‘L.A. Confidential’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and Andy Greenwald

March 31, 2026·2 hr 31 min·5 clips

Why do critics argue 'L.A. Confidential' deserved the Oscar over 'Titanic' in 1997?

The movie talk comes in hot. After the San Francisco live-show housekeeping, the room gets into awards math and starts sorting through the crowded acting field. Pearce gets the strongest push. The panel weighs whether Guy Pearce or Russell Crowe had the better nomination case, and the argument leans Pearce. Crowe still gets respect. One voice says Crowe could have made it too, like two guards making All-NBA in the same season. Then the nitpicks start. Crowe's accent and manner get picked at, with Virtuosity dropped in as the quick pop-culture jab that keeps it from getting too serious. Spacey hangs over the conversation. His awards run gets framed as one reason another nomination may have been crowded out around that period. Then the field gets strange. Peter Fonda, Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog, Uli's Gold, and American Beauty all get folded into the same Oscar puzzle. The tangent takes over from there. Uli's Gold leads to Lorenzo's Oil, then George Miller, then somehow an Erewhon drink order. That is the rhythm. A real point about performance categories keeps getting interrupted by jokes about ingredients, titles, and how certain movie names sound. The intro has road-show energy. The host plugs the first live Rewatchables in San Francisco, a Basic Instinct runback with CR, Van, and Mallory at ACT's Tony Remby Theater. The ending stays loose: production thanks, studio setup comparisons, Hawaii for A Perfect Getaway, and plugs for The Watch and Big Picture. It feels like friends circling one movie until one nomination question turns into a whole late-nineties movie ecosystem.

As heard by us

A loose, funny L.A. Confidential rewatch built around Oscar arguments, actor debates, and very specific side roads.

The Rewatchables takes L.A. Confidential into loose, argument-friendly territory, with Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and Andy Greenwald circling the movie through Oscar hypotheticals, actor rankings, and the kind of sideways jokes that keep the room from getting too…

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Why you'd press play

Four voices, one great 90s noir, and a running argument over which performance deserved the nomination.

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