The return of The Oscars, celebrating a most unusual year in cinema, deserves to be celebrated, too! And so, this week, your friends in podcasting bring back their old Oscars smackdown style show for the first time in years! There will be wagering – for stakes both ridiculous and sublime. There will be critiquing of the Oscar show itself. There will be analysis of the winners and the snubs.

The first half of this week’s show is all about the art and craft and future of podcasting! Storyteller Dave Pickering joins us from his home in Lancaster in the north of England to talk about his brilliant podcasts (“Getting Better Acquainted”, “Down to a Sunless Sea”, “The Family Tree” and more), about college lectures he gives about podcasting, about where he sees the art form at present, and what he thinks the future might hold. Actress Lily Holleman drops by in the second half of the show to reveal her Screen Actors Guild Awards ballot and to discuss what she looks for in performances. A whole bunch of great movies and performers get discussed. Great podcasts and great movies – truly two of our favorite things!

This week’s episode is full of a lot of what Dean and Phil do best! In “Celebrity Deaths”, they remember the singer of one of Phil’s all-time favorite songs, an artist who truly made his mark on Wall Street, a trailblazing theatre impresario, Beat poetry’s greatest champion, and in celebrating these giants, Dean and Phil also celebrate diversity. That can NOT be said for the Golden Globes, which aired this weekend and which are (once again) mired in controversy. Dean and Phil will have a ball unpacking those controversies, and perhaps stirring up some of their own where TV Awards are concerned! Still, with award shows and with the recent news surrounding movie theaters and movie release dates, it seems as if we are going to be returning to some semblance of “normal” in the not-too-distant future. Dean and Phil cover all of that, plus their views on three award hopefuls: The Little Things, One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah. They also champion two great new songs, one a Golden Globe-nominated modern classic, and the other, a terrific single from our very own Jon Lawlor! All that, plus Dean and Phil have fun with a couple more vintage movie ads.