LakerMania, NBA Expansion, WBC Lessons, and MBJ’s Moment With Billy Gil and Wesley Morris

27:51Bill Simmons:I don't get it. I really want to know more. So this vote's coming next week. I'm not convinced they have the 23 votes. but if they do this, it's a money grab. And they can say, it's like more jobs for everybody. Okay, cool. This is a money grab. This is going to make the league worse. I will plant my flag in that because we are just going to have more teams doing all the same shit that we hate now. There's tanking stuff. So the only way you could do expansion is if it's tied together with some real roles to make these teams actually care about competing and not being an embarrassment. Like the freaking Nets the other night, down 60 to 24 at halftime.

28:31Bill Simmons:Like the Wizards give you up 83 to bam out of bio. Like nobody wants to see this anymore. So we don't need two more teams doing this. So this is a bigger decision that they have to make. They have to decide what are the 30 best cities for the NBA? Do we have 30 cities that can handle the NBA at the highest level? And if we do, maybe we can expand. But now we have to bring in all this tanking stuff to make it possible to expand from a position of strength and not a money grab. So that's my take on expansion. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. Billy Gill is going to join us to talk about a world baseball classic.

29:08Bill Simmons:And then Wesley Morris and I are going to talk movies. That's next. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. What makes basketball so exciting? All the superior skill on the court. This has been the case my whole life. The craziest thing, I mean, Wemby, stuff he's doing every game. There's two, three Wemby moments a game And we're like, I don't know if I've ever seen that. The number one thing for me is when he does the screen and roll, he's going to the basket, somebody throws him an alley-oop, and he just catches it and dunks it without jumping. It's an alley-oop, but it's not an oop.

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30:19Bill Simmons:Ends on June 30th, 2026. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at makelobaltra.com slash courtside for free entry, entry deadlines and prizes and details. All right. The Duke Billy Gill is here. One of our big WBC fans here at the ringer. I got into it. I enjoyed it. I don't really know the protocol, though, of rooting for your country versus rooting for players on your favorite team. And I was battling the whole time because I was rooting for different Red Sox guys to do well while also rooting for America. But then I was really happy for Venezuela. it was about the least patriotic I felt in a while.

30:54Bill Simmons:So you went to some of these games. What was it like? It was incredible. So I've gone in past years. It's always been great. I put in Bill for a credential request. So I went there as an official representative of the ringer. So I was there going on the field, taking pictures of people, making a presence known so that the baseball community knows we're in the game. We're here to cover this sport. The environment is crazy. It's great, but it's sad because the environment in that stadium is not like that for the next four years. And it won't be like that at any Marlins games this year, which is disappointing.

31:28But man, Miami can host a World Baseball Classic. I have a question for you.

31:33Bill Simmons:Wait, can you hold that thought? Can you perform your question to me? Yeah. Is it weird to go to a place that has just a certain set, pretty depressing level of energy? And then all of a sudden you go there and it's fucking awesome. And you're like, I'm in the same place where it's basically sucks? I'm not used to it being that great because since they built the stadium, the Marlins have made the playoffs twice but have not hosted a home playoff game because one was the weird COVID year where they were on the road and then they switched it to like three years ago, I think, or two years ago, they made it.

32:06But it's that first round, that wildcard round where like the host city hosts all the games and it's like best of three so they don't travel. So there's never been a playoff game there. But because of the roof, it gets really loud and it's a great environment. But I'm also one that I've become accustomed to smaller crowds. I've become accustomed to the row in front of me will be empty. I can kick my feet up. So it's kind of like when it's too crowded, like it's, that's nice. But like, I'm ready to get back to my comfort. Like I have plenty of space. I don't have to wait that long in concessions.

32:37Like I'm good not having a ton of people around me, you know? So I like the energy, but I got my fill. We're good with that energy for a little bit, I think.

32:46Bill Simmons:It felt festive. What was your question for me? It was great. There was live bands going around. I don't know how it is that like certain, you have to go through security with a clear like bag, like in every stadium policy, right? But somehow you can go in with a trombone and you can go in with like a massive drum and you can take in all of these instruments that seemingly could be dangerous weapons, but like a purse that's like 16 inches by 16 is a no-go. I don't understand that security works. So here's my question to you. Am I... It's similar to what you were saying. Am I a bad American? Because going into the championship game, I was actively rooting for my country to lose to Venezuela.

33:32Bill Simmons:So I bet on the Dominicans in the semifinals against the U.S. Because I've always enjoyed the baseball players. They've been very good at the Red Sox. and I didn't really feel that patriotic about it in general. In the finals, I was like, I'm going to root for America in this one. I want Roman Anthony to do well. I was really excited he did well in the previous game. But as it went along and it was so clear that it meant like a hundred times more to Venezuela, it was hard not to be like, all right, I'm happy for these guys. This is like the greatest sports moment of their lives. So it would have meant even like one-tenth as much to America now.

34:14No, that's why, honestly, coming into the game. So I was like walking around. I was asking people like, oh, who are you rooting for? And like, yeah, I want America to win. And last time in the World Baseball Classic 2023, America also made it to the final and they lost to Japan. And there was a classic situation where Shohei Otani is pitching against Mike Trout. He strikes him out. They end up winning the championship. And it means so much to Japan. I wanted America to win that one. This one, America just had like not the best attitude throughout the tournament where you had Scooble coming and going.

34:44And then he kind of started feeling it. And then in the semifinal game where they were playing the Dominican Republic, he drove back from spring training. He pitched the day before in a meaningless spring training game for the Tigers. Drives back that day because he wants to be with the team. and there's like this whole article written about how he drove through a rainstorm to get there, which is like, I'm not applauding this. Like, welcome to Florida. It rains all the time. Like, this wasn't a hurricane. Like, what are we talking about here? But we wanted to applaud him because all of a sudden it seems like between the semifinal and the final, America kind of figured out like, hey, this is fun.

35:19We should try to want to win this instead of, you know, saying the wrong thing every possible chance they got, including Bryce, who like at the end was like very gracious and he was shaking the hands of Venezuela and all that. But earlier in the tournament, they asked him about it. And he's like, I, you know, I'd rather win the Olympics than the World Baseball Classics. Like, buddy.

35:38Bill Simmons:Yeah, just keep that one to yourself. Just don't say that. And then there's all the players from all the different countries who are all excited. And they're saying, even Quique Hernandez, who was playing for Puerto Rico, has been to five World Series. He's won three. And he's saying winning the World Baseball Classic would be more important, which then caught the ire of Derek Jeter, who on the broadcast, they say like, what do you make of all these players that say they'd rather win the world baseball classic than the world series? And he's like, sounds like players that have never made the world series.

36:07It's like, there's, there's plenty who have, who are saying this, but also like Derek, you're on the broadcast for the world baseball classic. Like, can we pretend to care just a little bit about this? Or like, also you don't add anything to any of these broadcasts. Just sit out the world baseball classic Derek, like we're not going to miss you. It's going to be perfectly fine. So the Americans had kind of like not the greatest attitude throughout it. You had the situation with Cal Raleigh and Randy Rosarena, where he didn't want to shake his hand. And then Josh Naylor, who plays for Canada, decided I want to troll Cal Raleigh and go to try to shake his hand.

36:42And then he also didn't shake his hand. And the Mariners seem to be falling apart. There was no injuries or serious injuries in this World Baseball Classic. But the Mariners, I don't think are going to survive the World Baseball Classic, even getting all of their team back healthy because they all seem to hate each other now, even though they'll downplay the situation.

36:58Bill Simmons:That's funny because they had great chemistry last year. The WBC could have just completely eroded it. Yeah, I mean, Randy Rosarana told Cal Raleigh to shove his handshake comment up his ass, which is kind of like, this is going to be awkward, I think, when we get back. And managers are going to have to sort that situation out. So I didn't think that a team was going to fall apart that wasn't playing in the World Baseball Classic, but we have to keep an eye on the Mariners now to see what's going on. But overall, I thought, great tournament. Here's another thing, by the way. Mark DeRosa might be the worst manager, I think, in the history of baseball.

37:31Bill Simmons:Just bring in Miller for the 9-2-2. What are you doing? He throws 1-2. Nobody's touching him. Just get an inning at him. What are we doing? Did you see they were asking him about it after the game? So in the press conference after the game, they were asking him, like, why didn't you bring him in? And he's like, well, I told, you know, I wanted to respect the Padres. like respect the Padres. Did you see what was happening with Venezuela? Their manager, Omar Lopez, had three different teams call him and say, hey, you played a semifinal game last night. Do not pitch our pitchers back-to-back nights.

38:04And he said, you know what? I'm going to pitch four pitchers back-to-back nights and you guys can deal with it because that's exactly what he did. Like four guys that pitched the night before pitched again.

38:13Bill Simmons:The Venezuelans were fine with it. They did it to Whitlock on the American team where he pitched three times in five days. Yeah. And his last appearance in the finals, he gave up the winning run. His miles per hour was a little bit down. Big topic with Red Sox fans right now. Was it? Just ready for Whitlock to be on the DL in June because he pitched three in five days. So back to back, I don't even know. Whitlock's a guy on the Red Sox, not to make this too MLB-centric, that I have wanted to work out for your team for the past five years. He was really good last year. him. Yeah, he's really good.

38:49But he was going to be a starter. And then they eventually moved him and figured him out. Like in the bullpen, which is, yeah, it's not as useful to me. I liked it when he was like a fit starter. Yeah, no, he's a reliever.

38:59Bill Simmons:Um, going back to the team thing, this was one of my issues rooting for America or being in the mindset of I should root for America. This is the country I live in. First of all, the world baseball classic has not been around since like 1892. Like this is a relatively new thing. So it can't be like, we have to root for our teams. I think you can kind of go where the heart wants, especially in the gambling era. But I was watching like the Dominicans and the Venezuelans, how they're just reacting to a double in the third inning. And they're just going crazy. They're so demonstrative. Everybody in the dugouts flipping out.

39:34Bill Simmons:And our team was basically like, okay, guys, we got them. Let's do it. I was embarrassed. It felt so forced. And even Bryce Harper, when he hit the game tying home run in the bottom of the eighth, when he's coming around, he did like a salute and he's like pointing at the flag. Like, I don't know why it felt like forced and it almost felt like angry patriotism. But when, then you see like the Dominicans and the Venezuelans are playing against each other. They're hugging each other at home plate and it's like competitive, but like they're enjoying it where the Americans seemed like, like forced.

