Welcome to Critical Darlings, a conversation about the award season conversation.

One contender at a time.

Please welcome to this stage, your hosts, Richard Lawson and Alison Wilmore.

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.

People Brazil. Yeah, Ben. People of Brazil.

Yeah. Gooden. Gooden talk to you.

We're mainly today going to be talking about the secret agent, but also international films, their presence in America, in the box office, and at the Oscars.

I'll get into a little Berlin talk from, I was just at that film festival. But before we do that, we should acknowledge that this week, the legendary Robert Duval died at the ripe old age of 95.

I was asked by Rolling Stone to contribute a little blurb for 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. But obviously, that's not one of it. But he's really good in it.

Yeah, no, he definitely is. And of course, because we do talk awards here, let us reduce that legendary career to a series of Oscar nominations.

It was impressive.

And one win.

Do you know what the win was for?

I feel like it's not maybe the one you would expect.

Is it for Great Santini?

No.

Tender mercies.

Tender mercies.

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