BookLovers

BookLovers: Episode 55

Episode 55: Oscars and Birnam Wood

March 22, 2024


What is Booklovers without Rea? Jess & Joseph find out on this episode, as they're left to their own devices to discuss both  the 96th Academy Awards and Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton.

To start with the Oscars, we're talking about the big shift in Oscar-nominated film watching, because it's rare to have a year where so many nominated movies were already available to watch. From Anatomy of a Fall and Poor Things to (of course) Barbenheimer, viewer access to Oscar films was much higher in 2023 than in years previous, leading to a more invested viewership--and way longer holds lists at the library, too.

Then we're taking the leap into a discussion of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, which takes its name from a Macbeth reference, but pivots to discuss environmental destruction, guerrilla gardening, illegal fracking, and what a bunch of Kiwi Millennials think they're going to do to fix it all. Birnam Wood's twists and turns, combined with Catton's stream of consciousness writing style and wide cast of characters, combine to create a cerebral quasi-thriller that leaves readers thinking about what it means to do "good" in the period of late stage capitalism.




Titles discussed:

  • King of the Hill, created by Mike Judge & Mike Daniels
  • Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan
  • Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan
  • Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan
  • Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan
  • La La Land, directed by Damien Chazelle
  • The 2024 Academy Award for Best Picture nominees
  • The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne
  • Sideways, directed by Alexander Payne
  • Bob's Burgers, created by Loren Bouchard
  • Past Lives, directed by Celine Song
  • The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
  • The Favourite, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
  • Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig
  • Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese
  • American Prometheus: The Triumph and the Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird
  • Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
  • Storm Watch by C. J. Box
  • The Social Network, directed by David Fincher
  • 45 Years, directed by Andrew Haigh