AwardsWatch Podcast #204: 91st Oscars Retrospective – It Was the Best of Wins, It Was the Worst of Wins

On episode 204 of The AwardsWatch Podcast, Executive Editor Ryan McQuade is joined by AwardsWatch contributors Sophia Ciminello and Dan Bayer dive the newest AwardsWatch Oscar retrospective covering the 91^st Academy Awards and the films of 2018.

If you can remember back to just five years ago, the Oscars were coming off the heels of a couple of years of great winners from the Academy, with Spotlight, Moonlight, and The Shape of Water taking home the previous three Best Picture prizes. It looked like, with new members added every year, the Oscars were done giving disappointing winners their top honor, but the 2018 Oscar season proved to be a massive step back for the Academy as Green Book won Best Picture, and went down in history as one of the worst winners in Oscar history. Moreover, the season not only had other films of questionable quality nominated as well, but it started a path towards a host-less ceremony, ideas of cutting categories, not inviting the acting winners from the year before to the ceremony to present, and other problems that would come up in one form or another for the next few years at the Oscars.

In this in depth retrospective, Ryan, Sophia and Dan break down the year in film, the good and bad nominees, and the overall legacy of Green Book’s win and the rest of the winners on the night. They also talked about where they were at just five years ago, the campaigning that got us this Best Picture win, and how similar tactics have been used since for both good and bad reasons. After doing that, Ryan gave out some Oscar Trivia for Sophia and Dan to answer, and then they got into playing ‘Should’ve, Could’ve, Would’ve,’ where they replace nominees from the 91^st Academy Awards and give out their personal winners for the year. The films included in their discussion ranged from If Beale Street Could Talk, Burning, Leave No Trace, A Simple Plan, First Reformed, Hereditary, Widows, BlacKkKlansman, Private Life, Roma, First Man, The Old Man and the Gun, Disobedience, Suspiria, The Favourite, Paddington 2, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Blindspotting, Wildlife, and so many more.

You can listen to The AwardsWatch Podcast wherever you stream podcasts, from iTunes, iHeartRadio, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Audible, Amazon Music and more.

This podcast runs 2h32m. We will be back next week to talk about our Top 5 Best/Worst franchise reboots, inspired by the latest Exorcist revival. Till then, let’s get into it.

Music: “Modern Fashion” from AShamaleuvmusic (intro), “B-3” from BoxCat Games Nameless: The Hackers RPG Soundtrack (outro)