By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2013
Some archive posts are time capsules of a platform as much as an event. This 2013 FishbowlLA item invited readers to a post-Oscars Google+ hangout — a sentence that needs two footnotes today.
Then
The post previewed the 85th Academy Awards with three open questions: whether Emmanuelle Riva, the oldest Best Actress nominee in Oscar history, would upset Silver Linings Playbook’s Jennifer Lawrence; whether Daniel Day-Lewis would cap his Lincoln awards run with one more memorable speech; and how host Seth MacFarlane would land with audiences.
FishbowlLA announced a Monday-morning post-Oscars Google+ hangout, to be streamed on the Mediabistro home page. The panel paired Gold Derby founder Tom O’Neil, KCRW producer Darby Maloney of The Business, TVNewser senior editor Alex Weprin and GalleyCat editor Jason Boog with FishbowlLA co-editor Richard Horgan.
There was a side wager built in: O’Neil and Horgan would finally see how their Gold Derby predictions had fared in what O’Neil called one of the craziest Best Picture races in memory, with four films having occupied the site’s predicted top spot at different points. The post promised, as a bonus, that no one would discuss what anyone was wearing.
Now
The ceremony resolved the post’s questions: Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress, Day-Lewis took Best Actor for Lincoln, and Argo claimed Best Picture in that unusually fluid race.
The platform did not last. Google+ never found an audience and Google shut the consumer service down in 2019, taking the ‘hangout’ format — briefly a real contender for live group video — down with it. Mediabistro, the host site, was sold and changed hands more than once over the following years.
Gold Derby, by contrast, endured: Tom O’Neil’s awards-prediction site became an established fixture of the season. The post is a small reminder of an interval when a media blog’s natural move was to gather its friends on whatever new video platform Silicon Valley had just shipped.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.