Oh, Goody! The Little Gold Men Are Back Again!
In the year after the year of the Barbie movie...
A very welcome, albeit unexpected joy of Emily For President is the opportunity it has offered me to reconnect with really great people from my…Past Lives (too much?). My guest today is one such person who I reconnected with over, and I cannot make this up, our shared love for former Real Housewife of Beverly Hills Lisa Rinna.
Since reconnecting, I’ve watched Sean Gorman launch and run his YouTube channel, The Awards Gambit, where he reviews movies and offers his predictions for upcoming awards shows. On the eve of the 96th Academy Awards, I asked Sean to join me and do just that. This week, we talked about why he started his channel, which movies he loved this year, and whether or not the Oscars are still worth their Salt…burn.1
Sean is a witty and sarcastic icon who loves movies and will tell you what he thinks is winning every award ever even though nobody asked. As a washed-up math major whose professional life has been a little all over the place, his love for film is and will always remain a constant. Last year, Sean decided to direct his passion for film and awards into a YouTube channel that highlights movies’ successes and predicts awards shows.
On an average day, you can find him lying on his futon with his cat Phoebe, rewatching a Sandra Bullock movie he has already seen ten times over, or working hard on a Tuesday NYT crossword puzzle.
And the Award Gambit Goes To…
Likely thing for me to do—I’ve gone and asked someone about their hobby! Without too much ado, I asked Sean:
Emily: What led you to start The Awards Gambit, and why this medium in particular?
Sean: After I left my job last June, I decided I needed to try out some new hobbies related to film and entertainment. There were so many channels like mine that I watched and enjoyed so much so I decided to try it out and it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Emily: Have your interactions with or consumption of content from other movie channels and podcasts influenced your own videos? If so, in what ways?
Sean: Absolutely. I have learned so many random facts and buzzwords from other channels that I have been able to apply to my reviews and predictions, and as a first-time YouTube creator, I have learned from them the importance of good thumbnails and video graphics in getting more views.
Emily: If there was a trailer for The Awards Gambit, what would the voiceover guy who did every trailer in the 2000s be saying and what song would he be saying it over?
Sean: The song would probably be some intense techno remix of The Winner Takes It All by ABBA and the voiceover guy would probably be speaking in movie-themed math equations attempting to solve the ultimate problem of who is winning the Oscar for Best Picture.
Emily: Would you ever want to develop critiquing or your interest in film into a full-time career or do you prefer having it as a hobby?
Sean: I really do enjoy it as a hobby and as something I get to do for myself outside of work. If after years of experience, I felt like I wanted to grow or expand my influence and the right opportunity came up, I could definitely see myself somehow turning this into full-time work.
I earnestly love watching movies amongst others—some of my best childhood memories are from our many Family Movie Nights during which my parents showed us a great number of classic and cult classic films.2 But watching movies with my family or going to the Alamo with friends also serves as a regular reminder that I have a very different taste than those around me—namely that I’m not the biggest fan of prestige films (sue me for thinking that Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is a better movie than The Holdovers).
Sean has, like perhaps everyone who has seen a movie ever, his own subjective opinions as well. But unlike the rest of us, he is in a position where he has to put that somewhat to the side and introduce a degree of objectivity into his views. I wanted to know:
Emily: What are your criteria when critiquing a film? Is there anything that definitively makes a film good or bad for you?
Sean: I would say that my movie reviews tend not to go too elaborate. I mostly focus on how well executed the film’s messages and themes are, and if I think the film will contend at the Oscars as well as which categories it has a shot of getting into.
Emily: What factors go into how you make your predictions?
Sean: I love this question because I put a lot of thought into my predictions. There’s an excellent website called Gold Derby which is a hub for everything awards and entertainment, so I often check that out for some starter ideas and go from there.
Furthermore, the Oscars have been around for nearly 100 years so I tend to relate certain races to patterns of past winners (Oscar history is the only history lesson I will tolerate). If a race is too hard to predict, I will go with whatever my gut tells me.
Seeing as Sean’s channel is called The Awards Gambit and not The Movies Sean Watched and Liked (Or Didn’t Like) Gambit, I wanted to pick his brain about the upcoming Academy Awards.
Best Flop at the Annual Flop Awards for Flopping
First of all, I’d like to wish a happy tenth anniversary to the inception of Adele Dazeem, a moment of culture that means an embarrassing amount to my day-to-day lexicon.
The Oscars have always been full of these bizarre, “Did I really just see that?” moments: from Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty reading the wrong name for Best Picture in 2017 to Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper essentially getting a room on stage, to The Slap Heard Around the World—yes, that was the Oscars!!!!
Before we get into some of the darker notes belying the Academy Awards golden and glamorous façade, I wanted to know:
Emily: Across all categories, what was your favorite film nominated for an Oscar this year and why?
Sean: This is always such a tough question for me cause I am so indecisive and tend to find the good in every movie I watch. But if I had to pick I would probably say American Fiction. It was laugh out loud funny, it did an excellent job getting its point across, and I cannot resist a good satire.
Emily: Be honest—have you watched every movie nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year? Why or why not?
Sean: Yes, I have. I try to watch all of the Best Picture nominees every year, but there are normally one or two I just cannot see myself sitting through so I don’t bother. This year was a really strong year for films and so I was happy to have watched all of them.
While it may have been a strong year for films, it has not been a particularly strong year for award shows. At the top of the year, Jo Koy hosted the Golden Globes in what might later be seen by history as a hex placed on the rest of the 2024 awards season. Even though the following week’s Emmys were a slight improvement for me at least because the people I wanted to win won, there was notably not nearly enough recognition of the fact that it was the 2023 Emmys which were taking place in 2024 because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that were still ongoing when the Emmys were supposed to be held in 2023. February’s Grammys would need their own piece to unpack everything that happened there so just know it was actively worse than this pretty bad precedent.
