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Any Oscars ceremony where most of the big prizes go to “Anora” and “The Brutalist”—two blazingly intelligent, vividly personal movies, both encouraging signs of an American independent cinema not yet in its long-anticipated death throes—is a very good Oscars ceremony indeed. It wasn’t an inevitable outcome, or, as the ceremony got under way on Sunday night, an immediately obvious one. “The Brutalist,” at more than three and a half hours, was the longest of the Best Picture nominees, and although the director Brady Corbet’s pacing is exactingly swift—something that the Oscars’ affable host, Conan O’Brien, overlooked when he made an obligatory running-time joke—the film was, like a sleeping giant, suitably slow to awaken. Not until the show’s second half did Corbet’s film begin to surge, nabbing three trophies in near-succession: for Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Actor, for Adrien Brody.
“Anora,” meanwhile, proved friskily competitive all night long. It won five Oscars, four of which went to Sean Baker, for writing, editing, directing, and producing the film; he shared the Best Picture prize with fellow-producers Samantha Quan and Alex Coco. With this feat, Baker tied a record for the most Oscars won by an individual in a single year, held, since 1954, by Walt Disney. (An asterisk: Bong Joon Ho nearly joined this élite company in 2020, with four Oscar wins for “Parasite,” but one of them, for Best International Feature Film, is technically awarded to the submitting country, not the filmmaker—a Korea achievement as opposed to a career achievement.) It’s worth noting that Disney, unlike Baker, won his four for multiple films; also unlike Baker, Disney did not cap his Oscar-night triumph with a rousing “Long live independent film!” Nor, by all accounts, did Uncle Walt declare solidarity with sex workers, as Baker has consistently done since “Anora” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. His star, Mikey Madison, echoed those sentiments when she was awarded Best Actress, for her physically and emotionally acrobatic turn as a Brooklyn stripper, noting that she would “continue to support and be an ally.”
Indeed, if there is something that unites “Anora” and “The Brutalist,” in terms both of onscreen story and behind-the-scenes process, it’s a masterful dedication to the art of the hustle. Baker and Corbet are well versed in it, having learned to temper their outsized visions with pluck, thrift, and resourcefulness. Both are deep-dish cinephiles, outspoken advocates for theatrical moviegoing—a cause that Baker expounded on at length, to much applause, in his Best Directing speech—with an acute awareness of how tough it can be to maintain creative control and still turn a profit. (“Anora,” which was released by Neon, and “The Brutalist,” which was distributed by A24, have each grossed about forty million dollars worldwide—respectable sums for both, though a far cry from the nearly billion-dollar gross of last year’s big winner, the studio-produced juggernaut “Oppenheimer.”) No wonder both Baker and Corbet took the opportunity to advance pessimistic, if not entirely sour, views of the American Dream. “The Brutalist” signals this early on with an upside-down view of the Statue of Liberty; what follows is an epic of lingering trauma and artistic compromise, in which a Hungarian immigrant’s most generous benefactor turns out to be his gravest enemy. Similarly, a promise of unlikely financial salvation is repeatedly railroaded in “Anora,” a screw-loose Cinderella story that builds, amid thunderous sexual passions and violent comic flurries, to scarcely a whisper of happily ever after.
The voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could only have further underscored their profound American pessimism by honoring “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s extraordinary drama about two Black boys who endure the hell of a notorious “reform school”—in actuality, a state-sponsored charnel house—in nineteen-sixties Florida. Brilliantly adapted from Colson Whitehead’s shattering 2019 novel, “Nickel Boys” was the finest American film I saw last year and my personal favorite of the Best Picture nominees. That it came away empty-handed from the ceremony—where Ross, ludicrously, wasn’t even nominated for Best Director—was thoroughly expected, yet no less disappointing.
Nonetheless, Sunday was a night of American Dreams fulfilled, and of several gratifying historic firsts. Paul Tazewell, accepting his Oscar for Best Costume Design for “Wicked,” noted that he was the first Black man to win in his category. Zoe Saldaña, teary-eyed and jubilant in her Best Supporting Actress speech, for “Emilia Pérez,” noted that she was “the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award.” Not to be outdone, the director Gints Zilbalodis noted that his win for Best Animated Feature, for the creatures-in-peril epic “Flow,” was the first Oscar ever bestowed on a Latvian, in any category. Brazil also claimed its first Oscar, for Best International Feature Film, for “I’m Still Here,” a drama about a family’s resilience under horrific political oppression; accepting the honor, the filmmaker Walter Salles described the victory as “an extraordinary feat.” It would have been more extraordinary still—and sent Brazilian social-media users into even more of a frenzy—had Fernanda Torres, the film’s acclaimed star, triumphed in the Best Actress category. But her fans at least seemed mollified by the film’s Best International Feature win over the scandal-plagued “Emilia Pérez,” whose tossed-in-a-blender representations of transgenderism, the Mexican drug trade, and the conventions of musical cinema had made it, for many, the most feared and loathed contender of the season.