40:07Bill Simmons:Like, they weren't even like at home plate. They were kind of over on the side. Like, all right, we'll go greet them. Yeah. It was weird. The Roman Anthony, Roman Anthony is my guy, obviously. He's Red Sox. And he has the big go-ahead homer in the game before. And it wasn't like if it happened for the Dominicans or the Venezuelans, it would have been like a borderline just they would have lost their minds for five minutes. I don't know. It bummed me out. The American bat flips felt forced to me, too, where it's like, well, I see how high the Venezuelans are throwing it. Let me try to throw it higher.

40:40I think overall, great tournament. Have you turned on this whatsoever? Are you in on this?

40:45Bill Simmons:You know what's interesting? First of all, way in, enjoyed it way more than I thought. The ratings were really good. And I'm not a ratings guy because I don't understand how the ratings just get better for everything every year. It's like ESPN every month. It's like highest blank ever. And just, it feels like you can finagle it however you want. But anecdotally, people cared about this. People in my life cared about this. Everybody that likes sports that I know feels like they were at least monitoring it. And then the last two USA games, I feel like, a lot of people in my life watched, they cared.

41:18Bill Simmons:My dad really cared. He was really upset that Anthony made the last out. He was like, I hope that's not going to be bad for him for this season. I was like, it'll be fine, Dad. Yeah, he'll be playing in like two weeks in real games. You know what I really loved the most was how you vacillate emotions. I was mostly rooting for America, but when Judge made an out after Harper tied the game, and you could be like, all right, Judge, let's go air and finish it off. Like part of me was like, I hope he makes it out. Yeah, I was going to say. I hope it becomes a story. you want your enemies to fail. Like, it's so weird.

41:50Because, like, I don't like Ronald Acuna Jr. Because I'm a Marlins fan and he's a Brave. And I find him to be very annoying. But I felt good for him. And they're crying on the field the whole time. You mentioned the Red Sox. Did you see the stat where the Red Sox outfield? So they had, like, all of the countries that hit home runs, who hit the most home runs throughout the tournament. And it's listed, like, the Dominican Republic hit, like, 15 home runs, or whatever, 12, 11, whatever it was. And then they had like the U.S. I think had like 11 or 12. And then just Boston Red Sox outfielders, 10 home runs in the World Baseball Classic.

42:26You guys?

42:27Bill Simmons:Our over-under is 86 and a half for Wentz. And I think the Red Sox are going to be legit good. I think they're plus 300 on FanDuel for the division. The team's like kind of loaded. Yeah. And as long as they don't have any pitcher injuries or anything weird like that. But Anthony is the big thing. I mean, that was why his homer that he hit, the go-ahead homer, I was really glad he had that moment because we're kind of counting on him to have like the Drake May major jump in year two and a Braille two. I thought it was a good showing for them. It's weird to root for the guys on different teams that are your guys and kind of monitoring them.

43:04Bill Simmons:You end up like, it's like a parent with multiple kids on different fields that, you know, some youth sports event or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, one other thing with the world baseball that I, that I, uh, I really liked, um, how it's going to transfer all the stories now about how it transfers to the actual season becomes like its own cottage industry for, for media coverage. Cause we have fantasy baseball coming with the season starting and just how it, how it swings your opinions either high or low. I think it's kind of, kind of entertaining. I think in 2017, myself and probably everyone else that was watching the World Baseball Classic when the US won, was like, Marcus Stroman might be the greatest pitcher in the history of Major League Baseball.

43:54I need to draft him in the first round. Yeah, like I need to draft him right away. And then he has like a classic like Stroman situation where he's like really good one year and then he's like not great the year that you draft him in fantasy. But yeah, people are definitely going to be drafting and overdrafting certain players based on World Baseball Classic performance. I like... Abreu is going to be one of them. Oh, yeah, for sure. So you mentioned the ratings. Almost 11 million people watched the championship game, which is crazy. I think it was up from like 7 million or something, the previous championship game.

44:25It was the most watched World Baseball Classic game ever. Baseball's riding this high coming off of the World Series and coming off of the World Baseball Classic. And I'm a little bit worried that once the regular season starts and everybody goes back to their teams and you lose the excitement that the World Baseball Classic games had that people are like, oh, like, yeah, we're back. We're back to baseball now because you don't have like the playoff intensity. You don't have the World Baseball Classic intensity. And now it's like, OK, this is game number seven of 162. We can't be playing trumpets and bat flipping and jumping over the dugout fence every time someone hits a home run.

45:03Now we need to get back to baseball decorum.

45:09Bill Simmons:I see the point. I just think we're so loaded from a season standpoint with good teams in huge cities with real baseball tradition. Players I care about in both leagues. young guys coming up even like we mentioned anthony but there's a bunch of either rookies or second year guys that people are like super excited about just watching like what's happening with the baseball cards the the like you mentioned last time the pittsburgh the 19 year old the rookie shortstop whether he who knows when he'll come up or will he be like a may 1st guy will he come up at all i don't know but his card was like exploding during the year and it just feels like they have a lot of guys.

45:49I hope they don't do the games with the rookies where they wait until... No, they're all doing it.

45:54Bill Simmons:The Red Sox are going to do it with the two pitchers we have. I hate that. I hate it. It's one of the worst rules that we have in sports. The extra arbitration year. It's so dumb. It's terrible. But the Dodgers going for a three-peat is a real thing. Judge, who's now hitting his mid-30s and somehow became embattled coming out of this World Baseball Classic. I saw Mad Dog did a whole thing about it on ESPN that I enjoyed. Like he's a real figure that people have opinions. My whole thing is like baseball needed to get back to people in your life just having arguments about different baseball things.

46:31Bill Simmons:And I felt like we started to lose that a little bit as the sport became more and more stats and more and more random, basically. And now it feels like you talk to people like, are the Dodgers ruining baseball? And half the people in my life would have like a real opinion on it. you know, do you think Aaron judge, is it his fault? People have opinions on this. What about Roman Anthony? Could he be the next guy for Boston? There's like 30 of these now. Who's the best picture in the American league? We just have good arguments again. And I don't, I, I, I feel blessed right. As we head into a massive labor short labor strike.

47:05This is the thing. Baseball can't get out of their own way. Right. Cause like they're writing this momentum and they're going to mess this up at the end of the year by having a lockout, Like 100 % they're going to lock out. And it's like, why are you guys doing this? Like, why are we trying to ruin a good thing? Just kind of agree to something, figure it out. Realize that you can't afford. I mean, they're not going to miss any time, even if they have a lockout. They'll figure it out so that they don't miss any games. If they miss games, it'd be the dumbest thing they could possibly do.

47:32Bill Simmons:Did you see the revenue thing where it was talking about the percentage that the leagues make and they were like 21%, 21%, 20 % and then baseball was like 2.4%. because so much of the revenue is being driven by a couple of these teams, so much of the salaries, everything, and clearly something's going to shift. But on the other hand, as a TV sport, we were all worried about it. Now that I have all the RSNs, as that all shakes out. But it seems like from a right standpoint, they're going to be good. I like the fact that Netflix got involved with the World Baseball Classic and these different non-traditional networks are trying to figure out ways to kind of grab a bite of the apple from them.

48:13Bill Simmons:So that's a good thing. It seems like a lot of people want baseball. I was a little bit worried last year. And like, I'm not one that gets like into the TV right situation or cares that much. Like I'll figure out where to watch the games. But when it was announced that they were going to leave ESPN, I was like, oh, this isn't good. Like the end of Sunday night baseball, like what's going to happen here? And then like, because I'm a weird guy and I like grew up watching ESPN, worked at ESPN a little bit and like know the personalities, I'm like, what's going to happen to Tim Kirchhen? I'm worried about this.

48:42Where's Kirchhen going to go? I don't want to see him on MLB Network. Like I can't, my heart can't take that. So ESPN is going to have, I think, weekday games now, but then like everyone's going to have games. There's going to be games on Apple. There's going to be games on Netflix. I think Peacock's going to have games.

49:00Bill Simmons:It's almost like a game show trying to figure out who has what game. But I think part of that is good though, because in theory, each of the networks will be trying to make their one day a week the most relevant game. So hopefully then we'll get good presentations and good broadcasts from all of the networks. And it's not just kind of like mailing it in. Hey, here's like a random Wednesday night baseball game, but we also have Sunday night and Tuesday night or whatever. So like we could just throw a fourth team on here and who cares what it actually looks like. I'm excited about baseball. I am too.

49:34Bill Simmons:We've seen this happen in NBA this year with, you know, like NBC's doing that Sunday night game, right? With Tirico. They're making it almost like trying to do it. They feel big. Yeah, they're trying to give it the NFL Sunday treatment for NBA. And it feels like a bigger game. Like it feels like they care more. They're sending everybody there is at the game. Like the studio show is there. Tirico's doing it. They have like the John Tesh stuff. And it just feels bigger. Which I think what some of these places will do with baseball. I was just looking at the World Series stuff on FanDuel. The top eight teams for odds right now, Dodgers, Yankees, Mariners, Mets, Phillies, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Cubs.

50:13Bill Simmons:And then the ninth one is Atlanta. These are all like big teams that have tradition and like big fan bases and really good players, right? Seattle is probably the one like non-giant fan base. But they have, you know, J-Rod, Cal Rally. I really like Naylor. I love Naylor. It's a fun team. And even Toronto, which I think is going to be a little different this year because they lost a couple guys. They've had some injuries already, but they were in the World Series last year. People know who they are. People know who Guerrero is. So I think we're in a good spot, Billy. Baseball might be back. Who knows?

50:50Bill Simmons:The Ringer might have to figure out some sort of podcast thing. Wow. I don't know. 11 million people for the World Baseball Classic. It makes you think like, shit. there's a market out there. Yeah, maybe there's, maybe people care again. Maybe they care. All right, Billy Gill, how are you feeling about, you never gave your opinion on BAMS 83 on this podcast. So go quick. Okay, so BAMS 83, I was in Sweden when it was going on. So it was 3 a.m., but my phone starts blowing up because like I'm in group text and they're like, BAM has 72 points right now. So it's like 3 or 4 a.m. and I'm like, I wake up to these and I'm like, well, I can't go back to sleep.

51:29So I'm trying to sign into like my FanDuel Sports Network, Florida subscription that I have. Yeah, of course, because I'm in a different country. It's like the country code. This doesn't allow it. So I'm doing the old school just following along on my phone. Oh, the mid 90s. Yeah.

