sportsalcohol.com podcast

In a follow-up to our recent Oscar special, the SportsAlcohol.com continues their discussion of the 96th Academy Award nominations, covering categories outside the big eight, which means nerdy discussion of music, animation, international features, cinematography, editing, and more!

The 2023-24 Oscar season has finally heading for the end, and the SportsAlcohol.com team has assembled to talk about our PREFERENCES, our PREDICTIONS, and our most treasured SNUBS in the top eight major categories! Place your bets, protect your faves, and listen up as we get our last build-ups and teardowns in on the films of 2023!

We may be arriving a little late with our discussion of the 15 best movies of 2023, but we still beat the Oscars to air! In a long and enthusiastic discussion of our collective favorites, your pals at SportsAlcohol.com take turns waxing rhapsodic over an eclectic group of 2023 movies that we loved, including major auteurs, exciting debuts, special-effects blockbusters, and small-scale indies. It's one of our biggest episodes ever and full of great streaming suggestions!

After a three-year hiatus to get our heads right, the SportsAlcohol.com pop-music contingent is back to talk about new discoveries, legacy acts, favorite albums, and more as we go through 2023 in music, featuring Boygenius, Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek, The National, Belle & Sebastian, and... Joe Jackson?! Join Rob, Sara, Marisa, Jesse, and Jeremy as we try to make sense of our fractured and internet-addled music landscape!

Leapin' lizards! Everyone knows Godzilla is the King of All Monsters, but what this episode pre-supposes is... maybe he's also the King of All Media? With a new Toho Godzilla film in theaters, an American Godzilla movie coming in a few months, a Godzilla-related TV series streaming on Apple, and the big guy fighting the Justice League in the pages of DC Comics, Godzilla fans are, as they say, eating. After seeing Godzilla Minus One twice each, Jesse and lifelong Godzilla fan/expert Nathaniel sat down to talk about the overall state of the monster. 

Happy Labor day from your pals at SportsAlcohol.com! We got you a podcast episode! Earlier this summer, Ben convened a small panel of labor experts (by which we mean Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse) to talk about the bumper crop of movies about companies making products. Air, Blackberry, Flamin' Hot, and Tetris all came out within months of each other -- what gives? In this episode, led by a bona fide MBA, we talk about each movie, which ones (if any) appealed to us and why, and the greater meaning of this trend. (We recorded this episode before The Beanie Bubble dropped but you know what? It's barely worth discussing anyway!) Please, spend your hard-earned Labor Day (or months after Labor Day) with us!

Our annual summer nostalgiafest and re-evaluation continues further into the 2000s, as Marisa, Jesse, Becca, Jeremy, and Ben go through the eye-popping 17-title list of movies that made over $100 million domestic back in the summer of 2003. Superheroes! Pirates! Car chases! Multiple cops on the edge! And... fish?! Take a stroll through the early-to-mid '00s with us and revisit the best and the dregs!

It's that time of year again, where the SportsAlcohol.com crew gets together and has a wide-ranging, semi-nostalgic, semi-modern discussion of the biggest summer movies of decades ago. This year, we're kicking off our pair of anniversary episodes with the 30-years-ago version, throwing it all the way back to the summer of 1993, where dinosaurs (of the special-effects variety) and dinosaurs (of the dad-movie variety) ruled the box office! Join Marisa, Sara, Jeremy, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Ben as we talk Ford, Stallone, Arnold, Goldblum, Dave, Hanks, Ryan, and Dennis (the Menace, that is).

With Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny now in theaters and wrapping up Indy's story for good, Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel decided to take a look at the whole Indiana Jones saga, starting with the new movie and working our way back through the other entries -- and some ancillary materials courtesy of Indy expert Nathaniel! Last Crusade is impugned and defended! Crystal Skull isn't hated! Temple of Doom is revered! Has the world gone topsy-turvy?! Listen and find out!

It's Oscar season! Well, for another few days, anyway! In the run-up to the 95th annual Academy Awards, honoring achievements in cinema for the film year 2022, our OSCAR EXPERTS (hint: actually just Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse) gathered to talk about who WILL win, who SHOULD win, and, of course, the SNUBS! We're really just talking about our general thoughts on the silliness of the awards competition in eight major categories, plus some bonus rounds that go beyond. We've got Oscar fever and we invite you to catch it!

