What's Up With the Oscars and Blockbusters?

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This week on Vulture's Pop Culture Podcast, we're back with the story of Sarah Baldwin. She was given the assignment of looking into the history of a death row inmate named James Bernard Belter. The mitigation specialist learned that his family had migrated from Jacksonville up to Brooklyn as part of the broader great migration of Black Americans in the 1950s and 60s. We'll also look at why it's been very unlikely for a big megabox office hit to win Best Picture at the Oscars.

Should past trauma prevent a convicted killer from being executed? The Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah reports on “mitigation specialists” who try to save the lives of death row inmates by investigating their histories.

This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matt Collette, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King.

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