Already and this this is the Daily This is the Daily os. Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's Monday, the third of March.
I'm Lucy, I'm Zara.
Another year in movies has come and gone, and the ninety seventh Oscars are upon us. Today's ceremony will show us what Hollywood considers to be the best films and the best performances of the year twenty twenty four. From Adrian Brody to Zoe Saldana. Today we will be taking you through everything you need to know about the Academy Awards.
Lucy, it was tough pickings to pick in the office do this.
Podcast today, but look, I settled on you because you are a genuine movie expert. I've actually never met anyone who is as well versed in movies, let alone Oscars movies as you are.
So for someone perhaps.
Not as well established in the Oscar movie scene as you, why did the Oscars matter? Why do we need to talk about it on today's podcast?
Well, what I always say when people ask me why things like the movies matter is that this is an industry, This is a major economy, particularly in the US. But certainly in Australia as well. When the writers and actors went on strike eighteen months ago, I told people, this is an industrial issue, that's why we should care. So aside from the fact that I care about movies, I love watching movies, I love seeing all the things that are nominated for Oscars as many as I can get to.
But also, this is an industry awards show, and it's interesting to see what the people in that industry think was the best, beyond what I think is the best as just a fan. So the Oscars are Hollywood's biggest night. That's what they're described as, and they're an industry award, just like the Grammys are for music, or in Australia the Arias or Logis for Australian TV.
I think that's the first and last time the Oscars and the Logis will be compared to one another, but we'll go with it just for the sake of contextualizing.
But yeah, they're an industry would. We actually don't know why they're called the Oscars, which is a really fun fact. No one does, and given that they've been around for ninety seven years, anyone who could have told us is long gone.
That's interesting.
Yeah, there's a few different suggestions of why they're called that, but we don't know. Officially, they're called the Academy Awards because they're given out by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Excellent, which I love.
It's so old Hollywood that name talking about motion picture.
Yes, it really is. It stands a test of time.
Though. I'm curious how the voting works when it comes to the Oscars because often people will watch.
This and be like, how did that possibly win?
And there is good reason and an entire process behind it. Talk me through the voting process.
So, as I said, before they're voted on by the members of the Academy, I think it's probably best to explain through the process of voting for an actor. So, if you are an actor and you want to be nominated for an Acting OSCAR, you need to appear in a film that is released within January first December thirty first of the year before the ceremony, and that also needs to be a film that is released for at
least a week in one of a few major US cities. Oh. Interesting, Yeah, there's very specific requirements around, even to the degree of at least one of the screenings in the week that it plays needs to be in the evening.
It's all very granular, and will movies be released accordingly? Like, is this thought about in the production and the release plan for a movie?
I presume, sir, Yes, definitely. It's why you will see a huge group of very serious dramas or be released around December, right before the proper voting process begins. Okay, interesting, But then it can also be kind of done an interesting way where something my premier at a film festival which doesn't meet that requirement in say late twenty twenty three, then do its week of required screenings in July twenty twenty four, and then be nominated for an oscar at
the twenty twenty five Oscars. The film I'm thinking of is Sing Sing, which stars Coleman Domingo, who's nominated for Best Actor. That's that movie's exact process. If first was shown to audiences in September twenty twenty three, it's now March twenty twenty five, which kind of shows you the journey.
Okay, and so there are these very strict requirements of a film to even be eligible to be nominated. Who then though gets to vote. How do members of the Academy become members of the Academy.
There's about ten thousand of them. Oh yeah, so it used to be many fewer, But.
I use for him in my brain.
No, it's because you have to think about how big Hollywood is as an industry. And part of what makes up that ten thousand is that it's not just actors. It's not just directors. It's makeup artists, hair stylists, costume designers, sound technicians. When you think about in a movie, when they show you we're filming a movie, there's a million people on set. Chances are most of those people are
voting members of the Academy. So you get invited, you have to be sponsored by other existing members, and you have to be in the industry. So as much as I might like to be in the Academy, if I somehow got Kate Blanchard and Nicole Kidman to say Lucy Tassel should be in the Academy, I'm still not actually in Hollywood, so I wouldn't get accepted.
But you could be a fact checker in Hollywood. They might meet some of them.
