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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique, fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture.
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--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: It's the Oscars. Every year, the Oscar nominations come out and every year we hear about who was robbed. And this year, it was women who were robbed. And more specifically, it was little women that was robbed.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And every year I see everyone bemoaning the people who got robbed and the robbing of those people. And I feel like these people don't understand how the Oscars really work.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And I was hoping that you could help them understand. That's my job. What are these people missing, Alyssa?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think most people just don't quite know what the Academy is or what they're picking when they pick the Oscars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're a very large group and very large groups tend to pick the middle option. So that's often what happens with the Oscars.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah. Who are these people? the Academy. So the Academy is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: That's their full name. There's about 9000 of them. It's film industry professionals, you know, cinematographers and actors and directors, also publicists and executives.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: They right now sit at about 32 percent women and 16 percent minorities, which is up from 2015.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: But in the earlier part of the decade, The L.A. Times did some investigative journalism and found that the median Oscar voter was probably kind of a white guy who was older than 60.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if everyone on the Internet knew that, they would probably freak out a little less or at least temper their expectations.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Right. It's not all that surprising that they're picking things like The King's Speech and Argo.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: It's a lot more surprising when they pick movies like Moonlight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Academy Award. Yeah, well, I mean, as we all remember, they almost didn't. For best picture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: La La Land. And then they dip. No, there's a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won best picture. Moonlight won it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is not a joke. This is not a joke.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: I'm afraid they read the wrong thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do the people in the academy, these largely 60-plus white men, most respond to?
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: They really, really, really love movies about Hollywood.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: It doesn't matter. It's a fake movie. If I'm doing a fake movie, it's going to be a fake hit.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: So a movie like Argo was almost a shoe-in because it's a movie about Hollywood kind of saving the world. That's like perfect.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The United States government has just sanctioned your science fiction movie.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: They also like kind of ponderous historical dramas of different kinds.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: So they really love, you know, the English patient.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll have to forgive us. We're not accustomed to the company of women. Not at all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was thoroughly enjoying my book.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: They like movies that are big and impressive.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Father to a murdered son. Husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance in this life or the next.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But you know what they like even more than all those movies, Sean?
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Tell me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Campaigning.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: You know, like political campaigns, they cost a lot of money.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: An Oscar campaign can cost a studio $10 million for one movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the race to the finish line, the studios shell out big bucks themselves, because gold means green.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: They're spending it on screenings, they're spending it on hosted events, luncheons, cocktail parties, meet and greets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I am tired of the campaign. I am an actor. I am not a politician.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: They do a lot of sending of swag.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What kind of swag?
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: People get DVDs in the mail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have piles and piles of them in my house so that they can watch the film.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: But they also send weirder swag, though.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, for instance, I have a whole stack of coffee table books from movies like The Irishman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's what it is.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Is The Irishman coffee table book, like, 4,000 pages long as the movie was three hours?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not, but it's about two feet wide, and apparently you can actually fetch about 80 bucks for it if you put it on the market.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, they're like worth money?
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, if people really like the movie, they're meant to be collector's items.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They also send even stranger swag, so if you look around my apartment, I, for instance, have a bobblehead of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that was sent out as swag to people who might be voting for the RBG documentary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, that seems way better than a coffee table book.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, it's kind of great.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it sits next to one of those Russian nesting doll things that I got as part of the swag for the death of Stalin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It has Steve Buscemi on the outside and then inside are increasingly smaller versions of all of the characters from that movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's smart.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's why you kept that one, because it's good.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, and they sent it with a bottle of vodka, which was very nice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK, well, that's just bribery.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It reminds me of the Golden Globes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People always talk smack about the Globes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who hands out those trophies, just wants to get their pictures taken with the big celebrities.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Are Oscar campaigns just as empty as that?
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Are they just about who gives the biggest bottle of vodka?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It definitely happens in the Academy
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It definitely also is to a lesser degree again because of the size of it
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And also because the Academy does have a labyrinth and set of rules about what you can do to promote your movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rules that they actually had to set in place because Harvey Weinstein, of all people, was concocting more and more elaborate plans to get his movies in front of voters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because that was the deal with Harvey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He could get you an Oscar.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, that's why Harvey Weinstein was so, so powerful, was that he could turn your little film into an Oscar winner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I imagine, though, you got to do more than just send some fun swag and have a nice reputation, though.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, what's the most extreme version of this campaign?
