To win or not to win? That is the question being asked by this year’s Academy Award nominees ahead of Sunday’s ceremony. Unless you’ve been in a wifi-less conclave for the last few months, you know the field is split into two polarizing halves. On the one hand, there’s Elphaba Thropp holding space for Timothée-Tok in Paris. The other side has been a filthy PR bloodbath, fraught with accusations of AI-enhanced trickery, lack of intimacy coordination, body-shaming tweets, and, rather shockingly, downright Islamophobia and racism (more tweets, but also blackface!). I don’t think attempts to smear competing films have ever been so naked, the usually murmured Oscar buzz becoming a deafening omen for a swarm of stings.
As Oscar voting closed last week and the mud stopped slinging, we all emerged, a little worse for wear, to gather our thoughts and gauge the likeliest victors. Guesses on statuette-securers are abundant, lead actor likelihoods are emergent, but I’m trying to work out which specific winners will feel like an antidote to the madness.
First of all, I am deeply in love with Demi Moore, a woman of remarkable character and grit, who’s lead role in the beauty-horror-satire, The Substance, turned heads as well as stomachs. When collecting her Golden Globe for her role as purportedly-past-her-sell-by-date Elisabeth Sparkle, Demi said she’d been slighted as a “popcorn actress” in the past, which had obviously rattled her. But I don’t think it’s a wholly untrue accusation. What audiences love about Demi is her watchability, her embodiment of ambitious and audacious characters—in Ghost, Striptease, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle—rather than those on the devastating fringes of human emotion. There’s an exhausting trope for best actress winners to be women who we’ve watched relentlessly suffer on film for two hours. I’m hoping Demi takes the win, not just for the horror genre itself, but also for a paradigm shift where effervescence and comedy intertwine in women’s stories.
Another standout for me, in the best-picture race, is Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. It is harrowing on paper, with an eye-watering runtime—especially in our increasingly online, increasingly impatient culture—and yet it propels you avidly through its beautiful-even-if-some-are-AI-generated scenes. Adrien Brody’s László Tóth is a Holocaust survivor battling for postwar equilibrium with a determination and wit that keeps us gripped. Not to be too glib, but rarely do Holocaust-adjacent, anti-Sematic, heroin-addled quarry-rape narratives feel so un-grueling.
