The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 481, titled:
Oscars Astrology Recap 2025
With Chris Brennan
Episode originally released on March 3, 2025
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released April 3rd, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. The Oscars just happened last night, and I wanted to do a quick recap to talk about some of the highlights from an astrological perspective.
All right, so the Oscars happened yesterday, which is March 2nd, 2025, and the big thing about this Oscars for this year is that Venus had slowed down and stationed retrograde just the day before on March 1st. So it began its 40 day long Venus retrograde period in Aries. And I’ve talked a lot about this cycle of the past couple of months, because it repeats every eight years. And in January, Nick Dagan Best and I went back and we looked at previous Venus retrograde periods in eight year increments, and one of the things that Nick pointed out to me is that the Oscars kept coming up as being really tied in with this particular cycle going back to the very first Oscars, which happened under Venus retrograde in Aries almost a century ago now. But one of the things that we kept seeing is that there were always a lot of firsts every eight years for the Oscars under this Venus retrograde, so that’s one of the things we were paying attention to. And there were also sometimes some controversies or snafus or other things that would come up of that nature under this Venus retrograde. Like, for example, eight years ago under the last one is when the wrong Best Picture was called at first at the very end of the night, and then they had to announce there was a mistake and bring the actual winner for Best Picture, which was Moonlight, up on stage, and it was a big debacle.
So going into this Oscars, I was kind of keeping an eye out for what the Venus retrograde themes were gonna be both in terms of firsts and in terms of controversies or snafus. And in the end, it did not disappoint, and it was a pretty exciting and interesting night.
All right, so with that in mind, I’m gonna share some of my notes and impressions that I took last night because I watched the entire thing live; I streamed it through Hulu just so I could document this and see what sort of Venus retrograde type events would come forth during the course of the night and in terms of who won.
So first things first, Conan O’Brien hosted the Oscars, and I thought he really knocked it out of the park. I’m a huge Conan fan as like, an elder millennial, so I’m kind of biased, but I think he did really well, and from what I’ve seen, everybody seems to be just raving about his hosting, so I think it was received really well and ended up being pretty much universally praised so that it’s a career highlight for him at this point. And this is really notable because in the original Venus retrograde in Aries in history episode, I had noticed that when he was first announced to be the new host of Late Night was in 1993 under this same Venus retrograde in Aries. So he was suddenly, like, shot into the spotlight at that time in 1993 when he was announced by Lorne Michaels to be the new host to replace David Letterman. Then he had a long career and actually ended hosting that specific show, Late Night, in early 2009 under another Venus retrograde in Aries two eight-year repetitions later, 16 years later. And then he went into a short-lived stint hosting The Tonight Show where he was kind of robbed of that and it was a huge sort of mess. But now he’s really rebuilt himself and out of all of the hardship of like, losing The Tonight Show under such weird circumstances and then eventually hosting other shows and then eventually coming back over the past several years through hosting podcasts, he’s sort of had this resurgence so that he’s kind of like, in the right place at the right time to eventually host this awards show under this Venus retrograde in Aries, and it ended up being a success. So I think this is really good Venus retrograde success story how sometimes for some of us when we’re tied into a certain Venus retrograde cycle, it can sometimes just show really important turning points in our career and sometimes, you know, important highlights both at the start of our career in his instance going back to 1993, that crucial turning point in 2009, and then this career highlight later on in 2025. So really cool, really happy for him. He did some funny stuff, too; like, he did like, some classic Conan jokes like having the sandworm from Dune like, come out and play the harp at one point was pretty funny or play “Chopsticks” on the piano was pretty classic zany Conan. Although he also didn’t shy away from occasionally having some like, stronger jokes as well, including a political one at one point about the US and Russia and things like that. So it was really interesting seeing him play that role, but I think he did an excellent job, and that was definitely one of my top Venus retrograde success stories for the night.
All right, so moving on. The show opened with a tribute to Los Angeles, and throughout the show of course there were frequent references to the fires that devastated Los Angeles recently, partially of course since that’s also like, kind of almost like the heart of Hollywood and really affected the film and entertainment industry heavily. And that happened in January as the Venus retrograde was just building up as it was about to move into its shadow period, and it had already moved into its retrograde sign of Pisces, but also right in the middle of the Mars retrograde in Cancer, which was just around the opposition at that point.
