFTA longlists reveal about shifting momentum, category surprises, and where the major contenders stand right now. Then, in our main feature, we trace the evolution of Best Cinematography at the Osca...

The Oscar nominations are finally here — and they didn’t break the way we expected. In this episode, we react in real time to the full list of nominees, sorting through the surprises, the snubs, and the calls that completely upended our predictions. From Best Picture curveballs to category shake-ups that force a rethink of the entire race, this is our immediate read on what the Academy actually di...

With Oscar nominations just a day away, we lock in our final predictions for which films will make the Best Picture lineup, not who will win, but who will get in. We debate the strength of films like Hamnet, Frankenstein, Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, F1, and the wild-card case for K-Pop Demon Hunters. We also break down how vote-splitting, international contenders, and late...

The Weirdest and the Most Iconic Oscar Campaigns The weirdest Oscars campaign of all time. The most iconic Best Actress campaign of all time. In this episode of Oscars Outsider, we explore two unforgettable moments in awards history: Melissa Leo’s self-authored “Consider…” campaign in 2011, and the legendary 1969 Best Actress tie between Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn. Along the way, we un...

For decades, the Golden Globes were Hollywood’s strangest open secret. Long before their modern reboot, and long before the scandals that finally brought down the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Globes operated less like a serious awards body and more like a social club where access, schmoozing, and favors mattered as much as the votes. In this episode of Oscars Outsider, we trace the biz...

In 1999, the Academy Awards didn’t just celebrate movies — they celebrated a worldview. In this episode of Oscars Outsider , we revisit the 71st Academy Awards and ask whether the ceremony represents the Oscars at the end of history : a moment of brash, unapologetic confidence at the height of American cultural dominance, in the narrow window between the Cold War and 9/11. From Roberto Benigni’s e...

Welcome to Oscars Outsider, a limited-run awards-season spinoff from the team behind Bravo Outsider. Each year we obsess over the Oscars, the gossip, the precursors, and the chaos — so this season we’re making it official. In this episode, Craig and Dylan kick things off with our WAY-too-early Oscars Fantasy Draft, recorded before the Golden Globes nominations drop. With almost no precursor data a...