Welcome to Oscar Talk.

In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

This week the New York Film Festival is launching and October is right around the corner. We’re catching up with this and that along the way and have plenty to mull over as always, so with that, let’s see what’s on the docket today…

The 50th annuals New York Film Festival kicks off today with the world premiere of Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi.” We both discuss the film, adapted from the award-winning novel.

With the season barreling ahead, it’s time to start handicapping some categories. So we start in with Best Actor, from Daniel Day-Lewis to Jamie Foxx and all possibilities in between.

Since I’ve had a chance to catch up on some films like “Cloud Atlas,” “End of Watch” and “Silver Linings Playbook,” so we go back to the well briefly on those and have a particularly heated disagreement on the latter.

And finally, reader questions. We field queries regarding major players peaking too early, viewing the season with favorites while banking on the excitement of upsets and — OMG — “Django Unchained.”

Have a listen to the new podcast below. If the file cuts off for you at any time, try the back-up download link at the bottom of this post. And as always, remember to subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.

“Here I Come” courtesy of Stuart Park.