The High Drama of the Best Actress Race
Little Gold Men by Vanity Fair
Conde Nast & Vanity Fair
4.4 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The LGM team is joined Variety chief correspondent Daniel D'Addario this week to talk about his new book, The Talent, which centers on a fictionalized best actress Oscar race. The novel, which is available now, has lots of juicy insider details that D'Addario has gathered in his years of covering entertainment. David, Richard, and Rebecca discuss with him why the best actress race is often the most dramatic, and what he thinks about this year's cut-throat race. Plus, D'Addario sticks around to answer some listener questions like why don't voters watch all the movies?
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, before we start today's episode, I have some news. |
| 0:05.0 | I wanted to let you know that we are once again doing our very own Little Goldman Oscars Pool. |
| 0:10.0 | Head to the link in our show notes to sign up and fill out your ballot any time before Sunday, March 2nd, at 4 p.m. Pacific Time, 7 p.m. Eastern Time. |
| 0:19.0 | We'll announce the winner on the show the morning after the ceremony. |
| 0:22.2 | Happy voting. |
| 0:26.9 | Hello and welcome to Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. |
| 0:32.4 | I'm David Canfield. I'm Richard Lawson. And I'm Rebecca Ford. |
| 0:38.9 | Today on the show, we are joined by Daniel Dadario, chief correspondent at Variety, and the author of the lovely new novel The Talent, which follows five fictional best actress nominees as they campaigned for an Oscar-esque award. |
| 0:50.8 | You could probably guess why he's on this podcast today. |
| 0:55.8 | So we're going to talk about the book, |
| 0:59.5 | how it intersects with this real-life campaign season, and Dan will stick around to answer some audience questions as well with us. Hi, Dan. Hey, thank you so much for having me. We are so happy |
| 1:05.4 | to have you. I thought a good way to start could be to get a little bit of your background at Variety, |
| 1:10.8 | how you've covered Hollywood over the years, and how that informed this novel, which, as we |
| 1:16.4 | will get into, was uncomfortably close, I think, to what we all cover on this podcast every week. |
| 1:22.5 | Happy to. So, I came into Variety as the television critic there, but in recent years, my title, just as you say, |
| 1:29.5 | has been chief correspondent. What that basically means is I'm offering commentary on the events |
| 1:35.1 | of the day while also reporting a lot of features, cover stories on actors in the Emmy and |
| 1:41.3 | Oscar races every year. These two things, both the critical backing of having been a professional critic |
| 1:47.6 | and also the kind of firsthand experience of seeing campaigns and action |
| 1:52.3 | and kind of interacting with them, bolstered writing a novel about this whole world. |
| 1:58.0 | There are a lot of things in the novel that feel very recognizable, |
| 2:02.2 | but there's just as much stuff I think that is wholly, you know, of your own invention. When |
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