Episode
Ep. 350: Oscars Retrospective of the 54th Academy Awards
- Podcast
- The AwardsWatch Podcast
- Published
- Jun 29, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 8508
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Summary
On episode 350 of The AwardsWatch Podcast, Executive Editor Ryan McQuade is joined by AwardsWatch Editor-In-Chief Erik Anderson and AwardsWatch contributor Josh Parham to go back 45 years and take a look at the 54th Academy Awards, covering the films of 1981. The AW team goes back nearly fifty years to a year dominated by a group of young men running on the beach to the score of Vangelis, as Chariots of Fire took down Reds and Raiders of the Lost Ark to win Hollywood's top prize. In the same year, the four acting Oscars went to some of the eldest group of winners in Oscar history, performers who won late in their careers instead of for their best work. In this year at the theaters, genre reigned supreme and was discussed at length on this episode, with films like Escape from New York, The Road Warrior, Body Heat, An American Werewolf in London, Dragonslayer, Excalibur, Polyester were discussed alongside films like Arthur, The Great Muppet Caper, Thief, Blow Out, Mommie Dearest, Prince of the City as films to highlight from this bountiful year of cinema. In their in-depth discussion, the AW team talked about the film year of 1981, briefly discuss talk about Chariots of Fire as a Best Picture winner, and how that speaks to the legacy of their nominates and or wins, do an extensive conversation over the below the line categories and nominees for the year, and then the new version of the AW Shoulda Woulda Coulda game, where instead of individual replacements, they must decide as a group who the nominees and winners should be in the top eight categories. The rules of the game state they can only replace two of the nominees that year from each category, except in Best Picture, where the group could replace up to three films to make up the final set of five nominated films. L…