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As Team Culture settled in on Sunday night to liveblog the Oscars, we had our worries. Would Chris Rock’s jokes land? Would Mad Max: Fury Road walk away empty-handed? Would the winners be so white we were blinded where we sat? There were a lot of great unknowns.
As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. A few minor blunders aside (Sam Smith: what, what, what were you thinking?), the night was a rousing success. Rock was funny; Lady Gaga belted out some vocal kerosene and lit a musical match; and—holy crap—Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his own little gold man. (And, more importantly to Ex Machina fans, so did Alicia Vikander.) Yes, friends, it was a good year to watch the Oscars.
The Academy Awards telecast, however, isn’t the only thing on our minds on this week’s episode of The Monitor. We’ve also got a lot of dirt to dish (wait, that doesn’t quite sound right…) on the forthcoming Lonely Island movie, the subpar performance of Gods of Egypt, and the casting of Idris Elba in an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
So, go ahead and reheat the last bit of Oscars night leftovers you have and pop in those earbuds. Editors and writers Peter Rubin, Angela Watercutter, and K.M. McFarland are here and we have a few things about the Academy Awards that we left unsaid. Hear us talk about all of them now.
A few helpful links for things we talk about in the podcast:
-WIRED’s Oscars liveblog -Angela Watercutter’s piece on what the 2026 Academy Awards could look like -Brian Raftery’s story on how the Oscars could improve next year -Jordan Crucchiola’s story on Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander -Tina Fey and Margot Robbie turn the tables on movie reporters during their Whiskey Tango Foxtrot interviews: [#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_mVtizhkvw]
