So a long time ago, I wrote about starting a podcast about the Liam Neeson Peril Meter/Index (it changes every time I tell the story). That podcast came to an end several months ago, with both a bang and a whimper. Our final movie was The Lego Movie, a personal favorite of Mom’s, but to my disappointment, the parody movie Tooken was not, in fact, a clever deconstruction of the decades-long career of a working actor, but instead an excuse for dick jokes and crude humor. So we didn’t get to talk about that one.
Anyways, where one podcast ends, another must begin, or else we’d have no excuse to get together as a family once a week and have homemade pizza. I went back to the drawing board. We like movies, and we’re getting pretty good at watching them at this point, so I figured we’d stick to what we knew. It had to be easy criteria for movie selection, but not too easy, such that we were treading very familiar ground. And finally, I didn’t want to repeat our previous formula, so no following one actor/actress’s career.
This lead neatly to the Academy Awards. It was always interesting when a Neeson movie would win an award, even though he never did. Also, a lot of Neeson’s movies were…not amazing, and tying the criteria to an awards show, despite the fact that it might be biased/rigged in some ways, still means that we’re probably going to be watching higher quality movies. But back to my rules for making the podcast. Just watching Best Picture movies is something that I’m sure people have done before, and I did zero research to confirm that, but it made sense enough to me. In fact, there’s probably podcasts, or at least articles and discussions, specifically about each category. So why not mix it up?
Welcome to If I Ran The Oscars (also available on iTunes and Spotify). Starting in 1953, the first year the awards were broadcast on TV, we select one merit award at random, watch the movie that won the award, and select three other award categories at random, to discuss if this film could have competed for those awards. We’ve had some ups and downs, yes; John Wayne being a bit of a chauvinistic ass is par for his course, but on the other side, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront is amazing. We’re a few decades into the awards at this point, starting to get into movies that Mom and Dad remember in theaters. Yes, I did make Mom watch Star Wars. Yes, the dialogue in Star Wars is not great, that’s not why people like Star Wars.
In any case, we upload most Saturdays, unless I have something else to do that evening, which will hopefully continue to be rare. This week, it’s The Sunshine Boys, a clean, funny film about the lost art of vaudeville.
Song of the Week (because I keep not making a separate post for this): The Other Side from the musical The Greatest Showman, performed by Zac Efron and Hugh Jackman. Good golly, I need to get started on my playlist of songs from musicals that are in my vocal range and also happen to be really good songs. The Greatest Show is also a good song from the soundtrack, but this one gets the edge for telling a story in three and a half minutes. Also, Wolverine singing showtunes is a bonus.
That's Pretty NEET 