Thank you again for joining me another week for it's a numbers game with Ryan Gurduski.

I want to ask you to like and subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast, the IHeartRadio app.

And I want to start this week by just acknowledging and taking a second for the horrible airline tragedy in Washington, D.C. that occurred.

A lot of people lost their lives, and I hope that you can keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

With all the heavy news that came out in January, I want to talk with something lighter and look towards February.

It's our shortest month. It's Black History Month, President's Day, Valentine's Day. But it's a really big month for pop culture.

February starts off with the Grammy Awards on February 2nd, which is the highest prize for music artists.

Then they have the Super Bowl, the week after. And then at the very beginning of March, which is technically still February since it's the shortest month, you have the Academy Awards.

So I thought we'd take a break from politics for one week and look at pop culture. Kicking off the show this week is my

first guest, River Page. River is a reporter for the free press. He wrote a fantastic review of

the Oscar-nominated movie Amelia Perez. And I thought I'd have them on for some pop culture topics. River,

thanks for being on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ryan. So I want to start off with talking

about the Academy Awards, which you wrote about, which are March 2nd, as I said. And for those of the people

who, like, haven't been following, there's 10 nominees for Best Picture. They are Anura, the

brutalist, a complete unknown,

Conclave, June, Amelia Perez, I'm still here, the nickel boys, the substance, and wicked.

Now, because this is a data podcast, I want to start off with a piece of data. Of the 10 movies

that have been nominated for Best Picture, they have made a total of $1.7 billion worldwide.

But that's only because two movies, Wicked and Doom Part 2, made $1.4 billion.

That's really not a lot of money for, like, movies.

So my first question with you is like, why is the Academy so heavily, like, nominating a bunch of art house movies that not a lot of people are watching?

Well, they've sort of always done this.

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