Culture Gabfest - The Rock Goes for the Oscar Edition
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 October 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s show, our fighters Steve, Julia, and Dana enter the ring to tussle over The Smashing Machine, the Dwayne Johnson vehicle directed by Benny Safdie. Can they smell what the Rock is cooking? Is it a subtly modulated performance about a sensitive pro UFC fighter? Or, a shameless Oscar play?
Next, it’s on to the offbeat climes of Tulsa, Oklahoma by way of The Lowdown, a shaggy noir series created by Sterlin Harjo and starring Ethan Hawke. Finally, they gaze into the uncanny eyes of Tilly Norwood, the A.I. beauty that launched a thousand think pieces and a Hollywood freakout.
On an exclusive bonus episode for Slate Plus subscribers, the panel unburies an old hatchet to discuss Elizabeth Gilbert’s newest memoir.
Email us your thoughts at culturefest@slate.com.
Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch. Production assistance by Daniel Hirsch.
Endorsements
Dana: The N+1 essay "Large Language Muddle" and Isaac Butler's deep dive on Daniel Day-Lewis in Slate.
Julia: Walking in Coal Oil Point Natural Reserve.
Steve: James Meek's essay in The London Review of Books "Computers that want things" and the novel Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard (and welcomes listener suggestions for what else to read by Bernhard).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Best, The Rock, goes for the Oscar edition. |
| 0:15.8 | It's Wednesday, October 8th, 2025. |
| 0:19.1 | On today's show, The Smashing Machine is a biopic about the pioneering |
| 0:22.9 | ultimate fighter Mark Kerr. It stars Dwayne the Rock Johnson, whose delicately layered performance, |
| 0:29.1 | arguably places him in the Oscar mix. Also stars Emily Blunt as his wife. It's directed by |
| 0:34.5 | Benny Safty. And then Hulu FX gives us a shaggy, craggy, |
| 0:38.8 | Ethan Hawke in a shaggy-craggy dog mystery, the lowdown from the creator of the marvelous |
| 0:43.7 | reservation dogs. Finally, she's so pretty. She's so perky and promising. She's so |
| 0:50.3 | non-existent and nauseating and terrifying. She's Tilly Norwood, who's being hawked as the first |
| 0:57.0 | AI actress, too much backlash, which we will discuss. But joining me first are two people |
| 1:03.1 | who've laughed at a joke already in the course of making the show. So today I love you. |
| 1:08.7 | It's Julia Derner of the Ananburg school of journalism at USC uh hey Julia |
| 1:14.5 | hello and Dana Stevens the film critic for Slate hey Dana hello nauseatingly non-existent |
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... |
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