All of this comes on the heels of ever-declining viewership numbers across awards shows, something Jason Goodman wrote and talked about with me back in 2022. But it’s no wonder no one wants to watch these events—and not just because they’ve become three-hour-long anxiety-inducing guessing games as to which celebrity will fuck up what when. I’m not exaggerating when I say that every major awards show has been plagued by at least one bombshell scandal over the past decade which has undermined their credibility and prestige.
Yet when we look back on the history of the Academy Awards, in particular, they have always been grappling with some scandal or another despite presenting itself as the decider of success in the entertainment industry. Last March, Vox journalist Alissa Wilkinson interviewed New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman about his book, Oscar Wars, during which they had the following interactions:
Alissa: It does seem like the history of the Oscars is a history of PR crises that the Academy created for itself and failed to anticipate—right up to the present, with #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo. Is there some reason that this keeps happening?
Michael: Well, yes. Hollywood is built on perception and optics and public relations. And on one very fundamental level, the Oscars are a marketing event. Often, in Hollywood, things don’t happen unless they become a PR problem, and people are forced to change something or move or do something.
That sounds very cynical, and it mostly is. But when you think about it, #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite became big movements because of a herd mentality. They had to build until the point where the powers that be felt that it was more damaging to stand still than to enact change.
The Academy tends to be more reactive than proactive when it comes to criticism and changing with the times…
Alissa: Every time I have to come up with a list of “milestones” in the Oscar nominations, it’s like, “Really? This person is the first to be nominated in this?” It’s really kind of shocking.
Michael: There still hasn’t been a Black Best Director winner. I mean, seriously? A Black person has never won Best Director. No person of color has won Best Actress since Halle Berry. And she was the first! She was the only one!
I end that chapter with something Halle Berry said in 2016: She had waited 15 years to see someone follow in her footsteps, and no one did. She said that it was heartbreaking because in her speech, she said, “Tonight a door has been opened.” But 15 years later, she realized she thought it was a moment that was bigger than her, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she hadn’t opened a door. That was heartbreaking to her.
The more you read about Oscar history, the less serious the whole enterprise becomes—especially since one of the reasons the Academy was formed in the first place was because of scandals! I alone can’t answer the question of why the Oscars ever became such an outsized cultural presence despite all of this, but to narrow the scope and get another perspective, I asked Sean:
Emily: Over the past decade or so, there have been a number of awards show scandals. In your opinion, have the awards lost some of their prestige?
Sean: Unfortunately, yes. In an age of streaming, broadcast and cable TV are gradually dissolving, thus viewership and ratings decline every year. As a result of this, the producers always try to add new things they think will attract a wider and younger demographic when they really should be appealing to their audiences and focusing on film and storytelling instead of terrible banter and publicity stunts.
As a sidenote regarding streaming vs. cable, I believe the Oscars should and will move to whatever Disney+ is called in 2028 when the Oscars contract with ABC is up.
Emily: What do we still watch award shows for?
Sean: For me, and hopefully for most people, its a way to celebrate exceptional art and the artists who create said art. But realistically I feel like people only tune in to see their favorite celebrities unfiltered, which is totally fair, especially if they are rooting for them to win.
I know I asked Jason a version of these questions two years ago, but I’ve been trying to answer them for myself since as someone who grew up watching and revering awards shows. Ultimately, I think what we all get out of the Oscars—or any award show in this day and age—is exactly what we put in. Perhaps the healthiest approach to awards shows is as Katya Zamolodchikova once potentially said in some way, shape, or form on The Bald and the Beautiful podcast: “If I win, that’s amazing. If I don’t, it means nothing.”3
And Scene!
I don’t mean to undermine Sean here but I do wonder sometimes if we place too much of an emphasis on awards shows being the end all be all of good art. Thinking about what we already discussed today—that everyone is entitled to their own taste in films, and that awards shows are messier than a Bravo franchise—maybe there’s something to be said about only viewing award shows as fun get-togethers the greater public is privy to rather than the pinnacle of success in Hollywood. Because, for what it’s worth, an Oscar win has not spelled out success for every winner.
But I want to reel us back in because there are only so many problems I can solve in a night (13 in this piece, and counting). Before we close out today and hurtle ever faster to whatever Sunday has in store for us, I wanted to ask Sean about movies he’s loved and, to undermine myself here, one last prediction for the road:
Emily: What is your prediction for which film will win Best Picture this year and why?
Sean: Oppenheimer—it’s been winning top prizes everywhere and it was an exceptionally made cinematic achievement with stunning visuals.
Emily: What is your Best Picture this year?
Sean: UGH I CAN’T DECIDE. But I guess I have to—looking at the list of movies I saw last year, the one that stood out to me the most was M3GAN. It was fun, funny, riveting, satirical, and timely AF.
Emily: Hi, I'm Emily from Letterboxd. What are your four favorite movies?
Sean: I had to think long and hard about this and by the grace of Gaga, I’ve formulated an answer. My four favorite movies are Black Swan, Mean Girls, Still Alice, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
So many thank yous to Sean for joining me today!!! Check out The Awards Gambit here to see if his predictions are right come Sunday!!
I am so deeply sorry.
In case anyone was ever curious as to why I have a cat named Cat.
After spending over 30 minutes trying to find a clip I have listened to no fewer than 10 times, I’m fully paraphrasing.