With Dean in the “Zone of Totality” for Monday’s solar event taking place over much of the contiguous USA, will this week’s show ECLIPSE all those that have come before?! Decide for yourself as your friends in podcasting & broadcasting discuss a great story about how people getting stuck in an elevator changed history, discuss D.W. Giffith’s Intolerance, discuss Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 breakthrough Old Joy, discuss French actor Marcel Dalio, discuss Christopher Nolan’s proposed big screen version of “The Prisoner”, discuss the “renaissance man” artistry of Hiroshi Teshigahara, discuss the poem that inspired “Game of Thrones” AND Ghostbuters: Frozen Empire, discuss the terrific new horror film Late Night with the Devil and the delightful surrealist classic Céline and Julie Go Boating. All that plus “SCTV” great Joe Flaherty gets remembered in “Celebrity Deaths”.

To commemorate this week’s Academy Awards, your friends in podcasting offer up this special show all about the history AND future of the Oscars! How might the Academy voting membership change and how should it change? What award categories need to be changed, removed or added? Dean and Phil weigh in on last night’s historic show, offering doffs of the cap and wags of the finger. They also pile into the Chillpak time machine and travel back to the early days of Oscar to analyze how effective the Academy was at selecting “Best Picture” winners that would stand the test of time.

With the Oscars coming up this weekend, the book will finally close on the year in cinema 2019 … The Best Picture nominees are 1917, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Parasite. The top performing films at the US Box office released in 2019 (ranked from 1 thru 10) were Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: Episode 9 – The Rise of Skywalker, The Lion King, Frozen II, Toy Story 4, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far from Home, Aladdin, Joker and Jumanji: The Next Level … Would any of these films make Dean and Phil’s lists of the best films of 2019? Find out this week as your friends in podcasting count down their Top Ten Films of 2019!

Because Phil Leirness is in the nation’s capital, he and Dean Haglund, pre-recorded this week’s show and it is hilarious! The first half deals with Dean’s recent road trip across the frozen tundra of America, as he, his better half, his Doberman puppy, and his cat, faced arduous conditions as they traveled from L.A. to the Motor City. The second half deals with the all-important “season of self-congratulation” in Hollywood, which reaches fever pitch with this week’s announcement of the Academy Award nominations. Your friends in podcasting discuss the folly of taking the Golden Globes seriously, while also praising some of the winners. They also analyze whether the Oscars matter any more when it comes to how Best Picture winners are viewed by history. The open road and movies. This week, on YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour.

Because Phil hosted “Leif Erikson Day 1953” at Friendship Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday night, he took a much needed day off on Monday. And so, this week’s installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour is one day late … Your friends in podcasting reconvene and compare notes on their respective “Live Events of the Week”, including upcoming comedy shows everyone in the Detroit area can enjoy at Go Comedy! Phil also reveals details of a party he attended in the actual Salem’s Lot house! In “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil remember the “King of Confetti”,  an opera soprano, an unsung blues artist, a punk rock icon, a pioneering actress of stage and screen, and a delightful character TV performer. After a discussion of a little-known Buster Keaton classic “talkie”, the subject shifts to comic book movies. Martin Scorsese’s (perceived) indictment of such movies, Cynthia Erivo’s (sure to be Oscar-nominated) portrayal of Harriet Tubman and Todd Phillips’ Joker, a fascinating mess of a psychological period piece and villain origin story, all get analyzed.

Your friends in podcasting are one day late in delivering this week’s hearty serving of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour, so they reward your patience with an extra 16 minutes of show!Phil and Dean follow up on last week’s conversation about empathy to analyze the ways we consume movies now and what those ways do for us, or TO us!  They preview the forthcoming Joker and Doctor Sleep. They examine the use of de-aging technology in movies. They analyze the evolving differences between the DC vs. Marvel cinematic universes. They review the current theatrical releases Ready or Not and The Peanut Butter Falcon, the recent home video releases Long Shot, Gloria Bell and Men in Black: International. All that, plus they will celebrate the lives and legacies of two music icons, a best-selling novelist, a Broadway trailblazer and a television character actor.