So part of the effect, I realize now in retrospect, is the impact of the fires during the build up to the Venus retrograde is it ended up delaying the voting for the Oscars so that it happened a little bit later than it would have happened as a result of those fires. And as a result of that, because the voting happened later, it actually gave time for these two controversies to develop that actually ended up potentially impacting the voting and the final outcome more than would have happened otherwise if the fires hadn’t happened and if the voting had taken place under its normal time. So it was this weird occurrence of like, fate and how fate sometimes like, shifts things and influences things in weird ways that you don’t anticipate.
But what happened is because the Oscars like, announced the nominees but then voting got delayed until something like, late January or early February, these two controversies developed. And the first controversy I’ve talked about already on the last forecast episode was involving Karla Sofia Gascon and the film Emilia Perez, where one notable Venus retrograde first that was notable historically for this Oscars is that Gascon was the first trans woman to be nominated for Best Actress. So right away there already just in that nomination, that was a notable first. As we’ve said, there have been tons of notable firsts in the past when it comes to Oscar history, and that was definitely one of them. But then what happened is the voting was delayed, and then in January, a bunch of essentially like racist tweets and other not good tweets that Gascon had put out in the past not too long ago between 2016 and 2022, as recently as 2022, resurfaced and caused a firestorm of controversy. And this caused her the production studio, like, Netflix, to distance themselves from her, the director and other actors in the film distanced themselves from her, and it was this huge debacle. At one point, she sort of impulsively like, did this interview all of a sudden without clearing that with the production studio, which to some extent maybe further made things worse.
So she did end up attending the awards ceremony, and there was one joke that Conan made that was pretty mild about it at one point during the opening. But what ended up happening is the movie ended up winning a lot less awards than it could have as a result of that controversy where Emilia Perez only took home two awards – one for Best Song, and one for Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldana. So that was an interesting example sometimes of Venus retrograde causing controversies – or not causing, coinciding with or correlating with controversies – and scandals and things like that, which is a pretty common Venus retrograde thing, and where sometimes you think one thing’s gonna happen, but then Venus changes directions and starts going in a different route. And all of a sudden, a different outcome takes place as a result of a reconfiguring of things. So that was pretty striking in terms of just the movie going into the awards season received a lot of nominations, and some people were critical of the number of nominations it received and whether it really like, I don’t know, was as good as the number of nominations it received and questions of, you know, whether it was true that it should have. And there were other controversies of people from Mexico saying that it wasn’t a good representation of Mexican culture and it was made by a French director and other things that were also sort of like, swirling around the movie. And in the end, it did only win two Oscars, which is a lot less than it could have, given the number of nominations that it could have had. So that was a really notable Venus retrograde story for me, and I was kind of holding my breath waiting to see how that would go and if it would go in the direction it looked like it did, and then ultimately I think it did with just those two Oscar wins taking place.
So speaking of one of those, there was another first in one of those wins where Zoe Saldana mentioned in her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress that she was the first person of Dominican origin to win an Oscar. And I thought that was really striking, so that was another first. It was one of a number of different firsts that often happen under these Venus retrogrades in Aries. But she also mentioned some other things in her speech that caught my ear because she was mentioning dates that were tied in with this Venus retrograde and this Mars retrograde.
So one of them is she mentioned that her grandfather immigrated to the US in 1961. So that’s really important, because that was both a Venus retrograde in Aries year and it was also a Mars retrograde in Cancer year. So 1961 is one of those years where you have a double repetition of exactly the same two transits that are happening right now with Venus retrograde in Aries and Mars retrograde in Cancer. So there’s something striking there in terms of time and the chronology and the connection of events if you think about it that’s just stunning where like, you can think about it from either way. That it’s like, from her perspective, it’s her grandfather, but imagine thinking about it from her grandfather’s perspective and time back then that he would immigrate in 1961 under that Venus retrograde in Aries and that Mars retrograde in Cancer, and then decades later when those same transits would repeat that his granddaughter would be like, winning this very prestigious award for Best Supporting Actress. And it’s kind of really interesting to think about in terms of the timing and in terms of sometimes astrology that can cross over across generations of people. And you know, for Zoe Saldana, she’s been a very hard-working like, actress over the past like, 15 years, like, being in a lot of major films. So it was notable that she’s now won an Oscar for that having been in like, huge blockbuster movies like, you know, the Avatar films, for example, or even more recently being in a bunch of the Marvel cinematic films, but here winning this for more of a dramatic performance.
