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With the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations, the members of the Academy have, in effect, responded to the natural and political disasters of the moment in the name of solidarity. A remarkable consensus has crystallized among a small number of movies that, in one way or another—whether with bold artistry or conventional methods, realistic stories or fantasies—embody, display, or at least appear to celebrate the liberal values of pluralism, equality, and resistance to the arrogance of power, be it political or economic. This time around, the Oscars are circling the wagons.
The degree of apparent consensus is extraordinary, as seen in the ten Best Picture nominees, the subjects they address, and their concentration of nominations throughout: six nominations for “Anora,” about the oppressive footprint of Russian oligarchs; ten for “The Brutalist,” a Holocaust survivor’s confrontation with a predatory American tycoon; eight for “A Complete Unknown,” a bio-pic about an icon of generational revolt; eight for “Conclave,” in which a coalition unites behind a progressive to resist a narrow-minded reactionary; five for “Dune: Part Two,” about sand (and a revolt against tyranny); thirteen for “Emilia Pérez,” the story of a trans woman and of the cis woman who enables her transition; three for “I’m Still Here,” a drama of resistance to a rightist military dictatorship; two for “Nickel Boys” (the year’s actual best movie), based on the true story of a murderous segregated Florida reform school; five for “The Substance,” about the ageist exclusions that women endure, especially in Hollywood; and ten for “Wicked,” a story of racism and oppressive, illegitimate authority.
Though the range of artistic achievement here is widely varied, from the originality of “Nickel Boys” to the blandness of “Conclave,” the Academy’s membership is sending an unambiguous message regarding what it stands for, and what it won’t stand for. The gestures are symbolic—but then so are movies. They are commodities, too, of course, and Hollywood’s assertive stance is rendered all the more staunch by its embrace of “Dune: Part Two” and “Wicked,” two of the year’s biggest box-office hits. Not all of these movies have made money, but all of them bask in the glow of success, heralding the notion that the business is confident of doing well while doing good.
It’s telling that one of the nominees for Best Documentary Feature, “No Other Land,” about the destruction of a Palestinian village by Israeli forces, has not yet been acquired by a U.S. distributor. So far, it’s been screened only independently, and will play at Film Forum starting January 31st; perhaps political principle in the business goes only so far. It’s also worth noting that two short films released by The New Yorker are among the nominees in their categories: the live-action film “I’m Not a Robot,” directed by Victoria Warmerdam, and the documentary “Incident,” directed by Bill Morrison, which reconstructs, through surveillance and body-cam footage, the killing of a Black civilian by police.
It’s inevitably the acting categories that are emblematic of the Oscars’ built-in nonpolitical prejudices—the ideas of professionalism and technique that only occasionally intersect with exemplary artistry. In one sense, it’s hard to make a wrong choice; actors at all levels of filmmaking put their bodies on the line, and display the fundamental mettle of being in control of themselves and in command of their art while a camera is trained on them. Yet control and command, which are all the more manifest in the higher reaches of the business, aren’t the heart of movie acting. Cameras see through virtuosity to reveal states of being. Great movie acting isn’t necessarily based on theatrical precision, but it does offer a different aspect of theatre: the emotional illusion of the actors’ presence. (That’s why great acting is usually found in exceptionally well-directed movies, ones with an original view of the relationship between actors and the very forms in which they’re presented.) This year’s acting nominations are no different—all of the selected actors are admirable, almost all in familiar modes.
The nomination of Demi Moore for “The Substance,” a stylized work of body-horror science fiction, is noteworthy. The fact that she hasn’t had major roles in recent years confirms the accuracy of the movie’s critique of Hollywood sexism; it’s also a sign that the venerable and central movie genre of melodrama, at which Moore excelled, has been left behind. It’s an inherently democratic genre, but current examples mostly proceed by inflation and deflection—“Anora” and “The Brutalist,” in their different ways, demonstrate both tendencies—with results that lack the spirit and the distinctive artistry of the genre’s classics.
Regarding international features, this year’s list offers a joltingly significant oddity: “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” an Iranian film directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, is a nominee officially attributed to Germany. The attribution is technically accurate (one of the production companies that made the movie is German) and perhaps morally, too: Rasoulof, facing a prison sentence in Iran after making the film there in secret, fled the country and now lives in Germany. Kudos to the German committee that picked the movie as Germany’s submission to the Oscars—but the Academy’s system of putting such choices in the hands of countries’ official film bodies is indefensible, because it gives oppressive regimes a veto against movies made in opposition. It’s urgent that the Academy—which has actively taken measures to broaden its membership internationally—assume control of its own processes and create a better system for the nomination of international features.