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And like, I don't know, the Harvey Weinstein classic sense.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: So just like in a political campaign, opposition research is important.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No. You sully the waters of the other movies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You sure do.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: You plant negative stories.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For instance, if you see a story about a movie that came out eight months ago, two weeks before the Oscars, then you know that somebody is probably behind it.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And this is the consummate Harvey Weinstein tactic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When Slumdog Millionaire was up against one of his films, a story suddenly appeared that the Slumdog Millionaire filmmakers were exploiting their subject.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, I remember that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not where you'd expect to find one of the stars of this year's favorite Oscar film.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this top 10 is Azruddin Mohammed Ismail's home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it may or may not be true.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they called Weinstein and said, is this you?
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And he basically said, well, you know, I'm not saying it's not me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's essentially what he said.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so, you know, obviously that's taking a page right out of political campaign books.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's an extreme version.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is this sort of campaigning happening on a smaller scale, too, maybe in a less negative fashion?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, the whole idea is to build a narrative around your movie or around your actor or your writers or whatever that people feel like they want to vote for it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The same way with a political candidate, you want to say, you know, this guy's from outside the establishment and he's going to come in and he's going to change things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or like this person overcame the odds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These are things people resonate with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Movies do the same thing every single year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The best story about the best story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, the best story about the best story.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And these fit different archetypes.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: We have, you know, here's the underdog film that might just make it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or here's the movie that, you know, we're going to give you the values that you want to be part of.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or here is a movie that, you know, embodies what it is to experience the power of art.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All these different things are archetypes that really work on Oscar voters.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Let's take it to present day.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: I mean, what are the best stories about stories we have this year, The Underdog and all the rest?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this year, one great underdog story is Parasite.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You might say, how's that in Underdog?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I feel like I've been hearing about it all year.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: But it's the first Korean film to ever get nominated for Best International Feature.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Formerly foreign language feature.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And if it wins Best Picture, it would be the first movie not in English to win in that category, which is a huge deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ever?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ever in the history of the Oscars.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: One thing they did very smartly to create a narrative around it is they released it into just, I think, one or two theaters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in New York, the big news was Parasite is sold out all weekend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: South Korean dark comedy thriller Parasite opens in theaters today and it's already a box office smash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming to be quite popular.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People waited in the long line outside the IFC Center in the village tonight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was at one of those sold-out shows at the IFC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and people thought, oh my goodness, like, I must see this movie that everyone is going to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a great, great way to light a fire underneath your movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's a great movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People really liked it, and so word of mouth was very helpful there.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: But that's an underdog.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, on the other hand, which is Tarantino, came out actually the same day at Cannes as Parasite did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it has a totally different narrative attached to it, which is that this is a film about Hollywood, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is almost a love letter to how Hollywood used to be to an older age.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello, everybody.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Alan Kincaid on the set of the exciting hit NBC and Screen Gems television series, Bounty Law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, it's a movie about kind of one kind of acting giving way to another kind of acting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, if you think you're seeing double, don't adjust your television sets because, well, In a way, you are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Especially for Hollywood people who feel like their industry is changing right now with the advent of streaming and things like that, it feels like that's a movie that kind of taps into a feeling they're having, too, of nostalgia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We also have movies like, for instance, 1917, which if I was allowed to place bets, that's probably the one that I would bet on as Best Picture winner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Deliver this to Colonel McKenzie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is a direct order to call off tomorrow morning's attack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you don't, we will lose two battalions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 1,600 men, your brother among them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a movie that's kind of a very classic Hollywood film about, like, courage in the face of war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You think you can get there in time?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, sir.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: The idea of, like, someone persevering and overcoming the odds, this has always done really well at the Oscars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People just really like those kinds of movies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: And you might say the same thing about The Irishman, potentially, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, here's another movie from arguably, you know, the master of American cinema, Martin Scorsese.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It replicates a lot of what's been popular about his work for a really long time and kind of puts a new spin on it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is how you dress in Florida?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a suit?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For a meeting?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anywhere. Florida, Timbuktu, I dress in a suit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For a meeting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the reason that one might be kind of coasting in not at the position it hopes in the rankings is that it's a Netflix movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's still a large contingent of Hollywood that thinks Netflix is trying to kill Hollywood and that it's killing the theatrical experience.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, the whole time I was watching The Irishman, I was just thinking, this is great, but I'd love it more as a coffee table book.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I have a coffee table book for you, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, you keep it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's worth $80.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder with a movie like The Irishman you got someone like Joe Pesci who like came out of retirement out of his like you know Pesci cave to make this movie for his buddy Martin Scorsese.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can see that dude engaging in the Oscar campaign engaging in the narrative getting out there telling the story to win an award.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does that happen?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do people ever say like man, this isn't for me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't even want to do this.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: Yeah, they do.