51:44Bill Simmons:The 976 lines. So I'm watching like the ball move like a little graphic up and down the court. And I'm like, man, they keep fouling like this is kind of crazy. What's going on here? I saw that you were kind of a defender of Bams. I'm a full defender. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people, a lot of people weren't like, yes, stop him. I'm surprised that, that Eric's bolster did it. Cause it seems like with their whole, like he culture stuff, like, Oh, this seems like beneath the heat to try to do something like this. But I loved it. I mean, obviously I'm biased here cause I'm from down here in South Florida, but I love the fact that they did it.

52:20I was thinking that they might do the thing where they take him out and like, Oh, we can't pass Kobe. They're like, no, screw that guy. We're going to pass Kobe.

52:27Bill Simmons:No, it was cool. I think it helped that he was such a liked guy. And that he's so not that kind of player who would chase stats. And everybody was supportive of that. It seemed like the most fun random game to go to. It was like real joy in the stands. He got to like 75. They're cutting. Miami can kind of come and go as a basketball crowd. People were deliriously happy as this was happening. It was really fun to watch. Well, the Wizards are a crap team, too. That's the thing. Like, stop him. Like, you guys can play defense. You can, like, why don't you double him? Why don't you take the ball out of his hands?

53:04Bill Simmons:Especially in the first quarter. The Heat had, like, no starters out there except for Bam. It's like, just take him out. Let everybody else be. It was a disgrace. And this was my big case was, like, the Wizards, like, this is, we have eight teams tanking. Now we have nine because Milwaukee's trying to tank. so it's almost one third of the league that's a way more of a disgrace to me than Miami being like Bam Adebayo is a great guy he's having the night of his life let's see how many points he can get I'm never going to be offended by that I didn't like that that so many like players and coaches came out and and like swaggy p like former players then just like I don't respect this at all it's like shut up like no one cares what you think why why do you have to ruin this why do you have to ruin a fun thing here it is weird though like if you look at the all-time list that then just bam out of bio is number two on the list.

53:53Not that he's not an all-time great of all time, but he's not an all-time great.

53:58Bill Simmons:You know, I've heard people say that. And if you go to every sport, there's fucking weird things in there. There's people that have had like, you know, four homer games in baseball. They're like, that guy had four homers? Yeah. And in football, same thing. I don't know who, remember Flipper Anderson had the receiver record forever? That receiver on the Rams, It was like 330 yards receiving or whatever it was. And it's never who you think is going to have these records. I think there was some Kobe stuff with it too. I think people just love Kobe and they kind of want, they liked how it was Wilt and Kobe and now Bam's in the middle of it and he's not a scorer.

54:36Bill Simmons:But I mean, everybody loves Bam. And it was the night of his life. He'd never had 42 points in a game. So I don't know. If you like sports, it's weird that you wouldn't like that one to me. But anyway. All right, Billy Gill. Good luck. Did you do your fantasy baseball draft yet? My fantasy baseball draft is next Tuesday. Keepers are in though, so that has been locked and we're moving forward now. We have to turn in keepers tomorrow night. Me and my buddy, Hench, who's my League of Dorks partner, my AL Keeper League. And I can't even tell you the Google history. Just searching any sort of info I can find on Joe Boyle of Tampa or Eric Lauer on the Blue Jays deciding whether we want to keep him for$3?

55:20Bill Simmons:Do we keep Narvaez at$7? Just Googling all his spring... It's pathetic. It's such a waste of time. How many keepers do you get to have? We have 10. So we have nine keepers. Now we're battling for who should be the 10th. And it's just a colossal waste of time. I love it. You can keep like half your team? Well, we have 40-man roster. 40-man roster? Including minors and reserves. Yeah. That's insane. I got a million. You won't believe it. And it's one. It's only one league. It's only AL. It's AL. Yeah. So you're just full of like random crap players. This is why we're talking about whether we want to protect Eric Lauer for$3.

56:00Oh, my God. That is deep. One of. So we don't do auction. We do like the rounds still. So ours is you can keep four, but it's four. You can only do it two times. So like you can only keep them twice. and it's four rounds higher than you drafted him the previous year. So I went in and Stanton got dropped last year when he was injured. So he was just out there. So I picked him up on a flyer, just put him on my IL. And I was like, I'll play him when he comes back. But also next year I can use him as a 20th round pick. So I was like, I'm using this for a future situation. So I had Giancarlo Stanton.

56:39But then the reports are he can't open a bag of chips, which seems impossible. and I'm looking at him like, well, he has three home runs or four home runs already in the spring. So I guess the chip situation has been resolved. He didn't play in the World Baseball Classic. I could get him in the 20th round, but also I know he's just going to injure himself because that's what he does every year. So am I going to waste one of my keepers on him? I ended up not doing it. So we'll see what happens with that.

57:04Bill Simmons:The move is always if the evidence is you're going to really regret this a month from now and be kicking yourself, maybe don't do it. I'm always stunned by the lack of information. In this world we live in now where information is everywhere. Like Twitter, you can't search for anything on Twitter anymore. If I want to find out like Joe Boyle, Tampa, give me like the last five days of tweets about him. Like fucking pizza comes up. Reddit, not nearly. Nobody's starting like a Joe Boyle thread, right? Are you expecting that? No, I'm not. So then you're Googling news stories and it's like, oh, Joe Boyle's in that one.

57:40Bill Simmons:And it's like just this tiny little tidbit paragraph. It's just not a lot of info. They don't care about like the diehards. We need a return to like the true honest to goodness beat writers in baseball that are there in spring. They leave their family for a month and a half. They live in like Lakeland, Florida, wherever their team is situated. And they're like giving us all the information on everyone. Now it's just like - Just a lot of dispatches, three times a day, different things about different players. Yeah, we don't have that anymore. Now you just go, they're hanging out, making contacts or whatever it is that reporters are doing there.

58:11if they're even attending the games, the managers don't even bother giving you actual honest assessments of what's going on with the players. It's become a travesty that's going on in journalism these days, Bill.

58:22Bill Simmons:Well, fortunately, we have websites that can show us the miles per hour compared to last year and stuff like that. Not that I've ever been to those. Maybe I have. Okay, fine. Are you excited about ABS's debut? We didn't have it in the World Baseball Classic. We didn't talk about that huge controversy at the end of the U.S.-Dominican Republic game where it was clearly a ball. Game ends like that. Dominicans are eliminated. Not going to happen regular season. Half a foot. same thing happened the inning before against Soto. Like, it was just a bad strike zone and American umpire. So, somewhat suspicious there.

58:53I don't know if he's on the take or what's going on.

58:55Bill Simmons:It was a little weird. All right, Billy Gill. You can listen slash watch to Billy on the Ringer Tailgate. A great show that has continued to go during the offseason as well as you pop on Ringer NFL from time to time and all over the place. Good to see you. Thanks for staying up with me. Hey, thanks for having me. This segment is brought to you by the all-new Audi Q3, made for the yes life. We're about to break down my NBA best-in-class pyramid, the guys playing well above the rest of the league. We just did Ringer 100, actually. I just turned in my votes, and I really, really battled with myself about whether I wanted to put Wemby or SGA in the top spot.

59:35Bill Simmons:And I'm not going to tell you what I did. But that top four of Wemby, SGA, Joker, and Luca is about as good of a top four with everybody playing really well at the same time that we've had in a while. So any pyramid would have to start with those four. And then you go down to that next level and it's got Jalen Brown and Donovan Mitchell and Kate Cunningham and so on and so on. But I think that would be the top four. And it's like the Audi Q3. Those guys, that top four I mentioned, they're delivering a level of performance and refinement that puts them in a category of their own. The other fun thing about that four, all of them are so different, right?

1:00:12Bill Simmons:SJ's, he's the guard. Luka, I have no idea what position he is. Joker's like a center, but he's also a point guard. And then Wemby is just one of the freaks of all time that we've had in the NBA. Those guys are the NBA best in class. They show up and play on a totally different level. The all-new Audi Q3 brings that same energy with faster acceleration than ever before, room for adventure in a digital stage that puts the whole game plan right in front of you. Say yes to performance. Say yes to the all new Audi Q3. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. All right, baseball fans, get ready.

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1:02:47Bill Simmons:Max$100 cash back per month. All right. So coming up, it's my old friend, Wesley Morris. We used to work together at Grantland. He has a podcast called Cannonball for the New York Times. And we had about to talk about the Oscars after it happened. So we're coming in right as we went for too long. So I cut the first like seven, eight minutes and we went right into when we started talking about one battle after another versus sinners. So here that is right now. I mean, just it's been a long time. It's wanting the institutions to acknowledge how great he is at his job. Well, the origins of, it could have happened for him with There Will Be Blood.

1:03:29Bill Simmons:And he just went against a buzzsaw with No Country for Old Men. Right? So the 2008 Oscars. And sometimes that happens, right? Like Sinners, I think in another year, could have won all the major ones that they were up for, which is basically everything except for Best Actress. That's his point about 70, 75, right? I mean, 75, the year, the movie year for 1975 at the 76 Academy Awards. And, you know, those five movies, Barry Lyndon, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and... Nashville. Nashville. I mean, come on, like, four of those movies are going to lose. And, you know, historically, I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest about a year ago.

1:04:14Yeah. And, you know, the least... I mean, the least impressive of the five and saying that like one flew over the cuckoo's nest is least impressive movie. Those five movies is a wild thing to say. And yet, like that is the one that is perhaps least discussed, I guess, like in these last 50 years. It's the one that's come up the least often, at least in my life. But Milos Forman, he's one of my I love him. I mean, every single movie he made pretty much. especially the Hollywood ones are you know

1:04:49Bill Simmons:chef's kiss well we talk about this happens in sports too sometimes a category is loaded sometimes you have an MVP like the NBA and it's like holy shit a lot of guys this year but then we also talk about distance which is something we've been talking about in this podcast forever like how we remember it five years from now will we think the right movie won what we think the right director won and stuff like that. This one, because it was one battle versus sinners for months and months, and then I felt like Marty Supreme was going to nudge some stuff in there basically because it came out last.

1:05:31Bill Simmons:There's something Sean had talked about, about just how late the Oscars were this year. By the time we actually had it, it did feel like a lot of times since all of these movies came out, right? And it probably hurt Chalamet the most, but But I do wonder five years from now, what we're going to think should have won. Because I think there's people really strongly in both camps. You could feel it in the audience for the Oscars. Like, it felt like Sinners was by far the most popular movie in the room, but that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, every nominee, like, you know, from the Kraft folks to, you know, Michael B.

