Critical Darlings: The Secret Agent And The Increasingly International Academy
2/19/20261 hr 33 min
Viva Brazil! Today we discuss Best Picture nominee The Secret Agent, the simmering, colorful Brazilian thriller about a man on the run, starring the dreamy Wagner Moura and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. The story, about retaining personal and political memory under authoritarianism, has proven resonant with an international audience and awards bodies, garnering three additional Oscar nominations for Best International Feature, Best Casting, and Best Actor for Moura. On this episode, we discuss The Secret Agent itself, how it fits into and subverts the tropes of international films at the Oscars, the Eurovision-like process for international nominations, check in on the Berlin Film Festival, and do a very special Il Postino corner. Sign up for Check Book, the Blank Check newsletter featuring even more “real nerdy shit” to feed your pop culture obsession. Dossier excerpts, film biz AND burger reports, and even more exclusive content you won’t want to miss out on. Join our Patreon for franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter, Instagram, Threads and Facebook! Buy some real nerdy merch Connect with other Blankies on our Reddit or Discord For anything else, check out BlankCheckPod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMarie0:00
[trumpet music] Welcome to Critical Darlings, a conversation about the award season conversation one contender at a time. Please welcome to the stage your hosts, Richard Lawson and Alison Wilmore.
Richard Lawson· Host0:24
[clapping] Marie, thank you as ever for that wonderful introduction and for being a guest on the show last week. We don't have a guest this week, but we are of course joined as always by producer Ben. Hello, Ben.
Alison Wilmore· Host0:36
Viva Brazil.
Richard Lawson· Host0:37
Oh. Guten- [laughs] ... guten tag to you. [laughs] We're mainly today gonna be talking about The Secret Agent, uh, but also international films, their presence in America in the box office and at the Oscars. Uh, I'll get into a little Berlin talk, uh, from, I was just at that film festival. Um, but before we do that, we should acknowledge that this week the legendary Robert Duvall died at the ripe old age of 95. Um, I was asked by Rolling Stone to contribute a little blurb for, like, a, my favorite of his movie performances, and embarrassingly I've seen him be great in many things, but I was like, "I think he's wonderful in Deep Impact." And they were like, "We don't want that." [laughs] [laughs] But obviously that's not one of it, but he's really good in it.
Alison Wilmore· Host1:22
Yeah. No, he definitely is.
Richard Lawson· Host1:24
Yeah.
Alison Wilmore· Host1:24
Um, and of course, um, because we do, we do talk awards here, let us reduce that legendary career- Yeah ...