Because this is an unusual year with many underlying questions to consider (and a small batch of movies excelling in multiple ways), I’m sticking to fewer categories. My picks are in no particular order, except for the winners, which are first and in bold.
Best Picture
“Nickel Boys”“Between the Temples”“Blitz”“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point”“It’s Not Me”“Juror #2”“Megalopolis”“My First Film”“Oh, Canada”“The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed”
The drop-off from the year’s best to the rest is relatively sharp. I wouldn’t read much into it—but, as it becomes increasingly tough to draw audiences for independent and international films, so it becomes harder for distributors to release them. (I’m noticing, for instance, that the first two months of 2025 have relatively little of the art-house counterprogramming that used to brighten the winter doldrums.) In any case, because there’s a big gap between this year’s handful of best movies and the rest, a relatively small number will weigh heavily in the various categories of movie work.
It’s with surprise and dismay that I note the scarcity of international films among the year’s best. This, too, isn’t a trend, just a blip: as I mentioned last month in my best-of roundup, several international films that I saw last year and that would have been high on my list were pushed to 2025 or haven’t even been picked up for distribution.
I’ve written at length about all ten of my Best Picture picks with one exception: Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” a picture that has been the victim of a critical misunderstanding. As a drama with an elemental emotional kick—a child alone, facing dangers while trying to find his way home—it has been wrongly disparaged as sentimental, conventional, or even compromised. The action is set in London during the Second World War. The child in question is Black, and the movie’s depiction of racist attitudes and acts, amid the city’s heroic efforts to cope with Nazi Germany’s bombing campaign, is part of a teeming, fine-grained, and wide-ranging historical reconstruction. Though its characters are brought to life in vivid and nuanced performances, it’s not a drama of personal psychology but of mentalities. McQueen distills societal attitudes and assumptions into action, in the form of a romantic Dickensian adventure. He also invests the film with a dash of Dickensian exaggeration, which, I think, accounts for its dismissal by some critics who’ve nonetheless embraced, say, the overt caricatures in “Wicked.” The blend of tones in McQueen’s film is a challenge, not a comfort.
Best Director
RaMell Ross (“Nickel Boys”)Zia Anger (“My First Film”)Francis Ford Coppola (“Megalopolis”)Paul Schrader (“Oh, Canada”)Tyler Taormina (“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point”)
A few years ago, I riffed here about the peculiarity of giving the Oscar for Best Direction to anyone but the director of the Best Picture winner—as if movies’ most important qualities were attributable to anyone but their directors. The Academy has done so just once in the past five years and has long done so only occasionally—and the specifics are revelatory. Notably, since 1941—the year that “Citizen Kane” was released—sixty-four out of eighty-three Best Picture winners have also won Best Director, whereas, in the first thirteen years of the Academy Awards, from 1927 to 1940, only five out of thirteen Best Picture winners did. In 1941, “Citizen Kane” won for neither—but, thanks to that movie, the idea of a comprehensive artist within the industry suddenly held sway in Hollywood. In short, Orson Welles made the Oscars auteurist, long before the term existed.
On the other hand, I understand the warmhearted reason for splitting the vote: in order to spread the love around, treating the Best Director award as, in effect, the prize for second-best picture. Last year, I split my own ballot, because the two best movies were extremely close in artistic quality, and because the second-best excelled in moment-by-moment inventiveness. This year, I’ve had no doubt whatsoever regarding the year’s best movie and its most inventive one: RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys” expands the very possibilities of cinema. Though its methods are startlingly original, its great gift to other filmmakers isn’t a technique to imitate but an inspiration to invent their own forms freely, by way of their own philosophical engagement with their subjects and with the history of the art itself (“philosophical,” literally, as seen in Ross’s essay “Renew the Encounter,” from 2019).
I wish that I had a sixth slot for directing, because there should be a place for another exceptional filmmaker, Jane Schoenbrun. The nature of Schoenbrun’s achievement in “I Saw the TV Glow” is as distinctive as the film itself. “TV” depends above all on mood, which is sustained with a power and a precision that are all the more remarkable for the film’s dramatic spareness. No recent movie reflects so substantially the aesthetic of Antonioni, evoking a world under the influence of mass media.