1:06:07Jordan and Ryan Coogler and the movie itself, you could feel, I mean, even that production number, right? When they did I Lied to You as part of the two songs that got performed during the show, you could feel the energy in that room for that performance. And it's not just because you had people, like there were too many great musicians on stage, right? Raphael Sadiq and Brittany Howard and Rhiannon Giddens and Shabuzi. I'm not putting him in the great musician class yet, but like he's good at his job. you know Chris Stone Kingfish Ingram was up there Buddy Guy didn't even play he just stood around it just was it was extremely impressive just to have those people up there kind of like contributing 5 seconds of music to this 90 second operation but you could feel in the room that those people were at a concert right and they were reacting like they were seeing you know the people they were seeing on stage on stage for free.

1:07:09So yeah, I don't, I mean, five, 10, 15, 50 years from now, I will say that one battle after another, and I don't know if this is, this feels like it might be true in your life too, Bill, given the amount of time that I know you've talked at least about sinners. And almost certainly one battle after another, you live in Los Angeles, like a town that has such long, I don't know when to say ambivalent feelings about Paul Thomas Anderson, but you know, I mean, like the question always was, you know, who's going to make the next one at studio wise? And like, are the movies going to make any money? And so I spent, I spent a year in change, almost a year now talking about Sinners.

1:07:51I've never had the same conversation twice. And I don't imagine I'm going to have the same conversation in five years talking about Sinners. And one battle after another, I don't know, we should talk about this. I feel like, you know, of all PTA movies, this is perhaps the most, at least in my life, this is the most contested one. And it's the one where the contest for me at least feels like it, it just really sucks to have these arguments with people.

1:08:26Bill Simmons:To pit movies against each other. Yeah. Well, to pit those two movies against each other, but also the camp of people who really feel like one battle after another is just really doing black women dirty. Yeah. and is operating on this continue. I mean, you and I have talked about this particular... I thought that was the biggest flaw of the film. ...question before. Yeah. But see, I... My thing about what is going on in this movie is... I think its best mode, and perhaps the best way to understand it, is like something adjacent to a cartoon, like a political cartoon. Right? Right. And the question that I that I that I the thing that excited me so much watching it that first time, which I'll never, ever forget.

1:09:15I just was so exhilarated and watched it in IMAX and it looked so good and felt like it weighed 4000 pounds was the sheer fact of Tiana Taylor as as an elemental energy and a physical presence. right um i felt like he was giving a black woman the treatment that he gives these white men in his movies he was he'd invented a character and you know you pinching has a lot to do with this thomas pinching who wrote violin the movie that this movie the book that this movie is based on um he came up with a character who is in this in the world of this movie a black woman who has as much weirdness and complication and like wrongness as the white guys do.

1:10:10Yeah. And that, that in the world of Paul Thomas Anderson is a form of that is, that is equality. But then undergirding that is this, are these, are these questions of like just American politics, forget like leftist, you know, white supremacist military industrial complex, but just like what the fundamental grimy roots of this country are all the soil they're growing in. And without really having to hit that drum too hard after the first 33 minutes, you understand what the stakes are. And they don't have to be too specific about what the politics are. I never got hung up on the fact that these people believe in four things.

1:10:52and one of them is freedom from fucking fear. Like, yes, amen. I didn't need more from that because I feel like this is a chase picture. Yeah. You know, a chase infinity picture, a chase picture between, you know, two white men for a black woman. And, you know, let's go back to, you know, that's a 400-year-old American story. You know, I mean, I just kind of like the brazenness of it. I liked its disrespect, but I'm also, I'm so, um, I don't know, comfortable with. And at this point, I'm here for and really, I've absorbed all the critiques of this movie in light of the, in the light of the way I just laid out what I think is exciting and exhilarating about it.

1:11:48because, you know, there's also, it's attached to this other history of how Black women have been represented in art, culture, and, you know, American commerce if we're going back to like, you know, 1865 and before.

1:12:02Bill Simmons:Hmm. I thought both were... You gave me a lot to work with there. When I left the theater, my biggest flaw with the movie, which I talked about after, was I was just, I was like, that person was a bad person. like I still don't understand why they killed the people at the bank that was like that crossed the line right and then basically dumps her kid which is another terrible thing to do and then there's this letter at the end that we're not even sure she wrote that tries to why aren't we sure she wrote that I know we talked about this before but do you have any more clarity on why there's a theory that he wrote the letter so to give the daughter closure right okay but listen big picture this i felt the same way you did like in the theater where i was like this is just fucking cool i'm just so glad there's a movie like this which is the exact same way i felt about sinners and i think i think the 2026 the big picture when we look back at this on the on the year is just like creative ip from scratch right yes although yes yes sinners is literally from scratch one battle is adapted from a book but either way like just two holy original movies If you read Vineland, you're like, how did he find this movie?

1:13:21Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm saying, at least there was a germ of somebody else's idea.

1:13:25Bill Simmons:But just how creative both those movies were, I think is pretty inspiring. And then you talk about a director that we've been on this three-decade odyssey with, who finally has his moment. And then Coogler, who I would say probably has the highest approval rating of anyone in Hollywood right now. I don't think I've heard one bad thing about him. Everybody loves him. and he'll have his moment at some point and he'll have his PTA moment I don't know when it'll be but he'll be on the stage and people lose their minds but two great ones and now they're kind of linked in some weird way I think yeah I love I mean thank you for putting it that way because I do feel like these movies are talking to each other in some way and I never felt good about them being pitted against each other I know that that is the horse race nature of the way we think about the Academy Awards, but I don't know.

1:14:20I just really feel like the things, the events that unfold in Sinners have such like dimensionalizing consequences for what happens in one battle after another. Yeah. Right? I mean, you are, this is two movies about Black people in America. and the forces that are trying to almost literally extinguish and expunge and absorb and, and, and, you know, rid white people of or, or for white people to sort of capitalize off of, um, in the case of sinners, it's just, I don't know. I, I do feel great that these, these seem like the two movies that people were most enthusiastic about. and you could feel just in the terms of the way the winners broke down I don't remember exactly how many sinners wound up with versus one battle after another but they it feels close to me but you know then there I mean can you talk about Sean Penn for a second

1:15:31Bill Simmons:well there's a lot of stuff to work with with Sean Penn you know I talked about with PTA doing basically the triple crown of movie director writing, which is Woody Allen, Robert Benton, James L. Brooks, Bong Joon-ho, and the Coens. And that's the entire list, basically, right? So you have that. You also have Sean Penn moving into three Oscars. Was that Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson? Katie Hepburn with four. I call her Katie. That's how you roll. No, I have been with four, but yeah, the three Oscar club is not large. But you remember I wrote that? So I did that Oscars piece for ESPN Magazine in the late 2000s, where I created the scoring system.

1:16:26Bill Simmons:Oh, yeah. Okay. Basically to try to prove that Meryl Streep was by using advanced metrics to prove that Meryl Streep was the greatest actor or actress of all time. and the scoring system was best actor actress wins seven points nominations three best supporting Oscar wins three and then supporting nominations one right and what was interesting about it so Meryl Streep under the scoring system had 65 and Katherine Hepburn 52 and Jack Nicholson 40 those were the three biggest and what was interesting was getting to 20 was hard there was like this weird cut off of 20 where it was only Nicholson, Tracy, Olivier, Daniel Day-Lewis, Brando, Lemon, Denzel, Dustin Hoffman, 29, Newman, De Niro, Hanks, Peter O'Toole, Al Pacino, Leo now with 23, Gary Cooper, Frederick March, Anthony Hopkins, and now Sean Penn with 20.

1:17:22Bill Simmons:So that's less than 20 actors. And if you're thinking about, it's way harder to do this with actors than athletes. Be like, who's the greatest? Let's rank them. You can't do it. The eras are different. But it is a nice little list of kind of actors that mattered over the last hundred plus years, right? And Sean Penn was right on the cusp, but now he's in there. Yeah, not one of those. I mean, it's funny because Sean Penn is probably the least likely to surface in a conversation that isn't among, you know, like our little circle. Right. Of the great actors. With the other actors, it seems like a lot of people felt like he was one of the guys.

1:18:02Bill Simmons:And that was the thing, even in the 80s and 90s before he won an Oscar, like that's one of the best actors we have. And he's always had that. But it felt like it went away the last 10 years and he just was hitting a pretty weird point of his career. I think he just made weird choices. He went back to directing these. I mean, I don't think the movies were inherently strange, but I mean, commercially speaking, I mean, he was never really interested in the box office. he was following his instincts and some of those movies were just you know that Dakota Johnson well he had that one where he was an assassin yeah you kind of didn't trust his taste anymore at least I didn't it was like there's a new Sean Penn movie and I'm like alright I don't know if I trust that it's going to be good he does have this side of him that kind of wants it like that's the only way you can I don't know how else you explain I am Sam right a movie that we all agree it's okay to laugh at the execution of a thing that is also execrable as storytelling and filmmaking well let's just Simple Jack and Tropic Thunder was basically its ultimate destiny such a ridiculous choice that it had to be parodied within a decade but I mean it also it said to me because all these all the great actors have that one performance where you're like it's too much.

1:19:27You've gone too far. You want something too desperately. And sometimes going too far really does take you to the Academy Awards and put you on stage with an Oscar in your hand. I'm looking at you, Mr. Son of a Woman, Al Pacino. But that is also a performance that comes, like, what? Ten years after the one that really breaks him, which is Scarface. He does, he goes from, I think, Injustice for All to Cruising.

1:19:58Bill Simmons:Well, he has the great 70s. Yeah, it's Cruising, Arthur, Arthur. Arthur, Arthur, that's the one. And then Scarface. And then Scarface. And I think Scarface is the one. I mean, he, Nicholson, and Dunaway all break at the same time. Like, they crack at the same time. Mommy Dearest comes out in 82. I want to say Scarface is 82? 83, yeah. 83. 82 or 83. It's 83, Scarface. And then The Shining is, is that 80? Yeah. Don't forget about De Niro kind of going sideways too during all this. But you know, Bill, I have a scandalous feeling about that. I think Raging Bull is him cracking. Yeah. That's the thing that like, I mean, he wins an Oscar for it, but he's not the same after.

1:20:39Well, there's also - He's a different actor.