If the night had a single most rousing, richly deserved, and precedent-setting victory, it was the triumph, in the Best Documentary Feature category, of “No Other Land,” which occasioned the first time Palestinian filmmakers have ever been honored on the Oscars stage. It is, in fact, the work of four activist filmmakers—two Palestinian (Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal) and two Israeli (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor)—and chronicles, in devastating fashion, the Israeli military’s demolition of homes in the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, in the southern occupied West Bank. More than a year after accepting awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, which drew reflexive and unjust charges of antisemitism from German politicians and journalists, Adra and Abraham, whose friendship gives the film its dramatic and emotional spine, rose to an even grander and more public stage. Adra, a longtime Masafer Yatta resident, expressed hopes that his daughter would have a better life than his; Abraham condemned both the horrors of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent atrocities committed in Gaza. “We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together, our voices are stronger,” he said, later adding, “Can’t you see that we are intertwined?”
Do any morning-after condemnations await the filmmakers—or, perhaps, the Academy, for giving a global platform to such unignorable evidence of Palestinian suffering? It’s hard not to wonder, especially with the ugly aftermath of last year’s show still fresh in the memory. When the director Jonathan Glazer accepted the Best International Feature trophy for “The Zone of Interest,” he angered more than a few observers by declaring that his film, a Holocaust drama from a Jewish filmmaker, was also a direct commentary on the violence of the Israeli occupation. For days afterward, Glazer’s speech was in turns embraced and denounced in open letters, signed by Jews across the film community. I suspect that Adra and Abraham’s even more specific remarks will be harder to dismiss; I also hope that more moviegoers all over the world will get to see “No Other Land,” which has shown in select American theatres but has yet to secure an official U.S. distributor, making its Oscar victory all the more remarkable.
Adra and Abraham gave the most powerful and politically searing speech of the night; frankly, they didn’t have much competition. The first Oscars ceremony of the second Trump era seemed relatively light on calls for resistance, even in the conspicuous presence of Sebastian Stan’s Best Actor nomination for “The Apprentice,” in which he plays a younger version of the man who’s now President. (If only Stan had been singled out for his even better performance as a different man, in “A Different Man.”) There were welcome, if somewhat muted, exceptions. The declarations of historic firsts for people of color, immigrants, and international filmmakers carried some weight at a moment when Hollywood studios are rolling back D.E.I. initiatives, in a grim capitulation to Trump. Brody, who plays a Holocaust survivor in “The Brutalist,” called out racism in general and antisemitism in particular. Daryl Hannah, presenting the award for Best Editing, prefaced her remarks and drew applause with a declaration of “Slava Ukraine.” O’Brien made a glancing reference to “divisive politics” in his opening monologue; later in the show, he delivered a jab on the heels of a win for “Anora,” which, among other things, makes swanning villains of the Russian oligarchical class. “I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian,” O’Brien said; it was a good line, but it would have resonated more had it not seemed to land in an otherwise apolitical vacuum. Or if “Anora” itself, pointedly political in many respects, were not so consciously—and, to my mind, realistically—devoid of any acknowledgment of Putin’s war against Ukraine.
It is perhaps worth flashing back to the Oscars ceremony of February 26, 2017, which was held about a month after the first Trump Inauguration, and which seemed to augur, with more measured diplomacy than impassioned outrage, a slow-growing tide of Hollywood resistance. The President’s name went largely unmentioned, but winners still spoke out against racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, police violence, and other nativist forces cruelly emboldened in the Administration’s wake. The winners themselves, who included Viola Davis, Mahershala Ali, Barry Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Ezra Edelman, were a heartening reversal of prevailing #OscarsSoWhite tendencies. That was also the ceremony, of course, where a fateful envelope mishap led to the last-minute Best Picture coronation of “Moonlight,” a lyrical drama about the inner life of a gay Black man, over the allegedly more Academy-friendly “La La Land.” Whether or not the groundswell of support for “Moonlight” was an expression of anti-Trump sentiment, it certainly felt then, as it does now, like a forceful intervention by the right side of history.
