Weekly Culture Menu 3.5.24

And the Oscar goes to…

For this week’s installment of the Weekly Culture Menu, we have a sampling of content across a variety of mediums, lengths, and sensibilities so that you can dip in and out all week. Once you subscribe, you can expect a weekly menu delivered to your inbox every Tuesday. 

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Happy Oscars Week! Oh, how I love the Academy Awards. The dresses, the tuxes, the speeches, and the general ceremony of a big, televised moment. 2023 was a hell of a year for movies, and I’m looking forward to celebrating with friends this Sunday by watching the awards. If you want to make wagers at home, this ballot from Rotten Tomatoes is great (interesting to compare critic vs. audience sentiment). Here are some Oscars-themed recs to get you in the spirit: 

🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]

• 🗞️ The Hollywood Pros Finally Getting Their Due. The Oscars are adding a new category for the first time since 2001 (when the Academy introduced the award for animated films). Beginning in 2026, the Academy will recognize casting directors for their contributions. To celebrate, the Hollywood Reporter put together a list of who they think would’ve won the award in prior years. This might not be the only new category we see - many advocates are lobbying for others, including recognition for choreographers and stunt performers. 

🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]

• 🎧 How Oscar Voting Really Works. This is a great explanation if you’re curious to learn more about what’s happening behind the scenes of Oscar voting. Skip to 43:55 to hear Tom Oyer (former SVP of member relations and awards at the Academy) speak about how voting works. This certainly informed how I made my predictions this year!

🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]

As the Oscars fanfare is best enjoyed together, I thought we could spice up the menu this week with something a little different! Let’s have a community discussion around our favorite Best Picture Winners from years past. To participate, read through this list of previous winners, pick your five favorites, and share your list in the comments with a quick blurb about why you chose each film. “Favorite” is defined not necessarily as what you think are objectively the best films ever to win (though they can be), but rather the five Best Picture Winners that you’ve continually revisited, have shaped your film sensibility, and that you just wholeheartedly love!

Here are mine:

• 🎬 Casablanca. It’s a perfect movie, with a perfect ending and lines that we’re still saying 84 years later. What more can you want?

• 🎬 The Silence of the Lambs. The third-ever film to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay and the first and only ever horror film to win Best Picture. This movie terrified me the first time I saw it and haunted me long after my first viewing. But it also created my passion for the psychological thriller and showed me the power of storytelling in horror.

• 🎬 Chicago. Of all the movies on this list, Chicago is by far my most watched. We’re talking double-digit numbers (and I don’t even want to see the play count on the soundtrack). I just love it. Plain and simple. 

• 🎬 Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). I vividly remember seeing this movie for the first time and being absolutely blown away by how different it felt from anything else I’d seen. That camerawork! The cinematography! And that ending. The first viewing will live long in my memory.

• 🎬 Everything Everywhere All At Once. There might be some recency bias here, but EEAAO was a movie that, when I saw it, I just knew I’d love forever. It’s wildly creative and bursting with everything everywhere all at once while still having so much heart. It had me asking, why am I crying watching two rocks?

What are yours? Let me know in the comments.

🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]

• 🎧 The Politics of the Oscar Race. Are you curious and a little skeptical about all this Oscars nonsense? Unsure of why we even care anyway? This episode gives a great breakdown of the politics of an Oscar campaign and explains why the results are something we continue to care about (even if we know it’s essentially PR games at work).

• 🎧 The One with Christopher Nolan. I’ll be honest, I didn’t love Oppenheimer. Yeah, I can recognize it as a significant achievement. Still, in a year of such strong contenders with diverse voices, perspectives, and stories, it feels like the most boring and predictable option of all the films we’re celebrating. Of the long-standing auteurs in conversation, I wish we were celebrating Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon instead (if you haven’t seen it, don’t let the runtime deter you - it was the most beautifully shot movie I saw last year, and Lily Gladstone is a revelation who rightfully deserves the prize). Oppenheimer rant aside, this interview with Nolan made me more at peace with what will likely be an Oppenheimer sweep. I loved hearing about the origins of how the project came to be (special shout out to Robert Pattinson - looks like the Twilight franchise is indirectly responsible for Oppenheimer’s wins? That’s my story, at least.), and his writing process. It's a great listen to add more context to this season’s biggest winner. 

And I’ll leave you with a Favourite Oscar acceptance speech moment.

What are your five favorite Best Picture Winners? Go to this list, then share your five in the comments below.

💖 If you liked this post, don’t forget to hit the heart to let me know and help others find my writing.

📮 Do you have any menu requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.