The 2024 awards season has felt unusually hectic thus far, because of the strike-delayed Emmy Awards shifting from their common fall airdate to January. To assist make sense of all of it — and unpack the discombobulated state of Hollywood now — these 5 podcasts provide a mix of professional evaluation and predictions for the foremost ceremonies, authentic reporting on the trade tendencies and behind-the-scenes machinations that affect voting, and reflections on Oscar front-runners of the previous that in all probability shouldn’t have been.
This Vainness Honest sequence debuted in 2015, which implies it’s been readily available to chronicle a few of the weirdest moments in Academy historical past, just like the 2017 Finest Image flub (when “La La Land” was mistakenly introduced because the winner as an alternative of “Moonlight”), 2021’s muted Covid-era ceremony held in a cavernous Los Angeles prepare station, and the slap heard around the globe in 2022. However even when there’s nothing fairly so uncommon occurring, the evaluation right here all the time makes awards season extra attention-grabbing. Hosted by the Vainness Honest journalists Katey Wealthy, Richard Lawson David Canfield and Rebecca Ford, the dialog is all the time exhaustive and filled with experience, exploring not simply the contenders for Hollywood’s prime prizes, but additionally the campaigning and strategizing that form the race. Since many Oscar journeys start at movie festivals resembling Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, there’s no scarcity of stories and releases to cowl 12 months spherical, to not point out interviews; current friends have included Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), Emma Stone (“Poor Issues”) and Greta Lee (“Previous Lives”).
Starter episode: “Oscar Voters, Begin Your Engines”
There’s a peculiar class of movie that debuts with nice fanfare, attracts loads of awards buzz, after which fades from the cultural consciousness with no hint (and no awards). Not the entire movies mentioned on “This Had Oscar Buzz” fall into that bracket, however, because the title suggests, the main focus is on the flicks that had that buzzy aura round them, no less than for some time. An early episode about “Cake,” a 2014 film starring Jennifer Aniston as a girl residing with persistent ache, exemplifies what works so properly about this format — Aniston was lauded for her playing-against-type efficiency and campaigned intensely throughout that awards season, however was famously snubbed on Oscar nomination morning. The hosts, Joe Reid and Chris Feil, don’t belittle both the efficiency or the hustle, however quite use the hype round “Cake” as a jumping-off level to debate Aniston’s profession and celeb extra broadly, alongside the ins and outs of how precisely buzz will get constructed within the first place.
Starter episode: “Alexander (With David Sims)”
Although not a conventional awards season podcast with predictions or play-by-play recaps, “The City” is a useful useful resource for anybody hoping to know the upheaval in Hollywood. Delivered in snappy episodes that clock in round half-hour, Matthew Belloni, a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a founding companion of the digital media firm Puck, shares insights and unique reporting on the trade, whether or not the difficulty is final 12 months’s monthslong writers’ and actors’ strikes, Disney’s succession woes or the cost-of-streaming disaster. In a current episode, Belloni and Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Occasions, went deep on the present state of the “unkillable” Golden Globes, which returned final 12 months after a hiatus sparked by controversy surrounding its now-defunct unorthodox voting physique, the Hollywood Overseas Press Affiliation. Historically the primary awards present on the calendar — and probably the most chaotic — the Globes have proved to have extra endurance than many predicted, and this evaluation is an efficient useful resource for anyone questioning why.