Hi, this is Ben Lindbergh, and Jessica Clemens, and we are the host of Button Mash, the

Ringer's video game podcast on the Ringerverse feed. We are in the midst of the biggest blockbuster

gaming month either of us can recall. We're talking about Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros,

Alan Wake, Five Nights of Freddy's, Assassin's Creed Mirage, woo! We will have our hands full,

you can have your ears full with us talking about these wonderful video games.

On the Ringerverse feed, weekly throughout this month, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Sean Fennesy. I'm Amanda Davins. And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about the

Oscars and horror with an old pal. Later in this episode, we welcome back for his record eighth

appearance on the Big Picture writer-director, movie freak, collector of Epic Horror,

paraphernalia, Alex Ross Perry. Please stick around for my conversation with him. We did a

mailbag of sorts about Halloween, about the perilous state of Hollywood, about raising young children

in the strange world. But first, Amanda, I've been thinking about how to incentivize and raise the

stakes on this podcast, this Oscar race, and perhaps our friendship. And so I have been brainstorming,

and we've come up with something very simple and direct, but that has, I think, made us break

out into hives since I pitched this. I'm incredibly stressed out. And I was explaining it to my husband

and soliciting advice and got very stressed out when just even talking about it to a third party.

And I've, yeah, this is a terrible idea, but also a great idea.

Okay, thank you. It's 135 days until the Academy Awards. So we've seen most of the major contenders,

the odd makers. Yeah, but the ones that we haven't. Yes, that's where we'll get there. We'll get there.

And even how some of them are going, okay, go ahead, keep going.

Oddmakers and season narratives are starting to form. There is a sense of what this race is going

to look like. We've been discussing it somewhat over the last two months, but we haven't gotten

...