So later in the interview, she was asked about some of the controversies, and there’s a lot of talk right now about the answer that she gave and whether that was really a good answer in terms of whether Mexico was properly represented. So some of those discussions are still ongoing, so we’ll see how that turns out. But otherwise it was a highlight for her, although I did notice that she seemingly pointedly did not mention Karla Sofia Gascon when accepting the award despite thanking everybody else. So obviously, there was a lot of tensions there despite it also being an Oscar win. So that could be something to think about occasionally in certain circumstances with Venus retrogrades of like, having a career highlight but having it partially be marred by other things that are happening that are kind of detracting from it to a certain extent. So for her, it wasn’t the worst case scenario, but certainly there were some things that were less than ideal that were circulating around everything last night.
All right, so that was the first movie that was impacted by a controversy where the voting was offset as a result of the Venus retrograde and the fires. The other notable one that happened also in January that may have been impacted to some extent, or there was speculation that it may have been, was that there was a controversy with the movie The Brutalist, which also won a bunch of awards last night, where in January it came out that they may have used artificial intelligence on some of the voices in order to enhance some of the Hungarian accents that were spoken by a couple of the actors. And this caused some controversy because there was a recent Hollywood strike just like, a year or two ago, where the role of AI was a major focus of that. So it caused some controversy hearing that they may have used AI to some extent in the production, and that also may have offset the voting a little bit in terms of who the final winners of everything ended up being. And it’s interesting that that wouldn’t have happened if not for the delay in the voting. Because in any other circumstances, what would have happened is those two controversies would have happened after the voting, and it would have been too late. And it would have been locked in at that point. But instead, again, that may have offset things to a certain extent.
So despite that, ultimately, The Brutalist still won a number of awards, including Best Actor for Adrien Brody, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography – so it won three different awards at least. And Adrien Brody’s win was notable because it was his second Oscar win for Best Actor, with the last one being 22 years ago. And 22 years ago, famously when he walked up to accept the award, he walked up and he like, kissed on the mouth one of the presenters, which is Halle Berry, and it was like, this big moment that still people talk about to this day. And so as a funny Venus retrograde thing that happened last night, Halle Berry came up to him on the red carpet last night and like, grabbed him and kissed him like, right there on the red carpet. His wife was like, standing right next to him; I don’t know how much this was like, planned, or how much this was, you know, something that happened spontaneously. It looked very spontaneous, but it was a funny full circle thing, and now like the first time it’s also causing like, a little bit of controversy just in terms of some people like, gasping about it and other people understanding the context and everything else. But I thought it was an interesting like, full circle moment 22 years later. And also very Venus retrograde-y.
So you know, for Adrien Brody, when he first – part of the astrology here is that when he first won an Oscar, he was 29 years old, so he was right in the middle of his Saturn return back in 2003. And his Saturn is in Gemini in the 10th house, and it made history at the time for being the youngest – he was the youngest, I think, just male actor, male lead – or maybe it was actor in general – to win an Oscar at that time. So it was very much tied up with his Saturn return at that point. And during the course of his acceptance speech, like, he got up and he kind of referred to that or he seemed to be alluding to the ups and downs of his career since that time over the past 22 years and how gratifying it was to sort of like, come back and be on top again or to show that he could go the distance and like, consistently produce good work or like, something like that in the first part of his speech. And I was really thinking about that Saturn placement, because since it’s been 22 years, and he was in his Saturn return the first time, that means he’s in his waning Saturn square right now where his Saturn is in Gemini in the 10th house, and Saturn is in mid-Pisces right now, so it’s squaring that original Saturn placement back to his return 22 years ago. And so in some sense, relative to his natal Saturn placement, it’s almost as if Saturn is in like, 10th house relative to its natal position at this point, and he has this second culmination of events during the course of his second Saturn cycle. So it’s interesting how like, Saturn keeps being a recurring theme and a recurring important transit for him because it’s in his 10th house natally since he has Virgo rising and Saturn in Gemini not far from the Midheaven.