In 2017, it was Faye Dunaway, presenting Best Picture alongside her “Bonnie and Clyde” co-star, Warren Beatty, who mistakenly announced “La La Land” as the winner. As though tempting a disastrous encore, this year’s climactic announcement came by way of another iconic screen-couple reunion, though Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, the stars of “When Harry Met Sally . . .,” encountered no procedural difficulties. With smooth professionalism and a wry nod to Crystal’s own Oscar-hosting history, they declared “Anora” the Best Picture winner—a victory that, by that point in the evening, seemed all but foreordained.
But speaking of ordainments: nearly everyone agreed that, if “Anora” were about to wobble in its front-runner heels, the winner would surely be the juicy Pope fiction of “Conclave.” Edward Berger’s film, which had already won Best Film at the BAFTAs, had been one of the most popular and resonant pictures of the cycle, and unlike “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” or “Emilia Pérez,” it had not been even remotely tainted by campaign controversy. In the end, though, “Conclave” took just one Oscar, for Best Adapted Screenplay—a smaller haul than that amassed by Berger’s previous film, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” from 2022. “Conclave” ’s greatest awards-season resonance was to provide, through its tale of a papal-election campaign, an elaborate metaphor for the insular, backbiting shenanigans of awards season itself—a metaphor that my colleague Michael Schulman recently dissected in unimprovable detail.
If there were any real unknowns, complete or otherwise, on Sunday night, they could be found in the lead-acting categories, which, to a fascinating degree this season, have been preoccupied with considerations of age. If Timothée Chalamet had prevailed for his turn as a young Bob Dylan, in “A Complete Unknown,” he would have not only beaten Adrien Brody but also eclipsed Brody’s own record as the youngest Best Actor Oscar winner in history. (Chalamet is twenty-nine, but a younger twenty-nine than Brody was when he won, in 2003, for “The Pianist.”) What does it say that, over in the Best Actress race, Madison, at twenty-five, became the ninth-youngest winner in that category’s history, placing behind performers such as Marlee Matlin (twenty-one), Janet Gaynor (twenty-two), and Audrey Hepburn (twenty-four)? At a glance, it suggests that the older-male gaze, still most broadly represented among the Academy’s membership ranks, remains a governing force in the selection of prizes. Voters have tended to associate male acting greatness with middle-aged maturity and gravitas—the kind exemplified by the late Gene Hackman, who received a warm extended tribute from his former co-star Morgan Freeman before the annual In Memoriam montage. Best Actress has long been an ingénue’s game, an index of presumed desirability as well as talent.
This year’s Best Actress race was widely deemed a nail-biter between Madison and Demi Moore—a showdown that eerily mirrors the anti-ageism plot of “The Substance,” in which Moore plays a faded luminary, Elisabeth Sparkle, who is tossed on the Hollywood rubbish heap. In desperation, Elisabeth conceives, and is viciously destroyed by, her own younger, more bankable doppelgänger. “The Substance” climaxes, in memorably grotesque fashion, with monstrous distortions of flesh and vengeful geysers of blood, splattering a tastefully well-dressed crowd and ultimately reaching as far as Elisabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. No such “Carrie”-esque spectacle occurred in the wake of Moore’s defeat and Madison’s victory, even if the Walk of Fame itself was mere steps away. There was consolation, for fans of “The Substance,” that a gutsy, gaudy feminist body-horror movie had been embraced so by the mainstream, to the point of becoming the biggest hit ever for Mubi, its worldwide distributor.
Long live independent film! Sort of, anyway. As a production, the Oscars ceremony was still dominated by lovely if indulgent expressions of Hollywood nostalgia. The telecast kicked off with performances of “Over the Rainbow,” from “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Home,” from “The Wiz”—readymade showcases, respectively, for Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, the nominated stars of the Oz-themed blockbuster musical “Wicked.” The show next paused midway through for a bizarre extended tribute to the James Bond franchise, which—in light of the recent news that Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the franchise’s longtime stewards, had ceded creative control of 007 to Amazon—could not help but feel like a tortured In Memoriam farewell in itself. Certainly, an Oscars ceremony truly premised on the greatness of independent cinema—in its trappings, which are planned, as opposed to its winners, which are not—would have scheduled a longer, more substantial tribute to the late David Lynch, who received a few beats of montage time but no more. Lynch received an honorary Oscar in 2019, having previously earned Best Directing nominations for “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” Relegated in their time to Oscar-night footnotes, they have long since been recognized as his towering twin peaks—cinematic effusions of a dark, visionary, and fundamentally inimitable strangeness, against which the sheen of even a good Oscars ceremony pales. We will not behold their like again anytime soon. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
