This week it’s all about the Oscars 2017! The 89th Annual Academy Awards are this Sunday evening, and as usual, Jeff and I are all in to talk about the nominated films and creators. Can you believe it was just a year ago that Leo didn’t have an Oscar?  Were we ever so young? The 2017 Oscars are a very different beast than last year’s ceremony, with the #oscarssowhite controversy fading slightly (though still a major, systemic problem), and new controversies taking hold. Jeff and I get into all of that and more in the episode, so dive in with us for Oscars 2017!

In our first half, we’re talking about the less glamorous categories. For Best Adapted Screenplay, we have an interesting set of works where in 3 out of 5 cases, a person of colour’s story is being adapted by a white person. This is the case for Hidden Figures (original story Margot Lee Shetterly), Arrival (original story by Ted Chiang), and Lion (original story by Saroo Brierley and Larry Buttrose). The other two films are works of people of colour, adapted by those people (and one collaborator, who is also a person of colour). Those are Fences by August Wilson and Moonlight by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Barry Jenkins.

For Best Original Screenplay, we have 5 movies written by white men, and four of them are specifically about white men. This is boring. We’re bored now. I’ve heard good things about 20th Century Women, so I throw a little support that way, but would prefer to take a pass on this particular Scrabble hand and change out my tiles.
On to Best Animated Feature next, and Jeff is glad to see two such high quality (and popular) Disney movies in this category. He and I are both hoping for a win for Moana, which is really super. Hat tip as well to the craft of Kubo and the Two Strings, which we did a podcast episode on earlier in the year. 
We finish the first half with talk about music. In the Best Original Score category, we agree that the lock has to be La La Land. That score is a character in the movie, and an important facet of the story.

For Best Original Song, we’re both excited to see if Lin-Manuel Miranda can add an Oscar to his passel of Tonys that he won in the fall. Controversial opinion: that guy is going to need several display cabinets for awards before long here. It’s a bit of a shame that “You’re Welcome” isn’t the nominated song here. Jeff makes the super point that leaving that out of here means we won’t get to see WWE Monday Night RAW alum Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson perform a musical number at the Oscars. That would have been pretty great. If you are interested in being depressed by a song about a reporter who was beheaded, knock yourself out here.