Introducing Critical Darlings

Blank Check with Griffin & David

Blank Check Productions / Talkhouse

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

4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2026

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome to Critical Darlings, a new podcast miniseries from Blank Check: A conversation about the awards season conversation, one contender at a time. On Critical Darlings, critics and Blank Check alumni Richard Lawson and Alison Willmore guide you through the state of the Oscars race, from the precursors, to the campaigns, to the nominees themselves. To get things started, we begin with a discussion of the festival circuit and the curious state of this year's race; where many promising films have floundered upon their public release. Sidebars include the host's Oscar history, watching festival features on no sleep, Brazilian film Twitter, The Oscars on Youtube, Leonardo DiCaprio at Cannes, and Allison's shocking Il Postino experiment. Critical Darlings is crashing the Blank Check feed every Thursday through the end of Oscar season. Starting next week we'll have video clips to share produced by our friends at Vulture, stay tuned. Subscribe to Richard's newsletter, Premiere Party, and read Alison's work at Vulture. 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. Follow @blankcheckpod on Twitter, Instagram, Threads and Facebook! Buy some real nerdy merch Connect with other Blankies on our Reddit or DiscordFor 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 Allison Wilmore.
0:26.1	Thank you, thank you. Hello, Allison.
0:28.8	Such an honor. It's such a pleasure.
0:30.1	It is an honor and a pleasure, and I want to talk about why we're here.
0:32.6	But first of all, can I just say how strong my commitment is to this brand new endeavor?
0:40.3	Just before we sat down to record i received from hbo the screener of the season finale of heated rivalry and it is burning a hole in my
0:45.7	inbox and i have to endure a long talk about movies before i can watch my favorite tv show ever made
0:52.6	i'm i'm very thankful for your sacrifice here.
0:56.3	I can't believe you didn't immediately catch quote unquote COVID and then have to reschedule.
1:01.9	But I really appreciate your being here, Richard, and not watching your prestige television smut.
1:08.1	Oh, yeah, well, I'll get to it eventually.
1:10.3	And, you know, I think you and I both,
1:13.1	I don't know, we've sacrificed a lot for movies over the years, over the years that we've known
1:17.0	each other even. Yeah, I mean, certainly any sense of financial stability or maybe, you know,
1:25.8	retirement plan, you know, a social life, really.
1:29.4	Well, a lot of evenings.
1:30.5	A lot of evenings are given up to being in Lincoln Square, AMC, or whatever.
1:35.1	But, you know, this is going to be how we get rich, finally, is this podcast in which, you know,
1:40.0	this season we're going to cover awards movies, particularly the critical darlings of the season.
1:46.2	But I'm sure we'll branch out into other topics as is the blank check brand.
	...

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