Cillian Murphy has nothing to fear between now and the Oscars except Paul Giamatti, and after the last two weeks of award shows I don’t think that’s a small exception.

We’ve had a slew of them. The Golden Globes, the Hollywood Critics Association, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Emmys, all stacked on top of each other because the strikes pushed everything out of its normal season. That’s why it’s been so confusing. The Bear is a good example: it’s picking up awards for season one while season two is already sitting there. Mrs. Know-It-All had to remind me during the Emmys why the dates felt wrong.

So Mrs. Know-It-All and I sat down and went through the highlights. We’re not covering every category. There are plenty of people online who’ve done that. These are the things we found interesting, and what they could mean for the Oscars, which are still far enough away that all of us movie fans can complain from now until then.

The Critics Choice Awards Knew What They Were

Neither of us had really sat and watched the Critics Choice Awards before, and I dug it. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t a big hullabaloo. The critics are there, they tell you what won, you accept your award and you’re done.

Compare that to the Golden Globes, which I thought were almost laughable this year, and by the way, laughable was still better than they’ve been in years past. The Globes are a great party for the actors and actresses, and if that’s what you’re into, fine. But these shows forget that people care about the actual awards and the speeches. They don’t care about the fluff, and the Critics Choice gave us very little of it. I think it’s a really good model.

Oppenheimer, and Who Could Actually Catch It

Best Picture went to Oppenheimer and Best Director went to Christopher Nolan, and neither one surprised us at all. We saw it in IMAX, the whole nine yards. I don’t think I could watch it again. It’s one of those movies where you walk out saying that was really good and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It beat Barbie and it beat Killers of the Flower Moon, which I haven’t seen yet. That one’s next on my list, and I know it’s going to be rough.

Here’s why I think it’s an excellent choice. How many biopics do you know of that bring out that much of the best in everybody involved and also had people coming in droves to see the thing?

Best Actor went to Paul Giamatti and Best Actress went to Emma Stone. Giamatti went viral because right after the Golden Globes he went to In-N-Out Burger, and he joked about it later at the Emmys. I think that’s just awesome. We put our actors and actresses up on these pedestals like they aren’t human beings, and here’s a guy who won and wanted something good to eat. He’s still one of us.

He’s also gotten several of these now. If there’s going to be an upset, if anybody can knock Cillian Murphy down, it could very well be him. I’ve got The Holdovers bookmarked on Peacock and we’re watching it before the Oscars.

That’s the nature of what we do. We don’t always get to see everything before the awards come out. So I’ve committed this year to watching more movies, and there are going to be more movie reviews on the channel, because if we want to be taken seriously as critics I feel like I have an obligation. I travel in a lot of scooper groups, for whatever that’s worth. I’m not a scooper, that’s not my thing, but I want the two of us up to date on what people are saying. None of that changes anything else here. There will still be crazy nonsense about TV series. We love TV and we’ll never leave it.

Is The Bear a Comedy?

Best Drama Series was Succession. Best Comedy Series was The Bear, and that one kind of blew my mind. We haven’t watched it yet, but everything I know says it isn’t exactly a comedy. There are funny parts in it. When you think comedy, though, you think The Big Bang Theory. I’d call Shameless a dramedy before I’d call The Bear a comedy. Mrs. Know-It-All’s read is that they’re going for dark humor, and that might be it. When we watch it, we’ll know. Brother Know-It-All says it’s worth every minute, so it’s on the list.

Then there’s the one I loved. Best Animated Series went to Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, and Best Comedy went to Barbie. Those are the two that Baby Know-It-All reviewed with me on the channel. What does this kid know that I don’t? Clearly I’m going to have to start asking her what she thinks.

I was really happy that the Critics Choice put animation on the main show. People who don’t watch animation treat it as a genre. That’s wrong. It’s a form of filmmaking, and it should be just as important to the filmmaking lexicon as anything else. You can have horror animation, action animation, sci-fi animation, fantasy animation, and lumping all of that together as one thing is irresponsible. Their animated film award went to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and it was up against some really good ones, including a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie that Mrs. Know-It-All did not expect to be as awesome as it was.

The Emmys Threw Television a Party

I had to pick Baby Know-It-All up from work right as the Emmys were starting. Don’t judge me: I had YouTube TV set up on my visor, she gets in the car, and I’m going “shh, they’re starting,” with my eyes darting back and forth while I’m trying to drive. By the time I got home I realized that probably wasn’t the safest thing in the world. Mrs. Know-It-All recorded it anyway so I wouldn’t miss the monologue.

The Emmys did amazing. It was short and concise. They punched in and punched out. I come from television. I’ve filmed two pilots and I’ve been in a writers’ room, and they paid so much homage to television that I loved it. Presenters walked out to music from old shows. At one point the Star Trek music played, and you would’ve thought there was a national alert in my house. I said shut up, everybody in the house, shut up, because I didn’t know which of the handful of people we have left was about to walk out. It was just somebody walking out to the music.

