For a show about pop culture, it's actually somewhat rare for us to address topics of pop culture while they are actually happening. But sometimes we do. So this week, we want to talk about The Oscars! Ok, it's too early to really give our Oscar predictions, but this week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had their Oscar nominations announcement ceremony and since the world was full of a lot of awfulness (both politically and because we were preparing for the snowstorm that has buried much of the United States) on this week's show Mav and Hannah not only react to the Oscar nominations but talk about their thoughts on how the Oscars work in general. Listen and let us know your thoughts in the comments. Citations...
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Call For Comments: Supersex in the Gotham City!
From Wayne: Superheroes are sexy, right? Skin tight costumes, rippling muscles, big boobs, and a near total lack of genitalia… what’s not to like? But for all of the suggestiveness of their idealized physiques, actual sexuality was a taboo topic in comics for a very long time. Some of this was due to a generally…
Call for Comments: Television in the Time of COVID
From Hannah: In 2020, Voxpopcast talked a lot about the media we consumed during, and partially due to, the pandemic (our comfort viewing, the AMAZING discovery of Marble League, the content that was majorly created pre-pandemic but released after our lives changed). But we haven’t delved too deeply into have the pandemic has changed the…
e143. Thirty Great Things You Missed In 2020
The year 2020 is over. You’re probably as relieved as we are. Of course the problems with 2020 are largely still with us, but at least getting here feels like SOMETHING has happened. Last year on VoxPopcast, we decided that rather than doing a “best of the year” episode with the greatest movies or books…
Call For Comments: 2021 Box Office Game
From Mav: Well, this ought to be weird. It’s the end of the year, so it’s once again time for us to do our movie picks for the annual fantasy box office episode. If you’re new to our show, every year we play a game where we earn points by how well movies do at…
e142. Deconstructing the Queen’s Gambit
If anything has characterized pop culture in the year 2020, it’s streaming media. From Hamilton to Tiger King, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the essential elimination of out-of-the-home entertainment, we as a people have been absorbing a great deal of content from our couches through the magic of streaming. This is a world made for…
e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…
Call for Comments: “The Queen’s Gambit,” or Chess is a Virus now
From Katya: The world, it seems, has lost its collective mind over The Queen’s Gambit. Released in October, it quickly became the most-watched limited scripted series ever and hit number 1 in 63 countries, according to Netflix. I’m not going to lie, I fell into the binge too. Give me an aesthetically pleasing show with…
Call for Comments: What did we miss this time?
From Mav: Way back at the end of 2019… you know, so like 47 years ago, we did a year in review show that we called “what did you miss?”. The idea was, rather than just reviewing the year and talking about the huge things in pop culture, we would cover the things that we…
e140. Why Do We Suddenly Love Musicals?
From Broadway to London, music has been a part of the history of drama for over a thousand years. The genre is enough of a part of American pop culture that it’s major award, the Tony, has become part of the EGOT, the grand slam of acting. And yet somehow, it has always seemed somehow…