2022 is over, but have you caught up on all of the great movies it had to offer? Maybe not! Five SportsAlcohol.com regulars voted on their 20 collective favorites from 2022, and in this podcast we run through the upper reaches of the list to discuss what movies got to us last year, and why -- including both consensus favorites and outliers that only made one contributor's list! From Irish infighting to Spielbergian family dynamics to multiversal variants, there are streaming (and, in a few cases, still movie theater!) recommendations galore on this episode, from your pals Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse. 

Taking a break from endless movie-watching, the good people at SportsAlcohol.com celebrate another overwhelming year of Peak TV with a Ben-led discussion of their favorite shows in various categories, including workplace, romance, sci-fi, animation, and more! If you're looking for an absolute slew of TV recommendations, and a handful of vicious takedowns, look no further!

Watch out for the cultural impact! Avatar: The Way of Water is finally in theaters -- in fact, it's topped the box office for seven weekends in a row, garnered a Best Picture nomination, and has made over $2 billion worldwide. In light of this stunning failure to attract any audiences or acclaim, your SportsAlcohol.com crew hopped in their submersible and did a deep dive on the films of James Cameron, in all their water-y, tech-y, earnest glory. The Avatars, the Terminators, the Aliens, the various boats and choppers... they're all here in this two-hour-plus extravaganza that is still shorter than the runtime of Avatar: The Way of Water. Jesse, Marisa, Jeremy, Nathaniel, and Jeff are your guides through the floating mountains of Pandora and beyond!

We got a little bit behind editing this one, we admit: Our annual round-up of a dozen-plus indie movies from the summer blockbuster season is dropping closer to the end of the year. But you know what? That works, because this marathon episode includes tons of recommendations that might get lost in the end-of-year awards-movie shuffle. Enjoy our enthusiasm over indie horror, indie whimsy, indie young-adults-figuring-stuff-out, and all the rest! Featuring Aubrey Plaza, Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Maika Monroe, Marcel the Shell, Jessie Buckley, and more!

You thought the summer movie season was over?! Well, it is for 2022, but for 1992 it's beginning again! Join Nathaniel, Ben, Marisa, Jesse, Becca, and Jeremy as we revisit the top ten biggest summer hits from 30 years ago, featuring movies from Tom Cruise, Steve Martin, Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Geena Davis, and Batman!

It's that time again! Your pals at SportsAlcohol.com are back to comb through the biggest but not necessarily best movies of 20 summers ago. We've worked our way up to 2002, a real mixed bag featuring masterpieces and junk piles alike. Cruise, Sandler, Bourne, Stitch, Lillard, and some kind of Ya Ya Sisterhood... the gang's all here! Join Marisa, Ben, Jeremy, Becca, Nathaniel, and Jesse as we relive the highs and lows of Summer 2002!

All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up: Sam Raimi put out his first new movie in nine years this summer, returning to the world of Marvel superheroes with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. We thought it would be a good time to revisit all of his older films and, in the process, analyze just how much of his voice can be heard in the MCU machine. And though Jesse did not edit this episode in a timely manner, Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange 2 is now on Disney+, so you can do a full Sam Raimi marathon, from Evil Dead trilogy to the normal-movie trilogy to the Spider-Man trilogy and beyond, from the comfort of home! Join Nathaniel, Jeremy, Marisa, and Jesse as we discuss every single Sam Raimi feature film, including his latest. Who defends Oz the Great and Powerful? Who was not feeling Darkman? Who loves The Quick and the Dead more now than as a callow teenager? Now dig on this and find out!

Every year, the SportsAlcohol.com crew of loyal Saturday Night Live viewers checks in to discuss a recent episode of the show and the season as a whole. For Season 47, we chose a late-season episode with host and musical guest Lizzo to assess the swollen 24-person cast and other changes as the show nears its 50th birthday.

Better late than never, and still earlier than the Oscars! The SportsAlcohol.com crew convenes to discuss our collective list of the 15 best movies of 2021, including streaming suggestions galore! How many musicals, superheroes, kaiju, cartoons, morose motorists, and Bronco Henries made the list? Listen and find out!