Hello, everyone. Welcome to a linoleum knife special. This is a thing that Dave and I love to do every year, and we usually do it in January, but, you know, the world got in the way.

Hip surgery. Yeah. So anyway, so here it is March, and let's just say, let's just say it's our Oscar preview, whether or not we talk about the Oscars at all, whatever. But we're thrilled to have joining us today.

Our dear friend Robert Abelie from the Los Angeles Times, our dear friend Justin Chang,

newly minted New Yorker film critic, Manola Dargis, veteran of the New York Times,

Peter DeBroouges, veteran of variety.

Welcome, everybody.

Thank you.

So, I mean, all right, just to, actually, before we get rolling,

we had a loss this week in the, in the film community,

the legendary film historian, uh god what the names

fly out of my head when i need them david wardwell david wardwell passed away this week and manola

justin i knew you guys knew him somewhat well at least compared to the rest of us i let manola go first

she knew him best of any of us.

Yes. I met David, well, I knew about David just from reading him, and I actually started

reading him outside of school. I had come to him after I started writing professionally,

and I had been really under the sway of a lot of very heavy-duty theory when I had

been in graduate school the first time.

And I was looking for a different way and into movies.

And I found a book called The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and Mode of Production

to 1960, written in the 1980s by Bordwell, Janet Steiger, and then Bordwell's wife and long-time collaborator,

Kristen Thompson. It is one of the great books that you can possibly read about the movie

industry, again, the classical Hollywood cinema. It is a brilliant, brilliant book. And one of

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