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 her senior year of high school and freshman year of college. After earning her BA in Dramatic Literature, she was an electronic music and culture writer in Atlanta for two years before enrolling at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television, where she studied neither (but she did meet David Daw).
When she isn’t watching old movies, Suzan can be found helping low income New Yorkers secure housing, secretly writing a young adult fantasy novel set in an alternate history Venice, and slowly fulfilling her goal of wearing her wedding dress on all seven continents (3 down, 4 to go). She lives with a tiny dog, two cats, and her partner in Manhattan.
Favorite movie: The Seventh Seal (1957) if I’m trying to impress someone; 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), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Stage Door (1937) in that order
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.
This will be David’s bio someday.
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