1:20:40Bill Simmons:There's also massive amounts of cocaine going around in Hollywood. So anytime I look at, anytime I look at late seventies through like about 86, I never know what's going on. it explains a lot of choices a lot of the movies that were being made a lot of the ups and downs of actors who knows I just love that though I mean and we're not the thing that we're losing is the ability to sort of have this conversation right like we cannot I don't know who generationally like Michael B Jordan wins best actor oh I can't wait to talk about that but like what are we what does the equivalent of talking about a Faye Dunaway, Meryl Streep.

1:21:21I mean, and Faye Dunaway is just a person who I think was just one of the great 70s actors who like just shattered. She went, she went, she didn't go too close to the sun. She flew into the sun, right? And tried to come out the other side of it. Tough.

1:21:39Bill Simmons:And Mommy Dearest. And a tough hang by all counts. Yeah, sure. I think on the said, I think she was pretty tough to handle. And then Mommy Darius broke it, and then that was it. It got weird. When those cameras rolled, wasn't nobody more willing to do whatever needed to be done. I still think Chinatown is one of the... Her performance in Chinatown is the... I don't know. Have I said this to you before? I feel like I've said this to you before. What is it? Maybe... I just think that that is the greatest psychological performance I think I've ever seen. I mean, maybe Isabelle Luper and the piano teacher is close.

1:22:20But Chinatown is just like she knows from the beginning of the performance what she's acting. But then she has to hold on to all of that. You know, she's keeping a secret from her. The character is keeping a secret from herself. The actor is keeping the character secret while also keeping a secret from us. Nicholson, And she has, she so wants to get caught and like unburden herself with this that she is willing to get involved with a fucking detective, right? She wants to get caught. And all of those things are in that performance. Every single scene, it is just the way she uses her hands, the fluttering that her mouth does, her eyes, the breath work in the delivery of those lines.

1:23:05Oh my God, her death. Like just what she looks like dead. oh my god it's just it's just one of the greatest performances of all time period

1:23:16Bill Simmons:well who won that year well she was that ellen burston yeah she didn't win that year that was it was uh yeah ellen burston yeah okay i think i love that performance yeah we're probably we're probably doing that one over again five years later if that gets a redo but ellen burston is great in that movie, though. That's the kind of thing you want to see actors. This Ellen Burson in that movie, to me, I don't know how you feel about this. That's Chalamet and Marty Supreme. Oh, explain. What do you mean? Just like a really unpleasant person trying to live life, right? Like, I don't like that character.

1:23:58I know where she's coming from. I know where she's trying to get to, but she is so abrasive and so hard to, I guess, quote, root for, unquote. But the actor is delivering the thing that makes the character human. And the human part is unlikely. This is a desperate, narcissistic woman whose dreams might not ever come true. And what you're watching Ellen and Bernstein play is just the anger of those dreams failing, but also like loving this kid and letting this man into her life, but you know, because it's Chris Christopherson, you better let him in. But also, what does it mean to have him there?

1:24:44Bill Simmons:Anyway, I don't know. Do you like that performance? Well, the Oscars loves those kind of characters, right? Nicholson won with that, with As Good As It Get. Same thing. Horrible guy and now I'm starting to like him by the end of this. Yeah, but you know, I hate that movie. I know you do. No, you hate that. We've discussed in the past. The greatest thing about the Alice movie is that it led to the CBS sitcom Alice with Linda Lavin and Vic Tayback. It's one of the weirdest movie versus TV show adaptations we've had. But 75 is a good example because that was when Art Carney won for Harry and Tonto and beat Pacino and Godfather Part II, which was one of the great performances of the last 60 years.

1:25:25Bill Simmons:and then Faye Dunaway doesn't win for Chinatown either. But this is what happens. I do wonder... It's a really tough one because I thought Chalamet was great, Marty Supreme. It's also a movie I probably don't ever want to see again. It was a one-timer for me. Now, what's interesting is I've only seen one battle once and I'm not positive. I'll see it again at some point, but I haven't been racing back to see it. But I've seen Sinners four times. Interesting. So I don't know whether rewatchability, like, affects some of the stuff with great movies. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it does. But with Marty Supreme, he's so great in it.

1:26:04Bill Simmons:But I, you know, I thought that movie was, you just kind of needed to take a shower after. It was a lot. I think that's why it didn't. I think, you know, something happened with that movie and its response and the response to it. and I think what you're identifying is something like what people felt you know I you know we did an episode of Cannonball on the reaction to that movie and part of that conversation that I had with Sasha Weiss was just like reading the comments that got filed on Manola Dargis' review of the movie and you know she loved it and the comments were like you are out of your mind that is the least pleasant time I've had in a movie ever I didn't finish it I walked out he is a reprehensible character why are we cheering this asshole and I think that you know it's a little like one battle with what we talked about earlier with that character why am I cheering for this person yeah but the thing about one battle after another is I'm talking about the Tiana Taylor character yeah yeah but Perfidia I mean Perfidia is still the mother of Charlene slash Willa So the person you're really rooting for there is Charlene.

1:27:22So I feel like the thing about, the thing that makes Marty Supreme great is also the thing that makes people hate it.

1:27:32Bill Simmons:Well, it's a 1950s ping pong movie set in New York. And, you know, it's heavily Jewish, which I'm sure like affected some people's thoughts of this. It's a Holocaust movie. It's like such a Holocaust flex. and there's some crazy ping pong CGI stuff I can see why people are like what the fuck is going on here I also think the way that they sold that movie I think people went thinking it was going to be like a cute, I think the ping pong confused people I think people really thought it was going to be like Forrest Gump he's just like doing a tour now it's it was yet another movie that was super creative and had an insane performance at the center of it that was like wow i haven't seen anything like this in a while i just i said this at the time we did a really long rewatchables about sinners i thought uh i thought what mbj did in that movie i just couldn't believe how good he was and i i don't want to say i didn't know he had it in him, but I had kind of reached a point where I wasn't sure he had it in him.

1:28:42Bill Simmons:And I thought the subtleties between the two twins, the kind of that 70s macho that he had to have. I thought the accent worked. I thought that ending, which I just loved the ending of that movie, and I thought he was so good in that final scene. The epilogue or the KKK? I'm talking the epilogue. I love the epilogue. Yeah, I love the epilogue too. I love the Apple. I just thought he was so good and it was a classic. It was like watching when you have like an NBA player who toils away for 10 years and finally wins the title. That's how it felt watching it. You know, it's like, holy shit. He put it together.

1:29:18Bill Simmons:He did it. Yeah, I mean, that is the metaphor that I used in some... So I, you know, I watched him with Sean and Amanda win that you know, SAG award. Yeah. And, you know, there was that image of him like looking at like looking down at the floor with his hands on his head and I don't just that really stuck with me and you know it's like an image that got like that was used to stand in for the rest of the acceptance speech and like as and to sort of be a metaphor for how we all felt about him winning was just like whoa well even having having Landry from Friday Night Lights in the front row and him doing this like MBJ has been an important part of pop culture for this entire century.

1:30:07Bill Simmons:You go to how important he was, the first season of The Wire. He's in Friday Night Lights, which was his beloved show that people felt like, this whole generation of people felt like they saved it. It was going to get canceled. They saved it. And then he became a big part of the Renaissance. And then Fruitvale, which is... I actually watched Fruitvale this week. Oh, did you? And I forgot how good it was. I hadn't seen it in a while. It's not a movie you're going to watch 20 times. because it's just so... It's hard. It's so hard to watch. So then with Fruitvale, goes right to Creed, resuscitates the Rocky franchise, right?

1:30:45Bill Simmons:And that was one of those things where it's like, oh, I'm rooting for these guys, the Fruitvale guys. I can't wait. Had them on the podcast. Can't wait to see what's next for these guys. And then it's like, oh shit, they're doing Creed? Like, what's going on? Did you think that was weird at the time? I was worried about it. Yeah, I was worried. It's like the same way I feel about the Miami Vice remake and Heat 2 now, where it's like, obviously, I hope this works, but are we sure, guys? I mean, the Miami Vice remake. By the way. And he's going to be in that, by the way. But it's just like he just has found a way to permeate culture over and over again.

1:31:22Bill Simmons:But I never, I thought that shit might have sailed on the Oscar for him. It felt like he was moving into like, kind of where Jamie Foxx ended up in the 2010s, like action movies, maybe a couple of dramas, maybe some fun cameos, but could he carry a movie and be a best actor? I didn't know. Yeah, I don't know. What year is that? I mean, I don't want to get hung up on Jamie Foxx, but like the soloist, whatever year the soloist, I guess the soloist is in the 2010s. It was in that great, he had a great 2000, he had a great 2000s, right? Yeah. That includes, I think one of the best performances of the 21st century, which is like him and the soloist.

1:32:01And Downey is great in that movie, too. And it's, you know, Joe Wright at his peak Joe Wright-ness. Like Joe Wright. I don't know. That movie is very moving. If you've never seen The Soloist, it's got two slam dunk performances in it. And it's got such good imaginative filmmaking from Joe Wright. And, you know, it came and went. It's one of those movies. It wasn't trying to win any Oscars. It came out in April or March or something. well you know the thing with MBJ

1:32:33Bill Simmons:so the way he and he'd been doing press for this movie for a fucking year right just sitting in seatbelt but he did a really good job of just kind of played it close to the vest you don't really didn't have any damaging quotes or some weird anecdotes he's just not gonna sink any campaign but go on he was just getting first downs just moving the chains and and chalamet and i don't think this was really 100 fair to him but he it felt like he's been promoting shit for a year and a half and he's just been omnipresent he's involved with one of the kardashians which the people have a feeling about that the movie was polarizing then he had a couple dopey interview moments and at some point he hit that really rare fuck that guy potential which happens sometimes where people kind of go, ah, fuck that guy.

1:33:31Bill Simmons:But nobody's like that with MBJ. So I do think that helps. No, it's the opposite. It's the opposite. Actually, I think his humbleness really, I mean, or at least the perception of his being humble. He's really like that, though. Yeah, I actually think he's genuinely like that. Whenever he came on your show, when, was it before Creed? Reed? When was that? He came on 2013. He came on. He came to my house in 2015. So it wasn't even Reed. No, he came the second. I had him three times in like six years. When was the first time? 2013. He came to the Grantland Studios. Okay. And by the way, I coached him at the Celebrity All-Star Game too.