So unfortunately, he set another record last night by giving the longest speech in Oscar history where he spoke for reportedly five minutes and 37 seconds. And he’s kind of being pretty like, roundly criticized for it today because he kind of, as I was watching it, it was like, he took his time to walk up there. He then started talking, but it was kind of like, a little rambly and not getting to the point for the first half. And they started playing him off with the music, but then he stopped them and he said, you know, something like “this isn’t my first rodeo,” and he asked them to stop playing the music and that he’d be brief. And they stopped playing the music, which was actually really shocking entirely, and let him continue speaking. And then he went on for another couple of minutes, but he started trying to make some points – he tried to say something meaningful in the second half, but some of his points weren’t entirely clear. And so a lot of the reporting at this point is getting lost in just the fact that he ended up speaking longer than anybody in history at that point and that people are kind of annoyed by that. So I thought that was an interesting additional like, Saturn thing that’s going on. And some of that is probably tied in with to a certain extent his transits right now, which is that Saturn placement. So let me pull that up. Where he has 19 Virgo rising and the Moon at 22 Virgo, and transiting Saturn is at like, 21… It was at 20 yesterday and 21 today Pisces, so it’s like, right on his Descendant. It’s opposite his Moon. And then we see his natal Saturn up here in Gemini in the 10th house conjunct the degree of the Midheaven at 17 Gemini. And on the one hand, you have that really positive transit where transiting Jupiter is up there in Gemini at 12 degrees right now in his 10th house, and that’s really signifying the win especially. But then, yeah, you’ve got some issues taking place here in terms of the Saturn transit on the Descendant and opposite the Moon, and the transiting Mercury-Neptune conjunction yesterday where Neptune was at 28 Pisces and Mercury was at 29 Pisces conjoining his natal Mercury at 27 degrees of Pisces in the 7th house, which is the ruler of his 1st house and 11th house, and yeah. He was struggling to sort of be clear and be on point last night, and now is kind of getting some flack for it. So we’ll see, you know, how much that controversy ends up like, sticking with him or what the impact is. But otherwise, winning Best Actor for The Brutalist was pretty notable. And I’ve been watching, and it actually is a really good performance, so I can see for sure why he won, although there was a number of other really great performances in that category this year as well, so there was pretty stiff competition.
All right. So moving onto the biggest story of the night and the biggest win of the night was the movie Anora, which pretty much swept the Oscars with a ton of wins, with the most wins, where it won Best Picture. It won Best Actress for Mikey Madison. It won Best Director for Sean Baker. It also won Best Original Screenplay for Sean Baker who wrote – the director who also wrote the screenplay, and also Best Film Editing, which was also Sean Baker because he edited his own film. So he ended up making history by winning four Oscars for a single film, which was, again, a notable first for somebody, which is one of those things that we look for with these Venus retrogrades. And the most notable thing about this film, though, from our perspective in talking about Venus retrograde and the astrology is that the film was notable because it was about a sex worker, and that was – and like, her struggle during the course of the film was really the main focal point, and it was very like, open about talking about that and talking about some of the different things involved in that. And that was very Venus retrograde-y, because as Nick and I noticed as we talked about in the previous episodes, sometimes winners under this Venus retrograde in Aries, the Best Picture winners or some of the Best Actress winners can have this like, risque quality where in terms of like, the social norms of the time, there’s usually something about the Best Picture or something about like, especially the Best Actress winner that’s like, pushing some boundaries or doing some things that at the time seemed like, taboo or something like that in terms of taboo topics. So for example, in 1961, very closely tied in with this because again that was the Venus retrograde in Aries and Mars retrograde in Cancer, we had Nick Dagan Best pointed out that Elizabeth Taylor won for her role in the movie Butterfield Eight. And part of the synopsis for that is that Taylor portrayed a high-priced call girl and that was seen as quite scandalous at the time because it challenged some of the like, conventional depictions of female mortality and things like – morality – and things like that. So this has been, then, a very interesting repetition