Check Book: OSCARS RECAP 2025

Adrien Brody's speech is still going.

, and

Mar 03, 2025

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

We did it. We made it through the 2024 awards season. A brief recap of last night’s Academy Awards:

THE GOOD

Conan delivered. A perfect combination of silly, classic Conan shit (Dune sandworm playing the harp) and an appreciation and enthusiasm for the craft of filmmaking! Artisans, craftspeople, and unions make movies great. Movie theaters make movies great. Also - The Substance parody intro was directed by friend of the pod and Podcast the Ride host Scott Gairdner!
Speaking of craftspeople, the use of the “fab five” format for presenting costumes and cinematography this year was wonderful and we should keep it going forward!
I’m Still Here won the first ever Best International Film Oscar for Brazil! So glad they won something, they’re so online.
I loved the Oz tribute opener. No matter what you think of Wicked, Ariana and Cynthia can SING, and it’s a pleasure to watch them do it. It was also nice to see Ariana in a dress color other than “pale.”
Sean Baker just became the most-awarded individual for a single movie on one Oscar night. Crazy. What does a Sean Baker Blank Check project look like? We’re excited to see!
The No Other Land team’s acceptance speech was a concise and profound distillation of a global conflict that I hope resonates with people.
Timotheé Chalamet Butter Yellow Suit
The composer of The Brutalist has hot Nosferatu vibes, v into it
Best non-host bits: June Squibb is actually Bill Skarsgard in makeup, Ben Stiller presenting Best Production Design from a malfunctioning set.

THE BAD

Gonna give a big “Ummm no thank you” to Adrien Brody’s rambling-ass speech. Actor brain bullshit, “I was in the wilderness for so long” (okay, insulting to Wes Anderson), throwing his gum at his girlfriend who happens to be Harvey Weinstein’s ex wife, give me a BREAK.
I’m just gonna say it, Kieran Culkin’s whole “my wife will give me children” schtick feels icky to me, and I also hated how the next acceptance speech was from the Iranian duo who won Best Animated Short, and the guy grabbed the iPhone from his female collaborator because she “wasn’t doing it right” and then just repeated what she already said.
None of the winners from Emilia Perez said anything about the trans community being under attack in our new political administration, which is just fucking typical and OF COURSE, they didn’t give a shit in the first place, we could tell.
Andrew Garfield being like “My dead mom loved you, Goldie Hawn,” and then Goldie Hawn being like “okay thank you”
Quincy Jones and Gene Hackman and the James Bond franchise get special “In Memoriam” tributes, but you’ve got Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini there (WEARING LITERAL BLUE VELVET) and you don’t do a special tribute to David Lynch? “Well, Lynch was never really beloved by the Academy.” HE WAS NOMINATED MULTIPLE TIMES AND HAD JUST WON AN HONORARY OSCAR. THEY GAVE JOHN HUGHES A SPECIAL TRIBUTE WHEN HE DIED AND THOSE MOVIES WERE EVEN LESS OSCAR-FRIENDLY. I’m sorry, I’ll stop yelling with my keyboard, but that sucked.
Demi Moore losing Best Actress to a 25 year old hottie with a bangin’ bod and toothy smile is literally the plot of The Substance, you have to laugh.
Mozart’s Requiem over the In Memoriam montage was a lil too intense for me. David Sims liked it. RIP Shrek’s Publicist.
Those fucking French people singing that stupid fucking song.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