1:34:10Bill Simmons:And he was like, we're basically trying to get him the ball. Kevin Hart just was ball hockey. Shocker. But a couple of interesting things with him just growing up, he was Wallace forever. Like for a decade, he was Wallace, but he also had the Michael Jordan thing. It was like Michael Jordan, Michael B. Jordan. So you're not as good as Mike. And that Michael Jordan thing really hung over him the first 10 years of his career. Cause just cause of his name, I don't feel like he shed it until Fruitvale. I think when the Fruitvale thing was just incredibly important for him in a whole bunch of different ways.

1:34:45Bill Simmons:And it's a really important movie, you know? And you think like that movie happens, what, seven years before George Floyd? mm-hmm to that whatever but but it was it was but it comes out at the same time basically as Trayvon Martin right right and it just so it's it's a pivotal movie for a lot of reasons but it was pivotal for him because it was like oh shit Wallace Vince from Friday Night Lights the guy from Parenthood like a you know it you just didn't know Parenthood I forgot about that but he broke through all of it and now he's minted you know I had a whole little I really believe this I don't know if I should be ashamed of myself for like having this feeling but I feel like that B is doing a lot now and I never think about Michael Jordan I never think about 23 ever ever ever I don't think about him at all I think about that B as being like an action verb you know like that is like a verb.

1:35:46Yeah. Michael B. Jordan. Yeah. Like, it's just something, it's a sentence to me. Right. And I just, he's such a fun, even, you know, like, I would not have voted for him for best actor. I just wouldn't have because I'm really not, I'm so much less about my feelings when it comes to these things. Who would you have voted for? I would have gone Wagner Mora, Timothee Chalamet, although I would have probably gone back and forth between Chalamet and Wagner Mora in The Secret Agent. But those would have been my top two options. And I, you know, I know that DiCaprio, you know, I woke up like this. I feel like he kind of can do these things in his sleep, you know, but he did a version of the same thing in Killers of the Flower Moon, and it was terrible, right?

1:36:38He was not good in that movie. And he's got such control over the material here in one battle after. I also think he's better directed in one battle after another, which is a wild thing to say about Martin Scorsese directing DiCaprio because, you know, that relationship. But I just think that the comedy of this movie is what he could lean into. And there's so, the comedy in one battle after another is so elastic that it just gives all the things that DiCaprio is good at someplace to go. Like, I think that that stretch from when he gets to, Sergio San Carlos' Benicio del Toro's karate studio to the moment that he gets caught with the taser falling off the roof.

1:37:28And his, the way he performs that being tased is up there with the Quaalude crawl from the house to the Lamborghini in Wolf of Wall Street. That's just such a good, the physical comedy dimension of how he plays Pat slash Bob in one battle after another. I'm not going to say it's underrated, but it's a huge part of what makes that performance really good. Anyway, I would have gone Wagner Mora, Timothee Chalamet, probably DiCaprio, and then Michael B. Jordan, because I'm not crazy about Blue Moon. I hate to say it. I do not love that movie, and I feel like Ethan Hawke is kind of trapped in the gimmick, in the shrinking, in the and the short man gimmick.

1:38:15Bill Simmons:Yeah. I just didn't feel the tragedy of that story or even like the sadness of it. I had Chalamet and BJ basically like 55, 45, but I'm not even sure which way. In your ballot? Or in odds? I think I would have voted for Chalamet ultimately, but I would have agonized over it for three weeks because I just thought it almost had to, and this isn't fair to do this. What's a harder performance? and both of them were so hard. Hard, yeah. Those are hard performances. First of all, playing twins that are different, but not too different, but definitely different where you could tell them apart and what some of the choices Jordan made with that, I thought that stood out.

1:39:02Bill Simmons:But Chalamet, that's just an insane movie. I don't know how many actors could have even made that movie work. So I think I probably would have landed on Chalamet. I would have loved to see somebody try with Michael B. Jordan I think Michael B. Jordan might have a Marty Mauser in him somewhere maybe I would love to see him I would love to but that's a really I mean Michael B. Jordan is 39 Timothee Chalamet is 30 that's not a huge age difference three Oscar nominations already before 30 it's like about as rare as it gets I do wonder if Chalamet just goes to New Zealand to film a movie let's say he's filming Dune 3 in friggin Dubai wherever and he's just gone the entire promotion season and I know they needed him to promote this stuff and that was a big part of the movie itself is that they had to blow this out and do all these like outside the box things to get people to go see a 1950s ping pong movie but I do wonder.

1:40:02And it worked right?

1:40:03Bill Simmons:I do wonder if he's just gone like Leo style where he's just out. Can you do that and still be with a Jenner Kardashian though? Is that possible? Maybe not. I don't think that's how that works. Maybe he's wearing Chromeheart suits at Knicks games. Like this is just so I don't. But what what's happened here now is now he's moved into the you have to escape the fuck this guy area and you evolve out of it. And then people are like, oh, I like this guy again. This is the Ben Affleck Argo scenario. Well, okay. This is what I like. This is this is this is why I came here. Yeah. Listen, let's just talk about what his life looks like if nothing changes personally, right?

1:40:43Because on the one hand, this guy is in a really shitty position. He is doing, he is the only person at his level of actorly fame doing the thing that we complain, we like plebeians complain, nobody does anymore. Nobody gives, nobody's just like telling the publicist to go in the other room while I do an interview. Nobody's like just hanging around for some internet content for somebody who needs it.

1:41:10Bill Simmons:Nobody's promoting stuff the right way. It's like we talk about tennis players and golfers this way. These guys aren't interesting. They need to be more interesting. And then he was actually interesting and people are like, fuck this guy. Yeah, I just feel like, do you want Taylor Fritz to be your movie star? Or do you want this Timothee Chalamet? Taylor Fritz, by the way, for people who aren't paying attention, is a very sleepy tennis player who's good at his job, but is also something you bounce a basketball off. What about everybody on the woman's side right now? Sabalenka, I mean, you mean tennis-wise or acting-wise?

1:41:45Tennis-wise. I mean, Sabalenka is fun. I mean, she says some crazy shit, and she doesn't apologize. Well, sometimes she'll apologize for it, but she speaks her mind. I don't know.

1:41:57Bill Simmons:I've never had a Sabalenka conversation with anybody at dinner. Hey, what do you think of Sabalenka? It's never happened. All right, fair. but I'm just saying if y 'all want to talk about a really fiery tennis player who's great at her job Arena Sabalenka is there for you Have I told you about Serena Theory by the way before I'm going to interrupt you and then keep going Oh no, go on That would be my number one draft pick for a pro sports thing for her to come back right now Oh man It would be so compelling I'd be so into it What would be more fun? Just come back Are we doing this to ourselves?

1:42:34Just come back

1:42:34Bill Simmons:We cannot do this Just come back. You know she could do it. What would be more fun? It would... Like, if Tom Brady came back, it would be like, this is terrible. Please don't do this. If Serena came back, I'd be like, what time is she playing? But first of all, what an insult to the rest of the field. I'm sorry. I'm just going to say that. Yeah. Whether it turns out to be true, you could be right, right? Like, she does get to the quarter semis and finals of events that she enters. It's the greatest tennis part of all time. Yes, sure. But you know what she's not out there doing every day that Elena Rabakina is doing every day?

1:43:12Bill Simmons:Right, just hitting four hands for five hours. She's just playing tennis every day. I know. That's what would be so compelling. Anyway, I interrupted you. I just, I don't, I don't, I can't, like it's hard enough watching Venus lose in the first round five times a year still. So you're pro Chalamet because he's interesting and I completely agree. But I also think he was, I think he was in the limelight for too long. And I'm not the first person to make that point. Sometimes you can burn people out on your persona. I also don't love the wigger thing that he was on for, you know, getting Marty Supreme rolled out, right?

1:43:49Like he was doing that thing that makes everybody, you know, anybody who's attuned to like, you know, our minstrel past. He was very comfortable sort of fucking with that. And it wasn't in a knowing way. I mean, I guess it was knowing, but it wasn't, he was leaning into and not questioning or challenging this thing. He was daring us to notice and comment on it. And that didn't feel great. But at the same time, again, like, he is doing, he is the kind of star that we say we want to have. and you know I think it is polarizing in a lot of ways but you know my coffee girl Chloe you know one of the coffee shops I go to in New York City you know Chloe nothing is gonna break her from her

1:44:40Bill Simmons:I like that you name dropped Chloe like we knew who this was Chloe I mean Chloe Chloe at Culture Coffee I mean if y 'all know you know I mean the culture on 38th and 6th like she there's nothing. She is worried about this relationship with him going into the Kardashian family. How can he not be? Imagine if this was my son. I'd be like, yeah, so he's dating one of the Kardashians. You'd be like, what's he doing? Why? I mean, but I think that that is part of... I mean, we know the story that it doesn't always end well for the people who go in there. Oh, really?

1:45:21Bill Simmons:is that what you've been hearing listen I think this is ultimately from a career wise from a career standpoint this is great for him big picture 20 years from now we will look back and we'll think like this is awesome you needed you needed to get punched in the chin a couple times this happens in sports this happens in movies all the time we've seen the greats sometimes it's good to get a black eye and have a broken tooth and then bounce back from it. I really love the way he entered the Dolby Auditorium. I don't know if you caught any of the red carpet stuff, but I did not see him stop and talk to anybody.

1:46:02I don't know if he talked to Jesse Palmer.

1:46:04Bill Simmons:He was walking into his assassination, basically. He knew it was going to be one of the worst nights of his life. He was going into a roast. He certainly had I'm going to get roasted energy, and he looked like Kevin Richardson from the Backstreet Boys. Yeah. You know, but he, he had some real, like, I'm gonna get rickled. I'm gonna get rickled energy going in there. He was strolling real hard. He'll be fine. He's a great actor and good things will happen to him. Yeah. I told you, I thought Jesse Buckley had the best performance male or female of this century and you, you made a noise. You didn't really like that take.

1:46:39Bill Simmons:I didn't. I mean. You didn't, you weren't into Hamlet. You're just not an emotional guy. have you met me? stop I think that I think the problem that I had with that performance is I just didn't understand why the movie existed and I sort of felt like it was an acting exercise in search of a reason to be I liked it and then and then the end comes and like many other people although I know a lot of people who got emotional at the end and were furious that it made them emotional but the end really works and you know I think that it's gotta be said Bill like that is maybe the greatest birth scene like the I mean I know but necessarily also has a really tough one you feel like it's actually happening yeah that is a really I don't know how you there's some things I don't know how you act and giving birth is just one of those things where I'm just like, wow.