to have both the Venus retrograde in Aries and the Mars retrograde happen and then again we get for not just Best Actress but also Best Picture a repetition of, you know, centering a sex worker or a film about a sex worker winning the Oscars. And not just winning, but sweeping the Oscars this year. So both the director, Sean Barker, as well as the lead actress, Mikey Madison, gave shoutouts to the sex worker community in their acceptance speeches, which I thought was really notable, and it reminded me of how back in 2023 when I was doing a bunch of Venus retrograde research that summer, and I did an episode on the ancient goddess Inanna and how some of her myths were specifically tied in with Venus retrogrades, one of the things we talked about and learned back then is that Inanna was like, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and sex and fertility. But she was also associated with there was this role in ancient Mesopotamia of sacred prostitution and temple prostitution, and that was kind of like, a topic that came up in that context of doing that research and how it was tied in with the Venus retrograde periods. So I think that’s actually a theme, then, that echoes back much further in history beyond just like, Elizabeth Taylor’s role in 1961, and maybe to some extent either a broader topic in some instances tied in with Venus retrogrades in general, or perhaps with this particular Venus retrograde in Aries for some reason.
So, one of the really interesting things in terms of the astrology of these wins is that we actually have a timed birth chart for Mikey Madison, and here’s the birth chart with Aquarius rising. And we can see Jupiter right there at nine degrees of Aries, and Venus has just stationed exactly or very closely on that placement in the past couple of days. So let me put up a biwheel so we can see the actual transits.
So we can see that Venus like, just stationed there at 10 degrees of Aries in Mikey Madison’s 3rd house, and it’s conjoining that Jupiter at nine degrees of Aries and widely conjoining the Sun at four degrees of Aries in the 3rd house. And we can see that Jupiter is actually the ruler of the degree of the Midheaven, which is up there at one degree of Sagittarius in the 11th whole sign house. So that brings added weight to Jupiter’s placement and ties it more into career matters than it might be otherwise because it’s the ruler of the degree of the Midheaven and the degree of the Midheaven then has 10th house associations with like, career and reputation and social standing and other things. And she’s just having this amazing Venus transit right now where Venus is really magnifying that Jupiter placement but also bringing a lot of like, awards and recognition for her acting and for her performance, basically.
So the other interesting thing about her chart is, that I’ve noted in recent months, is just how she has this Mars in Scorpio in the 10th whole sign house at 11 degrees of Scorpio. And I thought that was really funny when I first saw that, because last night there was a callback about one of her first super notable roles was in a Quentin Tarantino movie, and he actually ended up presenting one of the awards to the director of Anora, Sean Baker, last night. And he noted this, that he said that if Quentin Tarantino hadn’t cast her in that movie, that he might not have, you know, seen her, and she might not have ended up in Anora. So and I’d laughed about that Mars placement in the 10th house recently because in the past year, I’ve been talking about how some of the ancient delineations of Mars have to do with like, war and like, fighting, or fire, and things like that. And a very literal manifestation of that placement, for example, of like, fieriness was the birth chart of the host of Hot Ones, Sean Evans, has like, Mars in the 7th house, and he literally like, interviews people and has then eat spicy hot wings which like, burns their mouth, which is sort of like, metaphorically on fire or feels like it’s on fire for a period of time during the interview, and he has that in the 7th house. And then with Mikey Madison, she has it in the 10th house, and at the like, end of the Quentin Tarantino movie that introduced her to much of the world, she was like, set on fire by like, a flamethrower which hopefully – sorry for spoilers – but it was like, a funny ending. Then in another movie she was in, like a slasher movie or like, a slasher sort of like horror movie basically in one of the Scream films, and I won’t go into like, details about that, but also has very relevant Mars symbolism in the 10th house. And then now with this role with Mars in Scorpio in the 10th house and winning this role playing a sex worker and having talked to and giving a shoutout to the sex worker community, there’s also something very like, Mars in Scorpio about that as well for winning Best Actress for that. And yeah, I thought that was impressive just in terms of the symbolism and in terms of the astrology.
