By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Mona Zhang on FishbowlLA, November 2012
In late November 2012, FishbowlLA covered the fallout from Joaquin Phoenix’s October 2012 Interview magazine conversation with film curator and KCRW host Elvis Mitchell — the interview in which Phoenix called the awards season “total, utter bullshit.” The original framing tracked Mitchell’s perspective on the headline-making exchange.
Then
The Phoenix-Mitchell conversation had run in Interview magazine’s October 2012 issue, timed to the awards-season cycle for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, in which Phoenix gave one of the most-acclaimed performances of his career. Phoenix’s dismissal of the awards-campaign machinery had become a substantial entertainment-press story — an actor with a strong Best Actor case publicly disdaining the whole awards-season apparatus.
Elvis Mitchell was — and is — one of the most-respected film interviewers in American media, the longtime host of KCRW’s The Treatment. His Interview magazine conversation with Phoenix was the kind of substantive, discursive interview that his interviewing register specialized in; the awards-season comment had emerged organically from that broader conversation.
The FishbowlLA piece tracked Mitchell’s own perspective on the exchange that had become a headline — the recursive media-coverage moment of the interviewer being asked about the interview.
Now
Joaquin Phoenix’s comment did not, in the end, keep him out of the awards conversation — though he did not win for The Master (Daniel Day-Lewis took the 2013 Best Actor Oscar for Lincoln). Phoenix went on to win the Best Actor Academy Award in 2020 for Joker — and his acceptance-and-campaign conduct across that later cycle continued to reflect the awards-season ambivalence the 2012 comment had expressed. He has continued as one of the most-acclaimed and most-selective actors of his generation.
Elvis Mitchell has continued hosting The Treatment on KCRW across the entire interval — a 30-plus-year run. He directed the documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? for Netflix in 2022 and has continued as a film curator and cultural critic.
Interview magazine went through substantial subsequent turbulence — a 2018 bankruptcy and shutdown, followed by a relaunch under new ownership. The broader long-form celebrity-interview format that the magazine embodied has continued to migrate, substantially, toward podcasts and other audio.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of awards-season media culture — an actor’s blunt dismissal of the awards machinery, an acclaimed interviewer’s substantive conversation that produced it, and the recursive press cycle that followed.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.