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The second cultural gab fest. This is the daily podcast from Slate.com for Thursday, February 28, 2008.

I'm Andy Bowers. We're back for another outing with Slate's

cultural critics. This week, they train their sights on the Oscars aftermath, the trouble

with mocking Obama, and why young Starlitz should choose their photo shoots more carefully.

Now here's your host, Stephen Metcalf. Hello, welcome to Slate's Cultural Gab Fest.

This is our second time around.

We've gotten a sufficient number of emails indicating that you didn't revile us, so we're going to try it once again.

I'm Stephen Metcalf.

We're in Slate's offices in New York City.

And with me today are Julia Turner.

Hello. Slate's culture editor.

And Dana Stevens. Hello, Dana. Slate's film critic. And today we're going to start off by

talking about the Oscars. We come late to the table on the subject. But Dana, what's left to say?

Should we start by talking about who won what?

I don't know. Maybe start off with a question of why we're still talking about it, which is not

necessarily a sign that we shouldn't be. But I mean, I feel sort of Oscared out myself after, you know,

days and days of prepping for it and watching it and writing about it and thinking about it.

But it is sort of interesting to watch the Oscar hangover roll in. And, you know, everybody, whether or not they profess to give a shit about the Oscars, ends up watching them. We'll be the hair of the dog on the Oscar. Yeah, basically. We're the Bloody Mary of two mornings after. We'll get you through the day. Yeah. My own personal feeling very quickly is just, is that the better the crop of movies, the less compelling the award season tends to be.

Does anyone feel this way that when Titanic is sort of looking for some kind of legitimacy from the award season, it somehow generates a lot of excitement?

But when movies already have that aura of legitimacy to them, as the sort of leading contenders did this year, The award season feels almost like an afterthought or anticlimactic. Any thoughts? I don't know. I was just reading the back and forth in last Sunday's Arts and Leisure between A.O. Scott, who more or less took that point of view and David Carr, their Oscar blogger and kind of Hollywood writer, who took the point of view of, you know, lighten up and enjoy it, I think was the title of his piece. I guess that was more or less Tony Scott's argument, that now that the important sort of, you know, not indies exactly, but the studio specialty division movies like No Country for Old Men, there will be blood, you know, all three of them are from a major studio, but from sort of the art-y subdivision.

Now that those movies are starting to be recognized that the Oscars are less fun, it may be true from a sort of glitz point of view that, you know, it's obviously harder to grab punchy taglines and, you know, sexy stars from movies like the ones that were up for an award this year. But I found it kind of exciting that I had real opinions and some stake in what movies would be recognized, knowing, of course, that those that I wanted to be recognized probably wouldn't. Let's stay there for one second. I want to know. Did the right movie win? Well, probably not the one I would have voted for if I were in the academy. No. But to see three or four movies that, you know, I have to agree are pretty astoundingly great on many levels, you know, be in the serious running. That was great. I mean, personally, I would have made Paul Thomas Anderson best director, but, you know, I knew he didn't have much of a shot. What do you guys think? I've been sort of surprised to see the response to the award show being like, oh, what a dud. It was so dull.

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