So you know, one of the things about Mikey Madison’s win, of course, that was somewhat bittersweet is then Demi Moore lost. She was also up for Best Actress for her role in The Substance. And earlier in the awards season, she had actually built up a lot of steam, especially when she won the Golden Globe award for Best Actress at the beginning of January. And I think this is a really good example of the importance of exact transits, because the night that Demi Moore won the Golden Globe for Best Actress, transiting Venus was exactly at three degrees of Pisces, and it was conjoining her Jupiter in the 1st house, which is the ruler of her Ascendant and her 10th house. So Venus was – I’m not gonna like, pull up the full dates here, but Venus was right about here at three degrees of Pisces and it exactly conjoined her Jupiter that night. And she had this really striking moment where she won a major award for the first time after many years of kind of to some extent being overlooked for some of her previous roles, especially in the 1990s when she was so prominent and in so many notable films. But what we saw and what I had talked about on a previous episode of The Secret Astrology Podcast just a few days ago where we kind of looked at some of the award contenders heading into the Oscars is that with Venus stationing at 10 degrees of Aries, it wasn’t exactly aspecting any of the planets in her chart that we would look for last night in terms of having an exact transit that night. So it was notable still that she had the whole Venus retrograde going through her 2nd and her 1st house, or she will have that, and there could be some like, residual recognition or something that happens when Venus retrogrades back into Pisces and stations on her Ascendant of other like, moment for her for some reason. But in terms of last night and not winning the Oscar, there’s just something here from a technical standpoint that we can learn as astrologers in terms of attempting to make predictions about things like that that the fact that she didn’t have an exact transit that was getting hit in terms of that Venus retrograde station at 10 degrees of Aries, whereas Mikey Madison did, really ended up being decisive in terms of indicating the winner a little bit ahead of time if one was attempting to do that. So I thought that was just from an astrological standpoint something that we can learn and get from that. But nonetheless, you know, despite not winning, it’s still been a major career highlight for her having won the Golden Globe and having received the nomination for this. And yeah, being in such a prominent film this year, which was also very Venus retrograde-y because it had to do with women and with age and aging, and especially Hollywood, and I mean, ironically, one of the things a lot of people are talking about right now is just the role of sometimes an older actress is getting shoved out the door in place of like, younger actresses or things like that was ironically the topic and the focus of The Substance broadly speaking, in addition to like, other topics like implicitly like, things like plastic surgery and things like that, and appearance and age and other things like that. But I think that was the other kind of like, Venus retrograde thing in terms of this was The Substance itself also having a very Venus retrograde-y message. People are now sort of like, talking about that here. I don’t think it like, fully detracts from Anora winning, because it was like, Mikey Madison actually gave a pretty amazing performance, like, a really good performance. Both her and Demi Moore did. But then just in terms of how the voting ended up working out in the end, and I think partially due to some of the controversies that happened with the other films – especially with Emilia Perez and that – some of the voting and the vote reshuffling that happened after that controversy ended up impacting this to some extent. But Anora obviously swept with so many other wins, including Best Picture, that it makes sense then that by extension then Mikey Madison would also win for Best Actress, and that’s kind of how things work. So it was really notable and interesting that both films had different Venus retrograde representations, but in different ways and different themes.
One last thing I’ll mention about Anora is that when Sean Baker won for Best Director for Anora, he mentioned that it was his mom’s birthday. And again, I thought that was interesting thinking about like, generations sometimes and that, you know, his mom’s birthday was on this day, and that at some point she had, you know, her son, and then that her son would go on to win this huge award at some point in the future on her birthday so that her chart is being activated in some way as well. I thought there was something striking about that, again, about this theme of intergenerational astrology that I’m starting to become – I’ve always been interested in studying, but it might make for a good episode at some point to look at sometimes echoes of different family members’ charts or across generations of different people’s charts being activated because sometimes there’s something about our family lineage in terms of things that our ancestors do or things that earlier people do in our family that eventually set us up for success and put us in the position we can be in for better or worse to eventually go on to fulfill our own fate or our own destiny at some point later in our life. And sometimes their charts get activated in those callbacks, like either here or also previously when I was talking about Zoe Saldana as well.
