Hello and welcome to Little Build Men, the award season podcast from Vanity Fair and Panoply.

I'm Richard Lawson, Vanity Affairs film critic,

filling in for our usual host Katie Rich,

but she's on vacation.

But I am joined by Mike Hogan, our digital director.

Hey Richard.

And Joanna Robinson, our senior director. Hey Richard. And Joanna Robinson, our senior writer.

Hi Richard.

So it's kind of, we're in these weird dog days of August

where not a whole lot is happening.

You know, we were able to talk about Detroit which is sort of

Oscar last week but now we really have to kind of wait until the film festivals get rolling

in Venice and tell you right but you know month away it's really crazy soon what is that

schedule it's like is it tell you right first then Venice in Toronto or concurrent no

Venice starts because Venice is really long so that starts and then

couple days later telly rights starts and then Toronto happens and Venice

overlaps with Toronto a little bit so some people do this crazy they're like like I think American Airlines runs of Venice to Toronto like flight during that.

So people like do that crazy thing.

Oh right because don't people people go from Venice to Toronto and then if they win something they got to go back to

Venice to accept yeah yeah I mean that's fine it's a good reason to have to go back

to Italy. What a nightmare, a leftover whatever they call them. But there is something kind of in the news that's at least

tangentially related to us speaking of nightmares which is this HBO

...