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Hello, I'm Stephen Metcalfe and welcome to the Slate Culture Gab Fest Public Discussed Edition.

This is the Slate Daily podcast for February 25, 2009.

Today we'll be discussing, inevitably inevitably the Academy Awards, somewhat less

inevitably, Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party, Octomomom, and the backlash against a juice

carton. Our sponsor for this, as with all our podcasts, is audible.com. Joining me today are

Julia Turner, Slate's deputy editor. Julia, hello. Hi, Steve. And Julia Turner, Slate's deputy editor.

Julia, hello.

Hi, Steve.

And Dana Stevens, Slate's film critic, Dana.

How are you?

Dana, let's plunge right in by not plunging right in.

Let's start meta instead of talking about disappointments and surprises at the Oscars.

Let's talk about what it's like to be a film critic to have this loom on your horizon the entire year and then have it rush upon you like some

unbidden, horrible storm, and then it passes through. Do you feel good or used up and bored?

Where are you in the sort of trite cycle of overattention that we devote to this thing called the Academy Awards? I think I have exactly enough juice left to touch back on our juice topic. I have just enough juice to get me through this podcast. One more podcast. Enjoyably. I will enjoy discussing the Oscars with you guys. But then I just, I'm not even going to say a word starting with O for the next 11 months. I mean, the level of Oscar exegesis has now been performed. I mean, not just by me, but by the media in the past couple months since the nominations came out. It's just really kind of at an absurd extreme. I think recently in my slate dialogue about the Oscars with our TV critic, Troy Patterson, I compared this to what campaign season is for a politician. It's like this part of the year that now has basically grown to take up a quarter of the year or so. If you start from the sort of the big Oscar release movies coming out, November, December, January is the nominations. February is the actual Oscars. They used to be in March, in fact, so it used to be even longer. So a third of the year is taken up with this Oscar race. It's sort of what a

campaign season is to a politician. Yeah. Well, the winner of the Academy Award, Julia, doesn't bear the

burden of actually governing, but they do bear the burden of not living up in posterity to the pomp

and circumstance of being given this award, at least in many circumstances. So I'll go try.

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