The reunions were our favorite bits. The Martin cast played right into who their characters are, and I’m sorry, Black don’t crack, because they all looked amazing. Reboot the show now. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler got to do Weekend Update, and Mrs. Know-It-All loved that they just let those two do what they do best. She was screaming for Baby Know-It-All to come downstairs for it. For me it was Ally McBeal. I loved that show. It’s one of the reasons I was excited for She-Hulk, because they said it was going to be like Ally McBeal, and it wasn’t. Seeing them do the bathroom dance like they never missed a beat got me. And the Cheers folks are still around. I’ve long said you could easily do a Cheers reboot. Sam bought the building, there’s a photo of Kirstie Alley’s character on the wall, and you’re off.

Anthony Anderson’s mama deserves all the things, every time, forever. We don’t watch a lot of network TV. What we do watch, we watch on streaming, like Hell’s Kitchen and Bob’s Burgers on Hulu. So I honestly thought they’d hired an actress to play his mom, and then they showed a promo for his game show and that is legitimately his mom. John Oliver pretty much asked to get yelled at. Somebody else saw her coming and went straight to “thank Jesus and my family,” and that was it.

The In Memoriam was really, really good. Charlie Puth sang, they ended on Matthew Perry and the Friends theme, and I’d forgotten some of the people we lost. A lot of them were young, and that blew me away.

And Christina Applegate. Her multiple sclerosis diagnosis took me totally by surprise when it came out, and I remember reading that she was going to have to step away and thinking, wow. Seeing her walk up there was an honor. I feel like I’m being condescending if I say bravely, but you get the idea. She went to the mic and she hit her joke. She was very there. She told everybody to sit down because they were making her feel bad. It set the tone for a night of seeing people we grew up with do the thing they did, right through the All in the Family callback and I Love Lucy.

About That Lowest Audience Ever

A lot of folks have pointed out that this was the lowest Emmy audience ever. You can call 4.3 million a bad showing if you’re comparing it to when the show was at its top…but people on this planet have millions upon millions of other places to go watch something. I think it’s as good as you’re going to get in this day and age. You have to read the room and play the ball where it lies.

Mrs. Know-It-All made the other half of the point. There was a football game on, and Grandpa Know-It-All watched the game first and came down after. YouTube TV records everything now, just like the old tape decks used to. I’m sure plenty of people recorded it and stayed off the internet.

The Cool Kid Choices

Three names kept winning all night: Succession for drama, The Bear for comedy and Beef for limited series. Everybody from The Bear thanked Chicago every single time they got up there, and to me that says they know they couldn’t tell that story without that city and its culture. Grandpa Know-It-All was a chef in Chicago restaurants, so we’re making big pots of popcorn and watching it.

But here’s where I start asking questions. Better Call Saul was nominated 53 times and never won. It’s been in contention so long it was losing to the first run of Game of Thrones. Dan Murrell brought this up on his recap show, and the phrase he used was that these felt like the cool kid choices, the flavor of the week. I don’t know that I believe that, because I think Succession deserves everything it gets. At the same time, are you telling me nobody in the Television Academy thought Better Call Saul was excellent? There are people who argue it’s a better show than Breaking Bad, because of how much depth it gives to what made Saul Goodman become Saul Goodman. Right now Giancarlo Esposito is lobbying for his own Gus spin-off, and I say give him one, just so the Emmys can ignore that too.

The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia cast said about the same thing from the stage. Sixteen seasons, never nominated for anything. One of the main guys finally got a nomination for Welcome to Wrexham, which is an unscripted show, and that one actually won.

Genre Showed Up, and Still Got Treated Like Genre

I’m proud of my genre shows. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds won some stuff off screen. The Last of Us was very prominent. Andor was nominated and it was on the televised show.

Mrs. Know-It-All wanted to make sure we mentioned Nick Offerman winning guest actor in a drama for The Last of Us, another one handed out off camera. Everybody needs to put their politics away on this one, because that was just good acting and a wonderful story. My best friend is the biggest critic you’ll never see, and he can fall into the “is this woke” thing sometimes. He told me he watched it, it wasn’t the episode he wished it was, and he couldn’t stop watching.

It goes back to GLAAD getting the Governors Award. Representation can be something you hit people over the head with, or it can be part of the story. During that entire episode, episode three I believe, nobody stopped to announce that these were gay people. You saw the story unfold and you understood it. Mrs. Know-It-All put it best: if you can take a scene and put it in your own life and feel it, whether it’s Andor or The Last of Us, that’s a good writer and a good actor.

