Critical Darlings: The 2026 Oscars Ceremony with Griffin Newman

Blank Check with Griffin & David

Blank Check Productions / Talkhouse

Tv & Film, Film Reviews, Society & Culture, Comedy

4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2026

⏱️ 115 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s Critical Darlings’ biggest morning! After a marathon season, we react to this year’s Academy Awards: the winners, losers, presenters, performances, and awkward play-offs. One Battle After Another and Sinners nearly split the ballot with One Battle and Paul Thomas Anderson taking the biggest prizes in Best Director and Best Picture, while Sinners took home Best Actor, Score, Adapted Screenplay, and Cinematography. But for as many questions as the ceremony answered, it raised more: Do Sinners and Amy Madigan’s wins signal a shift in how the Academy sees horror? What exactly is the Best Casting Oscar tracking? Are we now doomed to see Timmy eat a raw elk in an Iñárritu film? As part of this special episode, we also check in with Critical Darlings fashion correspondent Ben “The Other Ben” Hosley on this year's Oscars fashion, review the best popcorn buckets of the year with Vulture’s Rebecca Alter, and reveal the future of Critical Darlings. ✨Subscribe to our new feed in your podcast player of choice, and join us next week for Project Hail Mary!✨ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/critical-darlings/id1885681327Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/60n6Z9BUUMUR81CQoHbE8bPocket Casts: https://pca.st/1beh8dxuAmazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a3598b5c-6f4a-4819-9457-44082cfea1fc/critical-darlings 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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Critical Darling's, a conversation about the award season conversation.
0:13.0	One contender at a time.
0:17.0	Please welcome to this stage, your hosts, Richard Lawson and Alison Wilmore.
0:26.1	Marie Barty, thank you so much for that wonderful introduction coming to us via satellite from London at this time.
0:33.3	We are joined again by our wonderful producer, Ben Frisch. Hello, Ben.
0:37.3	Good morning. And our special guest, Griffin Newman, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. All four of us watch the Oscars together. Yes. Which is the first for all of us, right? I normally watch it, you know, just on my couch at home at home at this point. Yeah. Stay tuned to the end of the episode. We're going to have an announcement about the future of Critical Darlings. And also, throughout this episode, we had Ben Frisch recording during our viewing party of the Oscars. And you're going to hear some special, I don't know, correspondent bits from Blank Check Universe's own Ben Hosley. So keep an ear out for those.
1:12.6	And near the end of the episode, we're going to be doing a popcorn bucket review,
1:16.4	both for the Oscars popcorn buckets and for just some of the best, brightest popcorn buckets with Rebecca Alter.
1:27.1	But Allison, what's your big question about this year's Oscars?
1:31.3	You know, I wanted to bring us back to my recurring question.
1:35.3	How real is this award ceremony? How real are the Oscars?
1:40.3	And why do we care, I guess, is the essential question.
1:45.5	We've spent hours now
1:47.4	talking about films
1:48.8	in the context of the Oscars.
1:51.0	Pretty, I mean, it's pretty high.
1:52.5	There were some significant things
1:54.0	happening last night,
1:55.2	like the first woman to ever win
1:57.2	the cinematography Oscar.
1:59.2	Michael B. Jordan,
2:00.2	joining a very small class of Black, you know, best lead actor winners.
	...

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