I don't think there's a research branch I'll tell you. There are nineteen branches of the Academy, and in the early rounds of voting, they all vote in their specific category. So makeup artists vote for Best Makeup. But once the official nominations are finalized, everyone votes for everything.
And a vote's waited in any different way, or is everyone's vote equal?
Everyone's vote is equal in all all the categories except for Best Picture, which when we get to the final nominations, best Picture is ranked by preference. Okay, we never know the exact voting breakdowns, as much as I would love to know them. If a film gets fifty percent of first preference votes for Best Picture, it automatically wins.
I'm obsessed with somehow feeling like we're talking about an election.
We're talking about the Oscars.
And people treat it as seriously as a political election and spend as much money on it as a political election, and it lasts as long as the US election does. Sometimes wow. I mean, just as an example, the movie Everything Everywhere, All at Once, which won Best Picture a couple of years ago. It premiered at the south By Southwest Festival in April, and then all of the actors in it were effectively on the campaign trail until the Oscars the subsequent March. Wow, it's a long process.
That is a long process.
Yeah, you spoke about Best Picture there before, which is the big gong of the night, and I'm wondering if you can just run us through who the nomineesa, or at least who people need to know when it comes to the nominees for this award.
So there's ten nominees. Used to be only five, then they expanded it probably ten years ago. I would say the big ones that people probably have seen would be Wicked, which is technically Wicked Part one, but it's just called Wicked, Okay, Dune Part two. There's Conclave, which is about popes. Yeah, there's Anora, which is about an exotic dancer who gets involved with a Russian oligarch's son. And then there's Amelia Perez, which you have probably heard of, probably not because you've
seen it. It has come out in Australia but not very widely, but because a it's a fascinating film and b because it's generated a fair bit of controversy, I think it's safe to say.
Can you take me through some of that controversy?
So Amelia Perez is a film that is a musical. It is about a trans female gangster who asks the lawyer to help arrange for her to have gender affirming surgery so that she can effectively become the woman she's always meant to be, change her identity and leave the criminal life and all of the repercussions of that. It is very specifically a film set in Mexico about the
role of drug cartels in Mexico. The initial controversy around this film was that this film about Mexico was shot in Paris, was written and directed by a Frenchman, the songs were written by French people in Spanish but written by French artists, and it stars three main actresses, a Spanish actress named Carlo Sophia Gascon. She plays Amelia Selena Gomez, who is from the US, and Zoe Saldana, who is Dominican.
So there was already kind of a bit of questioning around can you really tell a story about an issue that really affects Mexico without necessarily having it be very grounded in Mexico. Originally, this movie premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May. It happens every May. It's extremely prestigious and it can often be a good indicator of what the Oscar movies are going to be.
So Parasite, which won Best Picture in twenty twenty, premiered at the can Film Festival in May twenty nineteen, and from there it was basically everyone thinks this is the best movie of the year. Amelia Perez didn't win the top award at can, but it did win acting awards and it was received very warmly by the mainly French audience, although there was a lot of Hollywood people there too. It also then picked up a lot of support from
the Academy. It has the second most Oscar nominations in history with thirteen, tied with a number of other films, but still nominations in almost every key category that it was available to be nominated in, including Best Actress for Carlo Sophia Gascon, which made her the first openly trans person to be nominated for an acting Oscar. But then things took a turn right around the time that those nominations were announced. Once the nominations are in pronounced, everyone
in the Academy can start voting officially. There's a short voting period, so that is kind of assumed that you would be catching up on the things that you haven't yet seen, yea, and making your final decisions about who you think should win each award. And so what happened around this time a Canadian journalist named Sarah Hagey, who is a black and Muslim woman, noticed a couple of social media posts by Gascon.
That Gascon being the lead actress in this film.
Yes, exactly the lead actress, the titular role Amelia Perez. Hage said these tweets were an islamophobic dog whistle. Her words, dog whistle. That's a subtle message that might seem innocent to some and very charged to others. When she started keyword searching these posts from Krlo Sophia Gascon, she later told Variety magazine she found quote many racist and many anti Muslim posts. She said, quote. This wasn't some viral
controversy waiting to resurface. She had tweeted these things and they had existed online unchatchallenged, from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty three. There was no pushback, no visibility. This was just how she was casually tweeting. It was all just there. And she went on to say I'm flawed because we're talking about a front runner from one of the most nominated films in Academy history. It wasn't just about one comment.