All right, so that was huge in terms of like, the Best Picture of the year and the Venus retrograde themes and everything else. But there was one more major Venus retrograde event, and this is what I was waiting for is, you know, we had kind of been able to anticipate that like, some of the themes that would probably be emphasized through the Venus retrograde with like Anora and The Substance and also there being a number of different firsts. And one of the things that I noted that would be a first is that they were gonna be streaming this Academy Awards for the first time online. And this was notable, because in the previous episode, we talked about how many firsts there had been technologically with the Academy Awards, including in 1929 when Venus was retrograde in Aries, the very first Academy Awards ceremony ever took place. Then in 1945, the very first one that was broadcast on radio took place under a Venus retrograde in Aries. Then eight years later under the next Venus retrograde in Aries in 1953, the very first one that was broadcast on television took place.
Okay, so yesterday, it was the first time that the Awards was streamed live in history, and it was streamed on Hulu while also airing live on ABC television at the same time. And I watched the entire thing through Hulu; I streamed it through Hulu. Watched the entire night. I heard some reports of people having problems getting in earlier in the night, but I’m watching the entire thing, and I’m, you know, it gets to the very end of the night and it’s building up to the most crucial moment because they start to read the bios for Best Actress. We’ve finally gotten to the Best Actress category, and they start talking about the very first person, and then my feed crashed. And all of a sudden, somebody screwed up, because it seems like they had scheduled it to end at a specific time, but it’s an awards show, so it ran long. But by scheduling it to end at a specific time in the livestream, it meant that it cut out like, exactly at that predetermined time that it was supposed to end even though it was running long because it was a live event. And it really, really sucked, because I had been like, watching this entire thing for like, three or four hours, and I was especially waiting to see, you know, with the Venus retrograde, who was gonna win Best Actress and who was gonna win Best Picture because those are the most important Venus retrograde ones of the night. And it cut out like, right before I could hear who was gonna win Best Actress. And yeah, that really sucked, because then they didn’t seem to have a way to fix it, and they weren’t showing replays of it initially through Hulu. So basically, I wasn’t able to – and a lot of people, basically anybody who livestreamed it, which must have been thousands and thousands of people, maybe millions of people, I don’t know what the numbers are but lots of people lost and weren’t able to watch the end of it, and it was a huge technical fuck-up basically, and a huge snafu in terms of that being the first livestreaming thing. And I immediately laughed out loud, because that was finally like, the Venus retrograde, you know, snafu or problem that was a repetition now of what happened eight years earlier where at the end of 2017 they called out the wrong movie for Best Picture, and then it was a big debacle and they had to call the winners up for Moonlight after initially saying that La La Land had won the movie. So this was our 2025 version of that, which I guess is not as bad, because it could have been worse in terms of 2017 and calling the wrong picture was for sure worse for everybody there. But it was definitely like, an anti-climactic moment that kind of like, interrupted the ceremonies for a lot of people after that.
So then I eventually had to like, later that night, like, watch clips. Because everybody just watching on TV, on like, ABC was able to watch it uninterrupted. So eventually I watched the clips and learned who won afterwards and watched the replay, but it was super, super annoying. So yeah, I thought that was pretty striking that the entire ceremony and feed cut at the most crucial moment. The Associated Press had a headline today that said, “Hulu Viewers Miss Oscars Climax in Latest Mishap for Streaming Platforms Live Program.” So this ended up getting widely covered in the news. And yeah, I was annoyed, but it was also one of those like, hashtag astrologer good things where I was so impressed by the astrology that I was almost like, not as mad as I would have been because, yeah, the Venus retrograde thing hit at the very culmination of the night, essentially. And especially right during the Best Actress award, like, what better – that could not have gone any better in terms of if you had tried to script it in terms of Venus retrograde and its association with women but also with things going awry, which is just sometimes things that happen during retrogrades is plans do not go exactly as you had hoped or exactly as they were planned. But instead there’s often a detour or some sort of issue that arises, essentially.
