Hi, I'm Kim Masters. Thanks for listening to the business podcast. You know, KCRW produces another podcast that you might want to check out. My frequent banter buddy, Michael Schneider, hosts it. It's called the spinoff. It's about television, industry insights and trends and shows that we watch or shows that we don't. Find the spinoff on KCRW's iTunes page.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.

You have to understand that not everything is going to work, that you can bring all of the

greatest talents in the world together and still produce a turkey.

That will happen, but that should not stop you from taking risks.

Kevin Spacey is an Oscar-winning actor who's carving his own path.

He put Netflix on the map for original programming with House of Cards.

Today we'll revisit a conversation from earlier this year when Spacey self-financed and

self-released a documentary and shared compelling ideas about the business.

But first on an all-new Hollywood news banter, Oscar season, the best picture race still stubbornly fails to gel.

Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.

I'm joined by my partner in banter, Matt Bellany of the Hollywood Reporter.

Hello, Matt.

Hi there.

So, Matt, we are going to kind of be a little bit evergreen since we're taping during the holidays.

And so we're going to hope that we don't have one of those big news dumps. We're going to talk a little bit more generally about the status of awards season, which, no, it's well along. And by now we usually have a really great sense of maybe one picture that's destined to win or the top two. And this year, I don't know about you. For a lot of people, I think it is the mushyest year in recent memory. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of films that people like.

There are few, if any, films that people absolutely love. Yeah, there have been films that have

come out that are obviously in the conversation. Boyhood came out some while ago. That's the

film for Richard Linklater with the cast that was shot over 12 years. Obviously, it's been in the

conversation from the start. The imitation game, which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing,

who broke the Enigma Code and was then persecuted for being gay. That is in the conversation.

The Theory of Everything, which is the biopic of Stephen Hawking,

...