--:-- Alissa Wilkinson: I mean, Pesci actually has gotten the nomination in spite of that, but I think that's because he's a larger than life person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But yeah, not all actors love being on the road all the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's exhausting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's several months of just going to awards dinners every night, maybe listening to yourself lose to the same person every night.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that can sometimes sink their chances.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There were stories last year about, you know, Bradley Cooper just not loving that kind of a limelight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that widely is considered to be one of the reasons, you know, he didn't end up doing as well with the stars born as he wants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, is it a bad thing, the campaigning?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, is there a better way to do this or is this just the nature of the beast?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everyone still wants an Oscar, I guess, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everyone wants an Oscar because they want to keep working.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And an Oscar really makes it more possible for you to keep working because an Oscar winner gets hired, right, or even an Oscar nominee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the other hand, you know, the campaign is kind of distasteful to a lot of people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Academy likes to keep up this fiction that it doesn't actually happen, that this is, oh, these are people just going around and sort of going to parties, and they're winning on the merits.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's better if we remember that people are winning partly because they campaign really well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the end of the day, I think everyone maybe wishes that the genie had never been let out of the bottle, but it has happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And unless the rules are really tightened, it will probably continue to go the way it is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And like the Academy isn't changing anytime soon, which means movies like Little Women or female directors like Greta Gerwig might just suffer under the weight of this sort of old guard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that at some point a critical mass will be reached where enough of the Academy looks at a movie like Little Women and sees that, hey, this is actually a genius movie, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is great writing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just because all of the characters in this film are women doesn't mean that it's not for men.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that does not seem to be what's happening right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's going to take a while.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, once you're in the academy, you're basically in for life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it's going to take a long time for the composition to change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This whole time we've been talking about the big categories, the big movies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about those little ones?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the break, how David got Goliath to notice he even existed.
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--:-- Marshall Curry: I'm Marshall Curry, and I am a director.
--:-- Marshall Curry: I directed the short live-action fiction film, The Neighbor's Window, which is up for an Oscar this year.
--:-- Marshall Curry: You've been to a few Academy Award ceremonies.
--:-- Marshall Curry: Is that fair?
--:-- Marshall Curry: Yep, that's right.
--:-- Marshall Curry: So this will be my fourth, but the first for fiction.
--:-- Marshall Curry: So I've had two feature length documentaries that were nominated and one short documentary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, I mean, most of this episode, we've been talking about the big campaigns that people like, you know, Harvey Weinstein have run and big studios.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like your experience might be slightly different, but I still have to ask, like, do you still run a campaign for, you know, best short, best documentary short, stuff like that?
--:-- Marshall Curry: Yeah, I mean, so my first film came out in 2005, 2006.
--:-- Marshall Curry: It was called Street Fight.
--:-- Marshall Curry: It was about Cory Booker's first run for mayor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I remember that.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And that year we were up against March of the Penguins, which had made more money than any movie up for Best Picture that year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I remember that too.
--:-- Marshall Curry: We had a screening in New York.
--:-- Marshall Curry: We hosted a screening in LA.
--:-- Marshall Curry: I remember sort of putting my pennies together and buying a quarter page ad, a four-year consideration ad that a friend of mine who's a graphic designer designed for me.
--:-- Marshall Curry: In the documentary edition of The Hollywood Reporter and in Variety.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And I thought, like, wow, that's a real campaign.
--:-- Marshall Curry: I, like, cut it out later and stuck it in my scrapbook as this was my campaign.
--:-- Marshall Curry: But, of course, when I got that edition in the mail, I saw that March of the Penguins had bought the entire cover.
--:-- Marshall Curry: Oh, no.
--:-- Marshall Curry: I just thought, oh, well, I did my part.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what did you do after your March of the Penguins experience?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because you got nominated again after that, right?
--:-- Marshall Curry: Right.
--:-- Marshall Curry: Last year, I had a short documentary that was nominated, and it was called A Night at the Garden.