All right. Miscellaneous category real quickly that I wanna do of other firsts or other notable things. Another first that I noted that Leisa Schaim pointed out to me as we were watching is she pointed out that Flow was the first Latvian film to win an Oscar, and the winners actually noted that in their acceptance speech. I’m Still Here won for Best Foreign Film, which is a shutout of Emilia Perez, which had been favored up until recently and there was a lot of like, competition between the two films, and this was both the first nomination but also the first win for a film from Brazil. So that was really cool and really notable, and I was excited to see that one.
What else? Conan had this like, incredible joke about Anora and some of the current stuff in the news right now that I thought was relevant in terms of the Venus retrograde. He said, you know, “Anora is having a good night; that’s great news. Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian.” And obviously, that’s like, you know, invoking what’s happening right now with the US and Russia, and the US seemingly like, switching sides suddenly in terms of the war with Ukraine and Russia and now seemingly going against their former ally of Ukraine and seemingly starting to do support the other side. So it was interesting, because most of Conan’s stuff was very non-political, so it was a very interesting exception to that where he said something very pointed and yet also actually pretty funny. Conan has like, a background in history, so that’s probably part of where he was coming from in terms of that, of being able to see what’s happening right now and just how absurd it is. Like how crazy it is.
And then the last thing I’ll mention in terms of the astrology was Robert Downey Jr. gave a shout out to Jeremy Strong who was up for Best Supporting Actor. And he said that he remembered that Jeremy Strong sleeping in the stands when Downey Jr. was up for his first role in Chaplin. And in another interview on the red carpet, Jeremy Strong said that that was in 1993 when that happened, that he attended the Oscar Awards ceremony as a fan and he like, slept in the stands or in the bleachers or something in order to attend. And they quickly shot to a picture where they showed a picture of him being all young, and he got emotional and then teared up both times that was mentioned. So it was like, calling back to previous things from earlier, and it was important from our perspective because 1993, of course, was a Venus retrograde in Aries period, as well as Mars retrograde in Cancer. So for him, it was a perfect callback to his origins in like, 1993 of attending his first Oscars as a young fan. He looked like he was like, seven or maybe 10 tops in that picture. And then all these years later, when the Venus and Mars retrograde cycles repeat in the same signs 32 years later as they do every 32 years, he was nominated for his first Oscar there in attendance at the Oscars where he played Roy Cohn in the movie The Apprentice. So that was another amazing connection in terms of Venus and Mars retrograde callbacks and how it can connect like, the starting point in time of a person’s career in some ways to some later high point in a person’s career later on, and that was another brilliant one that I noticed to sort of wrap things up with.
All right. So there was a bunch of other notable things in general, but those are the only ones that I caught that were specifically astrological that I wanted to mention here. There’s a number of other things that happened that were really interesting just in terms of news and events and other things like that, but I didn’t necessarily have an astrological angle on them. If you notice something interesting in terms of the astrology, then let me know in the comments below this video on YouTube, because I’d love to hear if there’s other little astrological tidbits with either transits to people’s charts or other things like callbacks in terms of the Venus or Mars retrograde periods. I’d love to hear that in the comments so that we can sort of like, collect some of those to learn as much as we can about this event, because you know, it’s always really important for me to look at astrology through different lenses. And you can look at it through the lens of like, current events and politics and history and everything else, but also looking at it in terms of culture and music and movies and things like that is a major part of studying astrology. And that’s especially what I really appreciated about this Oscar awards season was seeing it through the lens of the Venus retrograde and how vividly some of those Venus retrograde events came through, both in terms of the quality of Venus retrograde but also in terms of the eight year repetitions of Venus that can connect events in the past with things happening in the present. So it was really fun to track all that.
So I think that’s it for this episode or for this video, so thanks a lot for watching, and I’ll see you again next time!
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