Hello, this is Everything Else, the Culture Podcast from The Financial Times.

Who are you, John?

Sorry, I'm Rusty, I've been away. My name's John Sonia.

Okay, and my name is Griselda Murray Brown, and we're both culture editors here at the FD. John, you've been on holiday for a very long time. I know. I tried to download the podcast from India, but it said it would take 36 hours to download because the internet was so crap. Not even you are that dedicated to listen. I wasn't. So I listened to it when I got back, and yeah, very much enjoyed it. But yeah, happy to be back. Good, well, happy to have you back. How was your trip? Really good. Did you find enlightenment? Yeah, namaste. I'm a changed man. Namaste. I went to find myself. Shanty, shanty. I watched lots of bad films on the plane, but I've been catching up very quickly since I've been back. So

what, Griselda, introduce what we're going to be talking about today. This week, we are

talking about the Oscar nominations, which have just been announced. And we're also going to be

talking about the Academy and whether it's doing enough to tackle the diversity problem that it has.

Is this the year of Oscars not quite so white? Yeah, there have been three big films,

Moonlight Fences and Hidden Figures which have prominent black actors in, a couple of whom might

win big awards. And black directors? Yeah. So are things changing? We will discuss all of that.

Later on in the show, we'll be talking to the British artist Idris Khan. He's best known for his photographs, but he hates being labelled as a photographer.

Okay, so with Griselda and I in the studio today is Raphael Abraham.

He's a cultural journalist at FT Weekend and writes a lot about film.

Thanks for joining us, Ruff.

Thanks very much. Good to be here.

And I thought we'd kickstart our discussion about the Oscars with La La Land, which has had a record equaling 14 nominations at the Oscars. It's a romantic comedy and Griselda, you've got a clip we're going to hear. A romantic comedy and musical, we should say. Yeah, that's quite important, it's a's a musical. It's a musical. It's definitely a musical of sorts. So let's listen to a clip. This comes from early in the film. The Emma Stone character, Mia, and the Ryan Gosling character, Seb, are early in their courtship. She's an actor, he's a jazz musician, a pianist, and they're both sort of struggling-ish to make it in Hollywood. I got a call back. What? Come on. For what? For a TV show? The one I was telling you about earlier. The Dangerous Minds meets the OC? Yeah. Congratulations. That's incredible. I feel like I said negative stuff about it before. What? It's like Rebel Without a Cause, sort of. I got the bullets. Yes. You've never seen it. I've never seen it. Oh my. You know it's playing at the Rialto. Really? Yes. You should, I mean, I'll go, I can take you. Okay. You know, for research. For research. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Monday night, 10 o'clock. Yeah, great. Okay. For research. So, Raph, let's start with you. What did you make of La La Land? I enjoyed it very much. I think it's a really wonderful piece of entertainment. I saw it back at its early screening at the Venice Film Festival and with a massive auditorium full of people. And there was a real expectation about what this film was going to be like because I think a lot of us absolutely loved whiplash Damien Chazel's previous film.

Yeah.

There was a lot of expectation for this one.

And it was a room of slightly jaded journalists and industry people.

And sort of from the big first opening number, everyone was absolutely swept up by it.

And it sort of erupted in applause at the end of the first

scene, which doesn't happen that often.

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