Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to the 504th episode of The Hollywood Reporters

Awards Chatter Podcasts, I'm the host Scott Feinberg, and my guest today is probably

the world's most famous living film critic.

For many people, he was the internet movie database before the advent of the internet.

The author of more than a dozen important books on film, he is best known for the exhaustive

movie guide that he updated dozens of times between 1969 and 2014, on the cover of which

appeared his bearded and vespectacled face and his name above the title from 1986 on,

and which the New York Times described in 1996 as the go-to choice for both film geeks

and casual couch potatoes, and in 1997 as the Bible of American cinephiles.

He also reviewed movies and interviewed just about every major filmmaker and star in

front of a massive national television audience as the on-air film critic for entertainment

tonight between 1982 and 2012.

He is someone who even the most casual movie buff came to know, he made a cameo in

Gremlins II, he was mentioned on an episode of The Simpsons, his guide was referenced

on an episode of The Sopranos and in the film Greenberg, and he read clues on Jeopardy,

but he always maintained his cred with serious cinephiles as well.

Perhaps the only film critic who has ever been invited to become a member of the Academy

of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he is also a longtime member and two-time past president

of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, a voting member of the National Film Registry,

and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

As the Los Angeles Times once wrote, Los Angeles has no lack of film critics, but there isn't

one who is more respected and admired than he is.

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