It's Awards Season, baby! Join GateCrashers regulars Patrick, Jon, and Ethan as they talk about all things Oscars! The guys ramble their way through 98 years of Oscars history (more or less), including some of the great moments in Academy Award history. One of the major tentpoles of the film industry, the Academy Awards, or the Oscars, is the premier award show of Hollywood and the English-speaking world's film industry. This year's Academy Awards, which will see the head-to-head matchup of major critical and audience successes Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler's Sinners, will be held on March 15, 2026.

As they dive into the Oscars as an institution, Patrick, Jon, and Ethan talk about some of the highs of the award show (Marissa Tomei, Parasite, and so on) and some of the… let's say less highs (Green Book, Crash, what have you). More importantly, they talk about a wide variety of Oscar-nominated movies and performances that were just really cool and really good (because honestly, that's what matters most). Towards the end of the conversation (and let's be honest, all throughout the episode), the guys talk about this year's nominations, including the new award for Casting, the record nominations earned by Sinners, and the interesting nominations (good and… less good) for the acting nominations this year.

All-in-all, this episode is certainly a preview for this year's Academy Awards and a bit of a retrospective. Come in and enjoy as you listen to Patrick, Jon, and Ethan's opinions on film that will certainly not upset anyone we are sure! 🙂 (Please don't be mean to us, we are just guys with opinions! We will cry!) And we hope to see you at future episodes about a number of topics that will certainly include films at some point!

With the recent rerelease of the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Night of the Mannequins, I sat down to chat with Stephen Graham Jones once again. I'm not shy about admitting that Stephen is the reason I started reading prose again, because I felt like I could really hear the voices of his narrators. It made me fall in love with reading in ways I hadn't felt since childhood. We get into his unique voice in his work, which makes it sing in a different way than anything else.

But with that unique voice, we also spend a lot of the conversation talking about the power of audiobooks and how his in particular always has the tone perfect for the Texas air that lingers in the text. Texas is also a hot topic of conversation and, in itself, a character in many of Stephen Graham Jones' novels. There are also comparisons made between the leads of Night of the Mannequins and I Was a Teenage Slasher, with tinges of unreliability in the narrators.

We also get into the power of the novella and how Tor Nightfire has been a major factor in making the horror novella front and center.

The novella is available wherever you buy books now!

About Night of the Mannequins

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones, comes a slasher story where a teen prank goes very wrong and all hell breaks loose in a small town. Winner of both the 2020 Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards!

We thought we'd play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead.

As summer winds down and his friends are growing up, Sawyer has a plan for one last prank to spook his buddy working at a nearby movie theater. Smuggling in a mannequin and seating it in the middle row is just harmless fun - until it wakes up, walks out, and starts killing. Luckily, Sawyer devises a plan to save as many people as possible. But in order to be the hero, sometimes you have to become a monster first. NIGHT OF THE MANNEQUINS asks "questions about the nature of change and friendship" (NYT) between its blood-spattered pages that will leave readers reeling.

You read that title right, GateCrashers does sports again! Come join Patrick, Dan, and newcomer Kate McGowan as they dive into the Olympic Games, just in time for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy! The Olympics are probably the most prestigious sporting event, uniting the world every 4 years for international competition across a wide variety of sports.

Patrick, Dan, and Kate talk about the history of the Olympics and their personal relationships with the Games (like how Patrick watches every single medal event at each Olympics!) before diving into what to expect at this year's Winter Games. Patrick eagerly talks about the absolutely wild new sport of Ski Mountaineering, and Dan talks about his love of all things Curling. Patrick and Kate give an overview of the broader Olympic program, including sore spots like the lack of women's Nordic Combined and the absence of most Russian and Belarusian athletes. They also talk about what to expect at this year's Olympic ice hockey tournament, with the return of NHL players for the first time since 2014 (and some very direct comments on how, if you want to support queer people in ice hockey after watching Heated Rivalry, women's ice hockey might be for you).

Kate then gives us a deep dive into the marquee event of any Winter Olympic Games: the Figure Skating program. She gives us an overview of the differences in the figure skating events (which include men's singles, women's singles, pairs, and ice dancing), as well as a very brief explanation of different jumps that constitute the sport, including the recently unbanned backflip. Patrick and Kate then preview who the medal contenders are this year, including who is representing Team USA. They also teach Dan about the unprecedented athletic feat that is Ilia Malinin and his quadruple axle.

We hope that you enjoy this episode and join us for 19 days of incredible international sports at the 2026 Winter Olympics!