1:47:43Bill Simmons:Well, there's also been some really bad versions of it too. Sure. But I mean, they usually don't take place in a forest. Ham that for an hour or 20 minutes. Or start taking place in a forest. For an hour and 20 minutes, you're like, what the fuck with this movie? Yes. What the hell? And then all of a sudden... That's me. But all of a sudden... But this is... I think you have to... The last 20 to 25 minutes are so good. You just don't even remember the first hour 20, it's like, it turns into like, you're like, is this the greatest movie I've ever seen? And you just, you just forgive the rest of it.

1:48:19Bill, so you're saying, you're saying what I'm saying. You're just also loving the movie because you've expunged the first hour 20 minutes.

1:48:28Bill Simmons:So I thought the ending, the whole last stretch was so good. I didn't care that I was mad at the first part. Once she leaves to go to the theater, I'm like, okay. When she's heading to the theater, it was great. Best Oscars in memoriam ever. It took them forever to figure out how to do this. What do you think took them so long? I don't know. I just think, I think it took them forever to understand this is one of the only parts of the show where everybody's like, I didn't realize he died. I didn't realize she died. Oh, I love that person. Like you could almost put this as an actual TV show and I think it would get ratings.

1:49:06okay so you're a genius at that sort of thing I don't know what you're talking to me for right now when you could be writing a pitch it's so depressing here's our in memoriam for the year

1:49:18Bill Simmons:death show but the Rob Reiner thing the only thing they fucked up and I was so happy they did that and obviously one of the worst Hollywood stories we've had they did a great job Billy Crystal was awesome didn't break I thought he was gonna and he didn't do it never broke because he's a pro They show all these people from the movies Yeah, yeah And it's like four seconds Like you bet I was like, can we sit with this for five minutes? Like we have Daphne Zuniga Next to John Cusack I was just about to say it I was been waiting to see Daphne Zuniga at the Academy Awards What are we doing? I want to see all these people one at a time I just couldn't They like quickly skipped over it And like Meg Ryan was out there I'm not even sure all the people that were out there I don't even know either Was Michael Douglas out there?

1:50:09Bill Simmons:I don't even know I don't know, it's a great question I mean, was Danny DeVito? I don't know Oh wait, did they do a No, Danny DeVito He has no reason to be there No filmography I thought I saw Fred Savage I'm like, why is Fred Savage out there? Oh, interesting, was like Patinkin? I don't know But I thought that was great I loved that So they go through half of the memoriam and then Rachel McAdams comes out and does like a whole Diane Keaton thing. I'm like, great choice. Good job. Way to talk about some of the best females. They go through that. And then they end with Streisand, which on the one hand was like, like almost like watching like, you know, one of our parents like try to speak.

1:50:55Bill Simmons:And it was like, oh God, I hope this goes well. And obviously she doesn't have the voice anymore, but it was weirdly touching. Because she meant it. Yeah. Because she meant it. I would have Jane Fonda out there with her. I thought Jane Fonda and her should have been together for that. Did you see Jane Fonda, what she said? Well, she was joking, but it was one of those, I'm not totally joking. Yeah, I don't know. She was like, I made four movies with him. My Spanish is not good enough to pick up on the nuances of sarcasm, but it just seemed like she was saying, I read it in El Pais, so I'm not sure.

1:51:29I mean, the sarcasm might have been lost on me, but no Fonda Fonda had to be out there. Yeah. I think she should have. I don't, I wonder what happened. I wonder how they asked who they asked. Oh, I think we know what happened.

1:51:44Bill Simmons:Streisand's like, I'm only doing it if it's me. Oh, interesting. I'm, I'm not sharing the stage with anyone. It's gotta be all. Yeah. I just kind of loved how like she just, she just like woke up and was at the, at the, at the theater ready to do this. You know what else I love? It tied into one of my other favorite things. When somebody who's old, who had an awesome, incredible career, still carries themselves like they were just as famous as they were 50 years ago. Yes. And I mean that as a compliment, not an insult. No, it's... I just... My mom always has this theory. My mom's had this theory forever that somebody who is beautiful at like age 18 carries themselves like that for the rest of their life, no matter what they look like when they're 60.

1:52:32Bill Simmons:and it's the same thing with famous people. If you hit a level of fame that you're just that way your whole life. Like I'm sure Faye Dunaway before she died when I think she's dead. No, don't put that out there. Is Faye Dunaway alive? Yes, she is. I'm sure Faye Dunaway right now if you met her would carry herself like one of the biggest stars in the world. I just think you almost like have to buy into it to be that famous. Yes. You're purchasing it. You don't lose it. This is like, you know, I mean, I like to talk to people about this. And if I had a different show that I was doing where I was just having people on and talk about how old they feel.

1:53:13You know, Max Linsky had a great show called 70 Over 70. And it was just like people of note over the age of 70 talking about what it's like to be the age they are. And I am like, one of the things that comes up on that show is like how old do you feel you are? And I think a lot about like, what is the age that you are going to feel when you're 85 years old? Mine is 32. I have felt 32 since I was 27. And what's yours, Bill? How do I feel right now? No, I mean, how do you, what's your spiritual age? Like what do you - 44. How old do you feel as a person?

1:53:56Bill Simmons:44, because I can't play basketball anymore. I mean, I probably could. I would just get hurt. That's a great answer. But when you think of yourself, you think of yourself as a 44-year-old. Yeah, because I'm still locked in. Yeah. I mean, I think that Barbra Streisand, I wonder what she would say her age is. Like, I wonder what she would say. Is she like the 19-year-old girl who got discovered singing at the Bonsoir in the village? I mean, she was younger than 19, I think. like what age I think that you know Jane Fonda is also one of these people how old is Jane Fonda think she is I guarantee she feels she still probably feels like she's a hot 42 year old yeah I think that she probably is still doing workouts workout videos and I think that like for movies I just think it's really important like Denzel I think Denzel still thinks he's 25 oh you could see that in the Spike movie Yeah.

1:54:58Bill Simmons:That was a performance that he's probably 10 years to do. And he's like, fuck it. Is there a chase scene? I'm in. I mean, and it really, it can sometimes go bad, right? It can sometimes ruin movies. But I mean, a lot of the time it brings out something really interesting and special. I think that's the thing that I love watching about Denzel now is that even when the movie is bad or like he is even bad in the movie. He's committed to whatever it is he has decided to do in front of those cameras. And it is youthful. Yeah. And like the youthfulness of it is really powerful. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

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1:57:10Bill Simmons:Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash Simmons Bill. Terms and conditions apply. You know, we have a, it's CR month on the rewatchables. I'm sorry you weren't a part of it. Thank the Lord. These movies, I just finished To Live and Die in LA. A movie, I will tell y 'all, y 'all are going to kill me. I've never watched it. So I watched, you know, I mean, one of the great things about the show is I'll just listen to episodes. I mean, I've seen I mean, well, now I that's this is one of the ones where like I watched it.

1:57:50Couldn't believe I've never seen it. Forgot freaking had directed it. Listen to you guys talk about it and was like, I cannot wait to smoke this movie.

1:57:59Bill Simmons:Well, so next week we have we did The Nice Guys. And one of the things I brought up was Ryan Gosling not to step on the rewatchables, but we, Brian Gossley's 2016, he has the nice guys in La La Land. And I was saying how one of the awards I would love to have in the Oscars is just the MVP for the movie year. Like how we do in sports. And it could be a movie, it could be a director, it could be a writer, it could be anybody, but like who is the most impactful? And it would kind of be shaded toward if you did at least two movies that were consequential in different ways for some reason or somebody that just owned the year.

1:58:42Bill Simmons:So I think for this year, if we did the MVP, I think it would be PTA because of what he does, the three awards he wins for that movie, which as we discussed, not a long list for that. Also gets Sean Penn, an Oscar. Another great Leo movie. Chase Infinity, he basically... The money, the money. the money that it makes and will continue to make and then some of the stuff it did for some of the actors in the movie and then the Benicio Del Toro gets nominated, Tiana Taylor the impact of it on all these different careers plus how it did, I think he's probably the MVP but I wanted to talk it out yeah, I think I like that, I feel like um I think it's hard to argue in that, you know, I don't know when the, I don't know when in like the NBA, for instance, when this, when, I mean, it always seems in the NFL that it's just statistics that determine it.

1:59:44It's not like feelings.

1:59:46Bill Simmons:Yeah. NBA, it's weird because NBA is regular season. So I always thought there should be an award, like a playoffs MVP, but movies are easy because it's just like 2025. It's basically who owned the year. Well, but what I'm saying is, what I'm actually asking is, in your evaluation of Paul Thomas, I mean, you did not introduce this, so I'm assuming it's inadmissible. Yeah. But the idea that it's taken... Oh, do the Oscars have to tie into it somehow? No, it's the opposite. Does there have to be... Is there a history that you can take into consideration when making your choice, right? Like, do you think about the fact that it's taken PTA this long to get the MVP?

2:00:28I think part of it's narrative

2:00:30Bill Simmons:part of it is has he even been one of the three finalists for an MVP do you know what I mean he's never even been to this dance before in the way that he's been there yeah so if you did 07 that gets really hard because you could say that Dana Day-Lewis that's one of the great performances of all time or you could say yo the Coen brothers this is their whole career was leading up to this and they've completely resuscitated Josh Brolin and what they did to Javier Bardem and create one of the great villains of all time and Cormac McCarthy and Tommy Lee Jones. It's like this exclamation point on his career.

2:01:10Bill Simmons:They're probably the MVPs of that year. And by the way, this is completely stupid. I'm fully aware. I'm sure there's movie nerds like, this is the worst thing I've ever heard. Shoot me. Don't do this, Simmons. But it's a fun idea. It's kind of an interesting idea. Right. I mean, there was the year Sandra Bullock was definitely the MVP. I think it was the next year, wasn't it? No, maybe it was like... For Blindside? 2009. Yeah, I mean, she had Blindside and the proposal. When she taught us how to think about race? Yes, of course. I mean, I can be a better black mother than this man, than Michael Orr's black mother.

2:01:43Never really considered all the stuff

2:01:45Bill Simmons:that movie made me consider before. But I mean, you know, the proposal and the Blindside and the way that, like, it completely kind of changed our understanding of what it was that Sandra Bullock could be in late, like sort of mid-late career. It's a great point. I love, not only did you embrace my idea, but you came up with an awesome MVP season, the Sandra Bullock to do the rom-com, win the Oscar. She's also hot in the blind side. It's kind of like Milf Hall of Fame in that. She really graduated into this different level of whatever and this sass and nobody knew she had it in her. That was the other great thing about that.