--:-- Marshall Curry: It was only seven minutes long.
--:-- Marshall Curry: It's the shortest film nominated for an Oscar in like 50 years I think people were saying
--:-- Marshall Curry: And it is all archival footage of a Nazi rally that filled Madison Square Garden in 1939
--:-- Marshall Curry: At this rally 20 New Yorkers arrived carrying American flags
--:-- Marshall Curry: They said the Pledge of Allegiance.
--:-- Marshall Curry: I pledge undivided allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And there was a huge 30-foot portrait of George Washington with swastikas on either side of him.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And there were swastikas all over the room.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And the leader takes the stage.
--:-- Marshall Curry: You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail.
--:-- Marshall Curry: He attacks the press for lying about him, and he tells the audience that we need to take back America from the minorities who are destroying it.
--:-- Marshall Curry: We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And a protester runs out on stage and gets beaten up.
--:-- Marshall Curry: While the crowd laughs and cheers.
--:-- Marshall Curry: It felt weirdly contemporary.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And so the entire film is just this archival footage with no commentary, no interviews.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And for that, we decided that we would buy a 30-second television ad on Sean Hannity's show.
--:-- Marshall Curry: It was only archival footage of the rally, and then at the end it says, it can happen here for your consideration.
--:-- Marshall Curry: But the Washington Post wrote a story about the fact that we had bought the ad.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And the CEO of Fox News must have seen that story because she personally intervened and killed our ad from being allowed to run on Sean Hannity's show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And she made a big mistake, which is that she told the booker of the ad that she had personally rejected it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And so suddenly it became a huge story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is it about America's history that Fox News doesn't want Sean Hannity's viewers to know?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is it about this story that's so frightening that they're going to turn down an ad?
--:-- Marshall Curry: So we took it to CNN, we took it to NBC, both of whom happily accepted the ad and aired it.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And it became a story with hundreds of news stories about the fact that Sean Hannity's show and Fox News' CEO had personally rejected this thing from being allowed to be shown on Fox News.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow, so this is like a real, like, advertising coup for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was crazy.
--:-- Marshall Curry: I mean, it turned a very small ad buy into, you know, 10,000 times as much publicity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fox News has rejected a national ad for the Oscar-nominated anti-Nazi documentary Short, A Night at the Garden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But The Hollywood Reporter has learned that a Fox News ad sales representative said network leadership deemed it inappropriate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you have any idea why, like, a Fox executive reached in to personally reject your ad?
--:-- Marshall Curry: I think that they recognized that we were trying to warn Hannity's viewers that in 1939, there were demagogues who were attacking the press and cheering violence against protesters and scapegoating minorities and wrapping all of this stuff in patriotism.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And I think Hannity is an enabler of that kind of demagoguery today.
--:-- Marshall Curry: So I was trying to go around him to speak directly to his audiences.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And I think the people at Fox, the CEO of Fox, recognized that and didn't want us to speak to his audiences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By your own measure, did that really work as a campaign?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you get more people watching your short documentary?
--:-- Marshall Curry: A ton.
--:-- Marshall Curry: I mean, the film was online, so you could just see the numbers explode.
--:-- Marshall Curry: And I think it also helped us, you know, with the Academy.
--:-- Marshall Curry: We didn't end up winning, but I heard from lots of people that they had heard on NPR.
--:-- Marshall Curry: They'd heard on CNN and MSNBC and places like that about the controversy, and it had made them watch the film, and they saw the relevance in it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I hope you win it this time around.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'll be paying extra attention this year during the best live action short film category, and I'll be listening for the name Marshall Curry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks, thanks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nice to talk with you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know what they say, fourth time's a charm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that what they say on the charm?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Academy Award for Best Daily News Podcast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're impossible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Come on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Daily.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is The Daily's first nomination and first award.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So why now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, no, no.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm sorry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm sorry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a mistake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, you guys won Best Podcast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm afraid they read the wrong thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, Best Daily News Podcast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained's first nomination and first award.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can't even believe I'm saying your name on the stage right now, Breakmaster.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you to Afim.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is our dream Shapiro.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We did it, brother.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Jillian Weinberger, who's always been there for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, man.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know I'm forgetting someone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cecilia Lay, thank you for having our back throughout this entire project.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to everyone at the Vox Media Podcast Network, I know you're staying up extra late to watch this on the East Coast, but we did it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now go to sleep.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: See you guys back at work on Monday