Yeah, I've listened to a lot of podcasts about this and the role of those involved in you know, casting and in the film, and perhaps some of the research that did or didn't happen when it went into.
The casting of this film.
I'm curious to understand what the reaction has been though, since these tweets surfaced and you know, the nomination still stand.
Certainly, just before we get into the blowback, I will also just note these tweets are all in Spanish because Gascon is from Spain. The film has been picked up for US distribution by Netflix, which is a US company That may go some way to suggest why these tweets never came to any one's attention before. Yeah.
Interesting.
In terms of the blowback, it was idiot and widespread. Netflix, as I mentioned before, kind of quite involved in this film's OSCAR campaign, said that it would no longer pay for her to be flown to different awards events that the film was nominated for, or pay for any of her styling, which.
You said, and that's important because you were saying before it's like an election campaign, like being on we'll call it the campaign trail.
Well, yeah, that's a huge part of it.
Yeah, it's actually going to events like the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which Gascon did not attend, but Seldania and Gomez did. There's a huge number of events that would be in the leader, but Gascon has not been at. She is expected to attend the actual ceremony today. Seldania also distanced herself from her as did Gascon's pr agency. Again, just another aspect of this kind of campaign. So I think overall it's safe to say this is kind of the major storyline of the lead up to the Oscars
this year, and it has certainly damaged the film's chances. Yeah, remains to be seen what it will win today.
Yeah, really fascinating. I want to turn out to talk about the Ossies who are nominated. Firstly, are there Ozzies who are nominated?
Exactly? Who are they?
It's a great showing for Australia this year, brilliant. First up, we've got Guy Pierce with his first ever Oscar nomination for his role in the film The Brutalist. Where he plays a volatile millionaire who commissions an architect to build a building on his property. Then we've got cinematographer Greg Fraser, already an OSCAR winner for his work on Dune Part one, nominated again for Dune Part two. I think he's in
with a strong chance. Then over in the Animated feature category, we've got Adam Elliott and Liz Karney for their film Memoir of a Snail. Elliot won in the two thousands for an animated short, but Carney has never won. So that's two Ossies in that category. And Ozzie's were on the teams of three of the five movies nominated for be Visual Effects, which I think is really cool to see and like an affirmation of the quality of our VFX industry.
So cool.
And then finally there's Maya Nipp who produced a nominated documentary short about a man in Texas on death Row.
You mentioned just before that it's Guy Pearce's first nomination. Oftentimes when we look at these award shows, something that comes out is the number of firsts that may or may not eventuate. What are some of the firsts that you're keeping a keen eye out.
For this is an exciting year of firsts, because, as you say, there's first every year, but this year there's a couple of people who've had really long and rich careers who are just now getting recognized. So just like I said, Guy Pierce, there's also Demi Moore. Her first screen appearance was in nineteen eighty one, and she has just now been nominated for the first time for her performance in The Substance. Then we've also got Isabella Rossellini,
who is Hollywood Royalty. Her mother, Ingrid Bergman, won three acting Oscars. Her father, Roberto Rossellini, an incredibly influential Italian director. She's been nominated for the first time for her role in Conclave, playing a scheming nun. We've also got Kieran Culkin, who obviously we know has been around forever. Everyone I'm sure listening can picture him as a child eating pizza in home alone, just now nominated for his role in A Real Pain. There's a couple of other possible firsts
I'll just quickly touch on. Timothy Charlomagne has been nominated quite a few times. If he wins Best Actor for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he'll be the youngest man to ever win the category. He's just turned twenty nine.
There are extremely the rest of us feel incredibly underachieving.
Yes, I'd love to not think about how well Ty is. There's very few Oscar's gone to men under thirty over the years. The current holder of the record for the youngest best Actor, Adrian Brody, also nominated in that category the year mm HM for the Brutalist So and then, of course the final first. If Carlo Sophia Gascon does win, she will be the first openly trans person to win an acting Oscar. There's so much to look forward to finding out today. I'm so excited, Lucy.
You have made me care more about the Oscar than I ever have in my whole life, and I will be watching with great interest. So thank you for that, and thank you for joining us for another episode of The Daily os. We will be back again this afternoon with the day's headlines. Until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcuttin woman from Gadigl Country. The Daily os acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.