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Oscar Nominations & Mel Brooks with Dylan O'Brien & Rheeqrheeq Chainey

January 28, 2026·1 hr 25 min·6 clips

The hosts break down why 'Sinners' getting a record 16 Oscar nods is a Trojan horse victory for Black cinema in a homogenized era.

The segment starts mid-swing. A film is judged as underwhelming and structurally dull, the kind of machine that does exactly what it promised and nothing more. Nobody finds much adrenaline in it. The better imaginary version has the first woman F1 driver, Bonnie Bedelia hair, and a scarf disaster. Isadora Duncan gets the callback. That tossed-off pitch says a lot about the episode's mood: bored by flat awards fare, happy to chase anything with danger, texture, and nerve. Then Oscar predictions take over. Likely winners get called, Sinners gets the rooting interest, and a possible casting prize turns into the liveliest argument. The casting category gets side-eyed. The host says casting can sometimes mean whoever answered the email, then shifts toward nominees that needed specific faces from specific communities. That tension keeps the riff from floating away. Mario Supreme becomes the preferred choice, with Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhardt, and Christopher Lloyd treated as part of the movie's weird charge. The Christopher Lloyd trivia lands cleanly. If that film won Best Picture, he would have appeared in winners fifty years apart, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to 2025. Naturally, someone calls it life. The Oscars come off as guaranteed emotional fuel, good for irritation or delight for at least forty-eight hours. That is the point. Awards season here is taste, trivia, grudges, and absurd hypotheticals moving fast. The outro turns to housekeeping: social prompts, YouTube extras, production credits, and a reminder that the staff is unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

As heard by us

A sharp Oscar ballot hang where real awards taste keeps swerving into ridiculous side riffs.

Keep It gets a lot of mileage out of Oscar ballot talk, mostly by refusing to treat predictions as sacred. The hosts move from likely winners to petty feelings, from rooting for Sinners to wondering whether casting awards sometimes come down to who answered the email.

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Why you'd press play

Dylan O'Brien joins to sort the Oscar nominations, and nobody on this show is pretending to be objective.

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