Welcome to Critical Darlings, a new podcast miniseries from Blank Check: A conversation about the awards season conversation, one contender at a time.

On Critical Darlings, critics and Blank Check alumni Richard Lawson and Alison Willmore guide you through the state of the Oscars race, from the precursors, to the campaigns, to the nominees themselves. To get things started, we begin with a discussion of the festival circuit and the curious state of this year's race; where many promising films have floundered upon their public release. Sidebars include the host's Oscar history, watching festival features on no sleep, Brazilian film Twitter, The Oscars on Youtube, Leonardo DiCaprio at Cannes, and Allison's shocking Il Postino experiment.

Critical Darlings is crashing the Blank Check feed every Thursday through the end of Oscar season. Starting next week we'll have video clips to share produced by our friends at Vulture, stay tuned.

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