Oscar Nominations yesterday. 16 for Sinners, none for Wicked For Good. But here in the blind community, we’re gonna pitchfork until Neon adds audio description to their two Best Picture nominees. For the past couple of years, we have had audio description for every title. The last time we did not was also Neon, with Parasite. Stop fucking the Oscars for us, Neon. Sentimental Value has nine nominations. That means only 8 Picture, 4 director, 4 Actor, 4 Actress, 4 Supporting Actor, and 3 Supporting Actress nominees have audio description. One company fucked the Oscars. Casting is 4/5, Original Screenplay is 3/5. Adapted Screenplay is the highest category with all five films nominated having audio description. That’s not just offensive, it’s embarrassing for an institution that proudly thanked its ASL interpreters during the live announcement. If you want to celebrate inclusivity, Oscars, this ain’t it. No International nominee has audio description, only 4 of the 5 Animated features do, and only 3 of the five documentaries. Hell, we can’t even sweep Original Song. Best Sound? The thing we are probably great at assessing? Neon got one of their parasites in there too, reducing that category. We can do Original Score, which went 5/5. While Visual Effects this year is also 5/5 thanks to the absence of a Godzilla movie, another strongly visual category, Hair and Makeup has only three of five nominees with audio description. An absolutely abysmal year for representation. Truly, just a huge step backward in an era screaming at us that diversity, equity, and inclusivity are everything wrong with the world. And the Oscar goes to… something that doesn’t have audio description. Hurray.

TV Shows Watched: Starfleet Academy: S1E2 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, High Potential: S2E9 (Disney Plus) with audio description, Shifting Gears: S2E6 (Disney Plus) with audio description, Finding Her Edge: S1E1 (Netflix) with audio description, and Nobody Wants this: S2E8 (Netflix) with audio description

Starfleet Academy- This show is just not good. The audio description seems to be OK. I still feel like I’m not sure what all these characters are or look like, but that might be a perpetual Star Trek problem. the interesting thing here would be to have the conversation about race in audio description, since not every character is human, and Star Trek makes very little distinction among the other alien races in terms of whether skin color culturally matters. Plus, by ignoring the skin tones of the actors, it allows them to fit into a wide array of alien races, where they might not have the save distinctions as us. I’d still really love to know more about the alien races present, and better descriptions. Even as someone who could see, and has a general idea of what a Klingon, Borg, etc. look like, I think the detail is a little lacking. The show is hot garbage though, but since Paramount already ordered a second season, these are conversations worth having before I find the nearest escape pod from this show.

High Potential- Lackluster audio description in whodunits always makes me feel like I’m missing a clue. It isn’t atrociou, but changing your name from DeCapta to VerbIt isn’t fooling anyone. There was a clear change in quality with the new seasons of The Traitors and will Trent because they actually got new companies with different writers. You can call yourself whatever you want, but you still make at best very average audio description.

Shifting Gears- I’ve enjoyed Dave Wallace on this from Day 1, and I think he makes a moderately funny show more entertaining. I did actually laugh when Tim Allen reacted to the name River with “is that actually the guy’s name, or did you just make that up to piss me off?” A very on brand joke for him.

Finding Her Edge- Meh. It’s an ice skating show, there’s a father daughter dynamic, and a pair of skaters who hate each other but will clearly end up together. You might say, they have a heated rivalry. With no show really like this on Netflix, it has the potential to surge. the actual figure skating moments felt weak in the description though. We go long times just listening to the song they skate to, not really getting great description of clearly a visual event. So, Meh.

Nobody Wants this- I love this show. But, what are they trying to do late stage with these couples? Please don’t break up. Sasha and Esther. I love this show, but Morgan is clearly with the wrong guy, but I also want her to only be friends with Sasha, never anything more. Solid audio description. It allows for a bit more than Shifting Gears and its multi-cam format backed by a laugh track, so I’d say this wa the best AD I heard yesterday.