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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bienkule. We're counting down to the Academy Awards.

The film Holdovers is nominated for five Oscars

including Best Picture, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, and Best Actor

for Paul Giamotti. He's already won a golden globe for best actor in a comedy.

Our producer Sam Brigger spoke with Giamotti last month. Here's Sam.

In the holdover is Paul Giamotti plays a pompous and lonely classics professor named

Paul Hunnam at a New England boarding school for boys in 1970. He's almost universally

disliked by other faculty members and by students because of his impossibly high academic standards and merciless grading.

The students also mock him behind his back because he has a lazy eye and bad body odor. The body odor is

uncontrollable, the result of a rare disease commonly known as fish odor

syndrome, but he doesn't do himself any favors in the way he treats the students, as he does here in this scene, handing out his students graded final exams.

I can tell by your faces that many of you are shocked at the outcome.

I, on the other hand, am not because I have had the misfortune of teaching you this semester,

and even with my ocular limitations, I witnessed firsthand your glazed uncomprehending expressions.

Sir, I don't understand.

That's glaringly apparent.

No, it's...

I can't fail this class.

Oh, don't sell yourself short, Mr Coates.

I truly believe that you can.

...