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Adam Driver (“Megalopolis”)Ethan Herisse (“Nickel Boys”)James Madio (“The Featherweight”)Glen Powell (“Hit Man”)Jason Schwartzman (“Between the Temples”)
A lead performer carries a film nearly literally, with a sense of physicality that’s also conveyed in the voice. In “Megalopolis,” Adam Driver—aptly given a Shakespearean soliloquy that reflects the movie’s mighty scale—hurtles and lurches, dances and whirls, strides and struts and even crumples while bearing up the weight of Coppola’s heroic fancies. There’s a great cinematic history of seriocomic interpretations of the “To be or not to be” speech, including by Jack Benny in Ernst Lubitsch’s film of that title and Charlie Chaplin in “A King in New York.” Driver, with his version of it, takes his place in their exalted company.
It saddens me that Ethan Herisse hasn’t received more recognition in this awards season; he’s twenty-four but, here, plays a teen-ager, and it’s been quite a while since someone has got a Best Actor nomination for doing so (2010—Jesse Eisenberg, for “The Social Network”). Herisse’s performance turns the texture of his voice into something intensely physical. His way of moving, almost too smooth for the rough world that his character is forced into, goes beyond technique into transfiguration.
As ads for old-time movies might have put it, “James Madio is ‘The Featherweight.’ ” When it comes to bio-pics, what’s needed is less impersonation than incarnation, a sort of metamorphosis in which the actor seems to have undergone, for the duration of the shoot, a DNA transplant; what is manifested onscreen comes from a change within. So it is with Madio’s performance as the aging boxer Willie Pep, whose ill-advised attempt at a comeback, in 1964, is filmed in the form of a (fictitious) immersive documentary; Madio’s performance matches the movie’s conceptual boldness.
As a nerdy professor who finds unexpected pleasures and romantic complications in impersonating contract killers to aid the police in sting operations, Glen Powell puts his ever-so-slightly effortful cheer and charm overtly to work and delivers a performance of breathtaking exuberance and macabre depth. Jason Schwartzman, one of the most innovative actors of recent decades, is too easy to take for granted, because his acting remains inseparable from his utterly unique voice and diction, his air of inescapably sincere whimsy and thoughtful spontaneity. He has never been nominated for an Oscar, a fact that reveals the industry’s narrow conception of acting. In “Between the Temples,” he displays an altogether more shambling, unstrung aspect of his art and his personality. The performance suggests a peacefully harrowing tangle, an inner hurricane of outward passivity, qualities that determine much of the movie’s architecture.
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Maria Dizzia (“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point”)Joanna Arnow (“The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed”)Léa Drucker (“Last Summer”)Karla Sofía Gascón (“Emilia Pérez”)Carol Kane (“Between the Temples”)
This has been a tough year for actresses, because there have been unusually few movies that call upon them to display something beyond skill, which may be the very definition of great acting. (Again, not a trend, just an accident of scheduling.) It has also been a very strange year for actresses because it’s hard to be sure who’s a lead and who’s supporting. The Academy is legalistic in its definition of the awards—which recognize not a lead or supporting actor or actress but “performance by an [actor or actress] in a [leading or supporting] role.” It’s the role that matters, but the Academy offers no official guideline, stating, “The determination as to whether a role is a leading or supporting role shall be made individually by members of the branch at the time of balloting.” In other words, vote your conscience.
Some technocrats vote with their stopwatch. For instance, in Variety’s report on Netflix’s controversial effort to get Zoe Saldaña nominated for a supporting role in “Emilia Pérez” (presumably to aid its campaign for Karla Sofía Gascón as a lead), her screen time is compared, down to the second, with Gascón’s—and is also compared with the screen time of other contenders throughout Oscar history. Criticism-by-stopwatch is especially useless regarding another of the year’s best performances, by Maria Dizzia, in one of the year’s best and most original movies, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.” Because of the film’s distinctive form—its story is conjured pointillistically in brief dramatic fragments, with few of the typically extended dialogue scenes that most films are made of—no member of the abundant cast would likely reach previous baselines for leading-role screen time.
This is all to say that, regardless of screen time, the performance is what defines the role. In speaking of actors in a leading role, I mentioned the carrying of a movie, and this concept solves my problem: Carol Kane, in “Between the Temples,” is therefore an actress in a leading role. Her voice is a pillar of the movie; her action and dialogue, involving copious improvisation, is a key through line. Her diagonal glances turn the screen three-dimensional, and it’s as if she steps out from it; it’s a performance of startling presence. Léa Drucker, starring in Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer,” brings a rare immediacy to her starring role in a tale of a middle-aged woman’s ardor, arrogance, vulnerability, and manipulative ingenuity in a heedless affair with her stepson. “Emilia Pérez” is incurious about its subjects and its characters, but there’s an operatic intensity—indeed, a drama-breaking urgency—to Gascón’s role as a drug kingpin who undergoes gender-reassignment surgery and seeks a new, redemptive and penitent way of life. The story is oblivious, but Gascón is bracingly alert throughout. (Her performance is my only point of intersection with the actual acting nominees.)