Let’s open this week with a meet cute: when Kate Capshaw first met her future husband Steven Spielberg at an interview for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, things got off to an inauspicious start, per the actress: “I went into his office on the Warner Bros. lot. He was sitting with his back to me. When I came into view, he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re not who I thought you were.’”1 Prior to the interview, Capshaw had been instructed to sit on a couch across from Spielberg, but she pivoted, opting instead for a spot much closer to the director next to a marble fireplace, where she—and Spielberg—soon both laid on the charm, according to Capshaw: “The minute I met him, I sensed he was a sweet, shy guy who was kind of wondering, ‘How did I get here?’ I love that in men, that shyness and humility.”2 And if you had been wondering this whole series whether Steven Spielberg smells good, Capshaw says—very normally—that he smelled great: “I think it was just the way he smelled. He smelled like my family. It was a smell of familiarity. I’m speaking not just metaphorically but olfactorily. They say that once a woman takes a whiff of her infant you can blindfold her and march twenty babies in front of her and she’ll pick hers, and that’s how it felt to me. I felt like I was blindfolded and took a smell and said, ‘This is the guy.’”3 When the first interview ended, Spielberg thanked Capshaw for “not saying anything about E.T.,” and she “went home and … said, ‘I think I’m in really big trouble here.’” At their next meeting, Spielberg offered Capshaw what Joseph McBride describes as an “unmistakable sign of his affection.”4 Per Capshaw, “Steven showed me how to play a new video game.”5 Unfortunately, none of the sources I consulted for this episode ever named what video game it was, though we’ll hopefully find out once The Fabelmans 2 comes out.
One of the challenges awaiting any leading lady in an Indiana Jones film is an unwelcome meeting with some sort of nasty creature: Karen Allen faced off against snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, as we’ll see in a few weeks, Alison Doody was tasked with rats in The Last Crusade. In the original script for Temple of Doom, Capshaw was also supposed to have her own close encounter with the serpentine kind, but the actress was convinced that the snakes would prey on her anxiety: “The animal trainer assured me I had nothing to worry about, and a lot of people came up and told me such snakes were harmless, but it didn’t help; even looking at them was disturbing. I’d talked to Frank Marshall about it and it was suggested that we all go with Steven on our day off to the set and visit the snakes. So I went over and I put my hand on the snakes—and I lost it. I absolutely lost it. I just became hysterical. I started crying. And I was terrified my fear would somehow communicate itself to the snake, which would then turn dangerous.” Kindly, Spielberg relented on the snakes: “She was shaking. So I said, ‘I’m not going to put you through this,’ and I cut the whole scene out of the movie.” The bugs, however, were non-negotiable, per Capshaw: “[H]e said, ‘But you have got to do the bugs.’ I went, ‘The what?’ And he said, ‘The bugs. You know, the bugs,’ and he tells me the scene. I’m not very good at reading a lot of the stage directions, so I’d missed all the snake stuff—and I’d missed the bug part!”6 And, according to producer Frank Marshall, the bugs were worse than the snakes in the end: “The bugs were much harder to work with than the snakes. You can arrange a pile of snakes. That's impossible with bugs. People were also much more scared of the insects. Every once in a while you'd hear this shriek when the bugs found their way on to the tap-dance rehearsal stage - a bad place for any bug to be.”7
Temple of Doom—like Raiders before it—was another globe-spanning production, with location shoots taking place in Macau (where the rickshaw chase was filmed), Sri Lanka (which provided the jungles and elephants), and California (specifically the Mammoth Mountain and Tuolomne and American Rivers). Initially, the production also planned to shoot some of the palace sequences in Jaipur, India, but producer Frank Marshall says that matte paintings and built sets were used instead after disagreements occurred between the producers and the Indian government: “[B]ecause of the voodoo element with Mola Ram and the Thuggees, the Indian government was a little bit hesitant to give us permission. They wanted us to do things like not use the term Maharajah, and they didn’t want us to shoot in a particular temple that we had picked. The Indian government wanted changes in the script and final cut.”8 But the palace wasn’t the only time that the studio was subbed in when a location shoot may have been used in the past; at the advanced age of thirty-six, Steven Spielberg newly craved the comfort and control afforded by London’s Elstree Studios: “The movie was shot principally 80 percent on sound stages in London and 20 percent outdoors. For me, this was a pleasure. I love location shooting, but the older I get, the more I’m getting the homing instinct to build it and shoot it indoors. I don’t like to wait. When it rains on me, and I want sun, or when it’s sunny and I want it to be overcast; I feel better when I can create the environment.”9
And here’s one for the George Lucas fans out there, from editor Michael Kahn: “On the second Indy, almost every other couple of cuts, George would say ‘I wanna flop this [reverse the direction of the shot]; I want it the other way.’ He made a lot of flop shots. So my assistant and I got him a cap that said PROFESSOR OF FLOPOLOGY. And we put the letters backward, too, so you could read it in the mirror. He laughed when I gave it to him.”10 Lucas’s proclivity for flops can also be seen in later productions like 1994’s Radioland Murders and 2015’s Strange Magic.

MARCH MADNESS IS UP AND RUNNING!

PTA (1) will face Ridley Scott Pt I (4) in the next round for main-feed, and Philip K. Dick Adaptations move on to battle John Wick (barring a last-minute surge from The Equalizer).

Today, you can vote for either Denis Villeneuve (3) or Alfonso Cuaron (6) in our main-feed challenge, and for either Scream or Elm Street on our Patreon.