Screen Test of Time is a podcast where Suzan Eraslan and David Daw watch every movie ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, in order, from the first awards season to, eventually the present day. Each week, they watch and review a different movie, and when they've watched everything nominated in a particular year, they tell you whether the Oscar went to the right one!
We will watch and review every* movie every nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, in order, from the first awards (1927/1928) until the present year. If there are multiple release dates for a film, we will proceed according to the earliest release date for the film listed on Wikipedia. Once we have watched all of the movies in a nomination year, we will tell you if the Academy chose correctly and why at the end of the episode for the last movie in that year.
*A handful of films that were nominated for Best Picture have either entirely escaped preservation, or are only available on a single copy kept in a vault at the UCLA Film Archives. When this presents an obstacle to us watching the film, we have no choice but to forego watching it, but it obviously didn’t stand the screen test of time if no one care enough to make copies. Sometimes, we will instead watch and review a different movie that was released in the same year but was not nominated.
Movies are scored on a scale between 1 and 10. We cannot give a movie a score of 0.* Since Ep. 3: The Racket, we have a policy of telling you whether or not you should watch the film, and since Ep. 7: The Hollywood Revue of 1929, we tell you if it was, in fact, a movie.
Movies that completely fail the screen test of time on the basis of racism, sexism, antisemitism, colonialism, etc., will still be fully reviewed— with one exception outlined in Rule 3— and may score points for technical achievements (costumes, cinematography, etc.) as per rules established after Ep. 27: A Farewell to Arms. However, automatic 1s are given to movies that feature black face or romanticize sexual assault, regardless of technical achievement.
*We have, however, been known to give it less than 0 or to depart from this scale in some way.
Once a calendar year (from January to December), we can play “The Bengal Lancer Card,” so named because it was first used for Ep. 47: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. The Bengal Lancer Card is played when a movie is just too egregious to warrant a review, and while we did, in fact, watch the movie, we won’t talk about it in the episode.
Once the Bengal Lancer Card has been played, regardless of how horrendous the movies following may be, all movies through the end of the calendar year must be reviewed. The Bengal Lancer Card resets every January 1st.
Suzan in the screening room of amateur Czech film historian Josef Kazda
Suzan grew up in Knoxville, TN, where she briefly worked at a video store when she was 18. After earning a BA in Dramatic Literature, she took a two year break to write about music and culture in Atlanta, before grad school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television, where she studied neither (but did meet her best friend, and co-host, David Daw).
When she isn’t watching old movies, Suzan spends her time helping low income New Yorkers secure housing, DJing at ((305)) Fitness, and slowly fulfilling her goal of visiting all seven continents (3 down, 4 to go). She lives with a tiny dog and two cats in New York.
Favorite movie: The Seventh Seal (1957) and Synecdoche, NY (2008), if I’m trying to impress someone. 28 Days Later (2002) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) if I’m not.
Favorite Screen Test of Time movies so far: La Grande Illusion (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Casablanca (1943)
Favorite Screen Test of Time episode: Ep. 23: One Hour With You for the hate watch glee, Ep. 70: Lost Horizon for how weird we got.
David in a tux at the Ebell, Los Angeles
David was born in Dallas Texas and then moved to Georgia at a very young age where he spent the rest of his childhood. You'd think he'd have met Suzan somewhere in there but nope, it was actually when he moved to New York to study the didactic uses of genre entertainment in film, comics and other media at NYU. He then went to grad school to study storytelling in new media and games. He's the son of a theater director and an opera singer. He has absolutely no qualifications to talk about film.
David is a writer whose byline has appeared at PCWorld, Gamasutra and Io9. He's also written genre fiction scripts for TV, comics, and podcasts but those haven't appeared much of anywhere. David lives in LA with his extremely cute wife and dog.
Favorite movie: Spirited Away (2001), If I'm looking to give a "correct" answer. Brothers Bloom (2008), if only to figure out why nobody ever talks about this movie but me. Rian Johnson directed it between Brick and Looper and it's like it fell in a memory hole. They're con-men brothers doing cons for good! Why does nobody talk about this movie?
Favorite Screen Test of Time movies so far: La Grande Illusion (1938), The Great Dictator (1940) and have you guys heard about this Citizen Kane (1941)? Pretty good.
Favorite Screen Test of Time episode: Ep. 7: The Hollywood Revue of 1929, which was the first time I realized the episode could still be fun if the movie sucked, Ep. 70: Lost Horizon also for how weird we got.