2:02:28Bill Simmons:That's the thing, right? Because the thing that makes her year, for instance, really interesting is that you just didn't think of her in all the ways that you were sort of being allowed to think of her. Which is as... Well, I think the sass without having to sort of suffer for it. The sexy sass. Right. So we had Inglourious Bastards that year and we had Avatar. We had The Hurt Locker. Catherine Bigelow won Picture and Director. Yeah, Cameron. That's a big one. And she beat her ex-husband, which was a fun one. So she would have gotten, she would have definitely been a finalist. She would have been a finalist.

2:03:12But I mean, I think that that's Sandra Bullock's. That's not

2:03:16Bill Simmons:See, this is a fun exercise. The MVP. So I think PTA was the MVP, but I'm willing to accept other I mean, the other candidates include Coogler. Coogler, 100%. Who would have been like if it's just... I mean, you could argue with the Coogler, you could argue the case, part of his case would be the movie reverting back to him 25 years later. Ooh. Yeah, that's a good one. Which is that he's not the first one that came up with that, but also like what that movie meant to Warner Brothers 2. Right. What it meant to Michael B. Jordan. Yeah, it's a good battle. By the way, we mention this every time we talk about the Oscars, standing back to when we were at Grantland together.

2:03:59Bill Simmons:And even we did an Oscars preview. I think, was that on ABC or ESPN? I don't... Right before I got suspended. I think it ran on both. That was right before you got suspended. Or right before I left. It was right before I left. When we did that whole Oscars preview that year, and there was a reason I brought this up, because we had all these fake goofy awards for it. Yes. that were super fun. They did add the best casting this year, which I enjoyed. And it made me wonder, are we going to start? Because I still feel like best young star should be an Oscar. And I know they've talked about this on the big picture too.

2:04:36Bill Simmons:Like under a certain age. I don't know if Chase Infinity, she might be one of those who's a little older than people realize. I don't know. Like depending on what your cutoff is, is it 16 is your cutoff? No, that's... you went older and I'd probably go under 18 under, Oh, under 18. That's Jason Penny was older than that. Obviously you could have the breakthrough star Oscar, like somebody, but I guess that would be, it's he, they could get complicated. Like Noah Joop. The, I think it's Noah Joop, the kid from, from Hamnet. He, he's probably your winner. Would you have pet Oscars or no? Oh, come on, Bill.

2:05:15No.

2:05:15Bill Simmons:Can you imagine like hooch getting robbed in Turner and hooch? Some other animal won. Sorry, Hooch. I don't know what to tell you. Hooch, you did too much campaigning. All the animals now are CGI anyway. Like, I don't even know what the real animal is. You'd have to prove that you used an actual living animal, which then creates all these moral and ethical concerns in your use of the animal. I don't think it's worth it. So does Chalamet win an Oscar in the next five years? Ooh. I mean, it's funny because I was going to ask you how many more Michael B. Jordan, how many more nominations Michael B.

2:05:52Jordan has. Oh, I think a couple more.

2:05:56Bill Simmons:I mean, he's in that stage now. And the Oscars, they do make you earn it a little bit. You had to have been around. I mean, Bradley Cooper, think about the people that do not have Academy Awards after like X number of events. But what would Bradley Cooper have won for? I'm not saying he was robbed. I'm just saying... Wedding Crashers? Oh, come on. Although he was, that's like, there was a sneaky supporting. Oh, there you go. That's, so should there be an Oscar for comedy and should there be an Oscar for horror? Should they just add those? And would you turn the TV off when they were awarding them?

2:06:32Bill Simmons:I would not. I personally would not. If we are talking about going down this really bad idea route, no, because, you know, it's true. There were no comedies. There were no best picture nominees that were like pure comedies this year for the most part. I mean, really at all. I mean, K-pop Demon Hunters is the funniest movie I saw last year and not nominated for any of the top awards. Original screenplay. What is wrong with y 'all? But I think that one of the interesting things to think about is I thought I don't want a genre category that leave the like bring back the MTV movie awards for that.

2:07:09But what I do think would be interesting, Bill, is removing the genders from the acting categories. Oh, wow. I think we got to call these people's bluff. We got to call the industry's bluff.

2:07:22Bill Simmons:You're losing too much history with that, though. I think that's the only issue. I think you're creating new history. We're creating new history. Yeah, that's a brain breaker for me. I just think we got to try it. We got to try it. Because at least then we will know something about this organization. Because it's not like, it's the Oscars. It's not like people, I mean, I'm sure there will be industry people who would hear a statement like this and be like, have you really thought this through? But I'm just saying like, it's not like the Oscars doing it costs work. So who would have won if it was just one actor Oscar?

2:07:58Bill Simmons:I think Jesse Buckley would have won. Jesse Buckley would have won. Oh, I remember what I was going to say when I brought up that Grantland thing. because if you notice, I pivoted beautifully, but I actually, like, brain farted. Yes, I mean, I thought you remembered. No, we've been talking about this for, ever since we've been talking about the Oscars. Not knowing the votes. And this is a William Goldman thing. He would talk about it all the time. Least the numbers. It would have been amazing if Chalamet lost by, like, five votes. Oh, man. Can you imagine? I think Sinners probably lost by five votes.

2:08:27By the time we got to the weekend, everyone thought Sinners was going to win. Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, if they'd had another week? I think so. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. We could have found, we could find out that Frankenstein came in second.

2:08:40Bill Simmons:There were too many awards. There were too many award shows in general. I said this to Sean last week. You mean leading up to the Oscars? Yeah, too many awards and the Oscars, it was too late. It shouldn't be like right before March Madness. That's fucking crazy. Oh, oh. Put this in February. Like, let's get the year done and move on. Well, I can tell you what does happen if you do that. Michael B. Jordan is not a best actor winner. Yeah. I think people turned against Marty Supreme. We kind of talked about that. And I also think it took people a second to really understand, including me, honestly, what it was that Michael B.

2:09:18Jordan was doing for that movie because the movie is so good that it doesn't even need him to be as good as it turns out he is, right? like we you me and van talked about this movie we made it an instant rewatch you made it an instant rewatchables and i you invited me and van to come talk about it i what do we say who won the

2:09:38Bill Simmons:movie there were only two options who won the movie we said coogler because we said coogler but partly because of the crazy deal he did and just how insane it is that he created this movie from scratch and got people to go see it. If you actually do the one sentence of, this is a vampire movie set in the 1930s. It's like the degree of difficulty was like a 9.95. But the Marty Supreme degree of difficulty was also high. I was just about to say, it did not need Michael B. Jordan to go out here and act a fool to try to get people to come see the movie. Right, right. The way Marty Supreme needed Timothy Chalamet to do some interesting stuff to try to put some butts in some seats.

2:10:18Bill Simmons:Well, next year's Oscars is going to be... a lot different because the Odyssey is just going to win 27 Oscars. No other movie should even come out. It's just going to be the Odyssey across the board winning everything. I'm sighing and moaning and groaning right now. You'll be the first guy in the theater for that.

2:10:42Y 'all know how I feel about Christopher Nolan. I'm just like, I'm not even opposed. I'm just, I don't know.

2:10:49Bill Simmons:We got to go. I kept you too long. I know. I'd love for you to come back on because there's TV stuff we got to talk about at some point okay are you watching DTL yeah I saw all of them DTF sorry I saw all of them it's a fucking weird one I don't like it I don't like it we should talk about Love Story are you watching that

2:11:15are you kidding

2:11:17Bill Simmons:am I watching that Okay. This is my wife's Super Bowl. I was going to say. She's watching three times each episode. Watches it, goes to her mom's house, second watch, then third watch over the weekend. Oh, my God. This is like Carrie. She's been waiting her whole life for the show. We got to have... Okay, then I want to talk to Carrie because, I mean, what a wild show. And a wild show to have... We can talk about it later, but it's a wild show to have now that the country and the world are falling apart. that we, I don't know, I don't know what this Middle East situation is going to mean for us.

2:11:54It's definitely not good. Yeah, I would say not promising. Not good. But here we all are strung out on a show about two, one very famous white person and his girlfriend and how much she does not want to get sucked into the vacuum of the thing that could probably kill her, right?

2:12:16Bill Simmons:Fame, paparazzi. the whole thing plus this family that had a bunch of deaths. Yeah, it just feels like this. I mean, in a completely accidental backhanded way, even more than, you know, heated rivalry solving other problems. This show is really about like this mess that we are in. And I don't even think it knows it, except it comes from Ryan Murphy's Funhouse. I guarantee you it doesn't know it. It might not know. Between this and heated rivalry, I think this has been my wife's favorite TV year. It's only mid-March. The combo of those two already, if we can keep this pace the rest of the way. I got to be honest, banged out all three episodes of The Madison with my queen, Michelle Pfeiffer.

2:13:00Yeah, yeah. It's a good one. You told me to watch it. I will watch it.

2:13:06Bill Simmons:Well, you love Michelle Pfeiffer as much as I do. It just looks like a catalog. No, you'll like it. Listen, we have to support Michelle Pfeiffer and Gwyneth Paltrow for the rest of their careers. Those are our two. I'll do anything for I would love to bring you on after the last JFK love story so mark it in your calendar now good to see you Wesley Morris don't forget about Cannonball that's his podcast I've been on it I haven't been invited since I've only been on once I'm always available always ready to go don't fret not good to see you bye that's it for the podcast thanks to Billy and Wesley thanks to Gahal and Eduardo as well don't forget two rewatchables went up this week to live and die in LA and a special mailbag.

2:13:52Bill Simmons:And the next episode of the rewatchables is going to be the nice guys. Yeah. That's going to be up on a Monday night. I'm going to be back on Sunday after Celtics Timberwolves. We're going to be live on Netflix, me and Zach Lowe. So it should be around seven 30 Pacific time when we're going live. So enjoy the weekend. Enjoy all the basketball. I will see you on Sunday night.

2:14:24I don't have feelings with them On the wayside

2:14:36Bill Simmons:Must be 21 plus in president in select states for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 plus in president in D.C., Kentucky, or Wyoming. If you have a problem, call 1-800-GAMBL or 1-800-MY-RESET. Call 888-79-7777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut or mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here. Visit gamblinghelpline ma.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24-7 support in Massachusetts or call 877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York for Louisiana. Call 877-770-7867. This episode is brought to you by TaxAct. Like an expert coach, TaxAct offers step-by-step guidance and guaranteed accuracy when filing taxes.

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