Joanna Arnow, directing herself in the role of a young woman whose desires for a B.D.S.M. relationship and a romantic one lead to conflict, is both quietly frenetic and energetically choreographic—and dialectically deft in scenes of sharp talk at cross-purposes. The fear factor is built into the character’s—and the actress’s—vulnerability and the clear precision with which her camera eye sustains it. Dizzia may very well have less screen time than any lead actress who’s ever won an Oscar, but anyone watching “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” with stopwatch in hand is missing the point—and the performance. Back to carrying: she is the center of the film, even at times when other characters take over the drama. She has fine and fervent dialogue, but she also dominates the whirling action and its flashes of radiant stillness by means of her gaze upon it. She doesn’t have to do anything—she’s there. Her face is the face of the cinema for me this year.
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“Nickel Boys”)Adria Arjona (“Hit Man”)Dolly De Leon (“Between the Temples”)Aubrey Plaza (“Megalopolis”)Saoirse Ronan (“Blitz”)
The torrent of accomplishment in this category is thrilling. In “Blitz,” Saoirse Ronan unleashes more energy and performs more impulsively than in any prior role of hers that I’ve seen; her liberated, liberating performance seems to come from within, as if breaking through a formidable technique (and any inhibitions that come with it) to unleash the specific furies—familial, political, historical—evoked by her role and the movie at large. Adria Arjona sets such a tone in “Hit Man” that it’s tempting to call her role a leading one, but it’s written as more of a fixed reference that helps to define Glen Powell’s surprisingly inchoate protagonist. This makes her performance—wry and sly and glinting differently from moment to moment—all the more exhilarating. In “Between the Temples,” Dolly De Leon, who rose to international stardom in “Triangle of Sadness” with a tone of stern earnestness, raises it to a ferociously sardonic pitch, and catches her character’s singular sense of living in a spotlight on the stage of daily life. “Megalopolis” demands displays of outrageously steely artifice from its entire cast, as if the dialogue were in iambic pentameter plus emojis, and Aubrey Plaza, in the role of a power-hungry television personality who romances her way into actual power, invests the character with diabolical exuberance to match an irrational, hubristic self-confidence. But, just as “Nickel Boys” is a movie apart, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s performance, in the role of a Florida grandmother in Jim Crow days desperately trying to protect her grandson from racist violence, is virtually a sacrament. She delivers a monologue, of the litany of horrors that befell the men in this family, that’s the most exalted moment of performance I’ve seen all year, and she sustains this inspiration throughout the movie.
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Jacob Elordi (“Oh, Canada”)Adam Pearson (“A Different Man”)Ha Seong-guk (“A Traveler’s Needs”)Brandon Wilson (“Nickel Boys”)Christophe Zajac-Denek (“Sasquatch Sunset”)
It was disheartening that the Zellner brothers’ “Sasquatch Sunset”—depicting a family of four of the mythical apelike beings—was both dismissed as a goof and derided for taking its cryptids seriously. Yet its meticulously conceived realm of zoological observation elicits wonders in mime from its cast of four. Christophe Zajac-Denek embodies the spirit of discovery in his role as the youngster of the Sasquatch troupe, whose seemingly spontaneous invention, in gestures, of the novel concept of self-consciousness conjures a mighty historical moment. In “Nickel Boys,” Brandon Wilson—as a streetwise teen who, in a brutal reform school, befriends the bookish protagonist—rises with gruff tenderness and unyielding purpose to the difficult role of a regular guy of exceptional character; avoiding cliché, Wilson renders it precise, complex, and unique. Adam Pearson is one of the wittiest of actors; playing, in “A Different Man,” an actor who has neurofibromatosis (as Pearson does in real life) and who takes over a role from an actor only pretending to have the condition, he gets to flash his wit as if off the blade of a knife. In Hong Sangsoo’s “A Traveler’s Needs,” Ha Seong-guk (a Hong regular) gives piquantly awkward new life to the stock character of a young man caught between his romantic independence and his mother. Jacob Elordi, who met the difficult challenge of playing Elvis Presley in “Priscilla,” has a similarly tough role in “Oh, Canada”—he has to evoke a de-aged Richard Gere, and to do so while incarnating the spirit of the nineteen-sixties, the period in which his character faces unbearable conundrums and takes a small step for a man and a flying leap out of his life. If Gere, playing the same character in old age, weren’t such a dominant and charismatic presence, Elordi would be the movie’s lead. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
