Charles Barkley has proven over the years to be one of the best NBA analysts in the business. But as far as his track record as a movie critic, that has been far from exceptional, which one woman calling into The Steam Room reminded Barkley of in rather painful fashion.
In the debut season of The Steam Room podcast in 2020, Barkley and his co-host, Inside the NBA host Ernie Johnson, discussed which movies they thought would win the award for Best Picture.
Ultimately, Barkley settled on picking the movie 1917. But when asked by Johnson to describe the movie, Barkley had no response of any substance and eventually admitted that he hadn’t seen the movie.
“It’s outstanding,” said Barkley. “But the two that I really want to see…”
“Well, tell me about 1917,” replied Johnson.
“Well, it’s a typical… Wait a minute, I haven’t seen 1917, I apologize,” said Barkley.
Considering this past clip was nearly five years ago, it’s easy to assume that the vast majority of people have now forgotten about the hilarious mistake. But on the most recent edition of The Steam Room, one caller reintroduced the blunder to everyone when discussing this year’s Oscar-nominated films.
“Hi Ernie, hi Charles,” said the caller. “With the Oscars coming up, I was wondering, what’s the best movie you guys have seen this year? Also for Charles, is there another movie like 1917 that you haven’t seen yet but should definitely win Best Picture?”
This got a good laugh out of Ernie Johnson, who then had to take listeners down memory lane by bringing up audio of the old clip.
After all these years, Barkley finally explained why he was so confident a movie he had never seen was going to win Best Picture, detailing that he had originally been going to see 1917 before he got distracted and watched The Gentleman instead because of his “man crush” on Charlie Hunnam.
“I hate y’all so much,” said Barkley as he laughed about his old clip being shown. “I’m gonna tell you what happened that day. I went to the movie theater to see 1917. Then, on the wall I saw The Gentleman with Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam… Because I have a little man crush on Charlie Hunnam. And Henry Golding is in the movie also. And the character actor on Succession. I really enjoyed that movie.”
This prompted a conversation around this year’s Oscars nominations for Best Picture. But this time around, Barkley was open about the fact that he was not familiar with any of the movies nominated for the award.
“I have not seen not a single one,” said Barkley.