So here’s my question. Diversity is the catchphrase of the day. How diverse is it when everything that wins is a drama or a dramedy and nothing can be genre? I can line up half a dozen episodes of Star Trek and Andor that were hugely dramatic. I’m not a big fan of Obi-Wan, but it had moments that deserved more than a visual effects conversation. I’ve been listening back to our old reviews while I put everything on the podcast feed, and there was great drama in those shows. But there are talking aliens or lightsabers or people being teleported, so, sorry, we can’t take you seriously.

The broadcast networks don’t help. Any time they’ve tried sci-fi they give it a season, maybe a season and a half, and cancel it. Fox was always the forward-thinking one, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and shows like it. Mrs. Know-It-All asked how Andor would’ve done on Fox, and I think it would’ve lived on FX, where the harder versions of things go. Either way, Andor did great, and its lead just said he has about two more weeks of filming on season two.

Animation Got Pushed Off Camera

This is Mrs. Know-It-All’s anger and I share it. The Emmys handed out animation off screen. In the past it’s been on the show. Rick and Morty presented once.

The nominees were strong. Bob’s Burgers was up for “The Plight Before Christmas,” which I don’t care who you are, that episode is awesome, and it makes my daughter cry every time. Rick and Morty was up for “Night Family,” which was ingenious and poignant in a way The Simpsons hasn’t been in quite a while. Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal was up for “Shadow of Fate.” Entergalactic was in there too. And it went to The Simpsons for a Treehouse of Horror.

Mrs. Know-It-All thinks the Emmys copped out because they couldn’t decide what was better, and I think it was the safe one. They deserved the nomination. Three of the others were better.

Primal is almost entirely silent. There are growls and grunts and not much else. Tartakovsky did it on purpose, as an experiment, to prove he could tell a story in animation with no dialogue, and he did it so well that I called Mrs. Know-It-All in and told her she had to watch it with me. It’s on Max. Go see it. It’ll change how you look at animation.

What the SAG Nominations Tell Us

In the past we’ve thrown full-blown Oscar parties in this house, with a red carpet and suits and ties and tiny gold statues for whoever guessed right. I still have a couple around. We may do it again this year and make a show out of it. There are wiser people who track this for a living. We just really enjoy it.

The guild nominations inform the bigger picture, and SAG-AFTRA just put theirs out. Leading male actor: Bradley Cooper for Maestro, Colman Domingo for Rustin, Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers, Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer, Jeffrey Wright for American Fiction. I’ve literally said Colman Domingo should be Kraven the Hunter. I hear Jeffrey Wright is unbelievable and I need to catch that as soon as humanly possible. But this season belongs to Giamatti so far, and that’s why I keep landing on the same sentence about Murphy.

Leading female actor: Annette Bening for Nyad, Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon, Carey Mulligan for Maestro, Margot Robbie for Barbie, Emma Stone for Poor Things. From the little bits I’ve seen, Emma Stone is acting so far against type that she could very well lock up her second, if not for Lily Gladstone, who by every account is amazing. My fear is that some people will vote out of a feeling that they have to. I just want whoever did the best work to win. If that’s Lily Gladstone, awesome, I’m down. I still think Emma Stone is the person to beat.

Supporting male actor: Sterling K. Brown, Willem Dafoe, Robert De Niro, Robert Downey Jr. and Ryan Gosling. Downey already has the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice. He’s the guy. This is his bite at the apple, and I love him and hope he does well.

SAG is about actors, so its version of Best Picture is the cast award: American Fiction, Barbie, The Color Purple, Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer. The two I still need to catch are American Fiction and Killers of the Flower Moon.

On the television side, the limited series actors are Matt Bomer for Fellow Travelers, Jon Hamm for Fargo, David Oyelowo for Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Tony Shalhoub for Mr. Monk’s Last Case and Steven Yeun for Beef. The Bass Reeves one hits me hard. When I had a production company we were in development on a Bass Reeves show. After the first episode aired, my head writer, who’s my best friend, called me and said they did what he was going to do. I told him history is history. You’re a brilliant writer, so of course they did what you were going to do. I don’t think there’s any doubt Beef takes that category, though.

Toward the end of the Emmys we were calling winners before the envelope opened, and we kept saying we got Schitt’s Creeked. We didn’t. I looked it up, and that sweep in 2020 was the first of its kind. This year it was three shows, The Bear, Beef and Succession, with The White Lotus falling in there a little.

Mrs. Know-It-All hopes the Oscars are as entertaining as the Emmys were, even if they’ll be a little stuffier. We agreed we need to watch more of these movies before the night gets here. The Oscar nominations land in the next week or two, and we’ll be back to talk about them.

So who’s right: is Paul Giamatti really the one name Cillian Murphy has to worry about, or is there somebody else on that list you think can take it? And tell me whether The Bear is a comedy. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.