Oscars
Story Stream
In Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho Misses the Moment March 06, 2025
Bong Joon-ho was delighted by a congratulatory letter he received from Martin Scorsese after his 2019 Korean-language film Parasite triumphed at the Oscars. At a press conference, Bong revealed that Scorsese had said he and other directors were keenl...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
The No-Drama Oscars March 06, 2025
When Quentin Tarantino strode onstage last night at the Academy Awards ceremony to hand out best director, it was an indicator of two things. The first was that last year’s winner in the category, Christopher Nolan, was unavailable. Nolan is currentl...
Stand Up for Better Oscar Bait! March 05, 2025
The mother of all costume dramas.Conclave starts with a simple, can’t-miss premise. We will stick ourselves in the Vatican for two hours. What we have to spend on the elaborate set will be offset for by never having to change locations. We will be su...
Sean Baker’s American Dreams March 04, 2025
At last night’s Oscars ceremony, Mikey Madison was dressed like a winner. The star of Sean Baker’s Anora wore a pink Dior gown, a wink, perhaps, to this one Audrey Hepburn wears in Funny Face, and to Gwyneth Paltrow, a fellow Best Actress winner. In ...
High Infidelity March 04, 2025
Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a productive night for The Brutalist, which scooped up the statuettes for cinematography, score, and best actor. Since the film’s release late last year, the deluge of acclaim for Brady Corbet’s epic, three-and-a-half hou...
The Winners and Losers of the 2025 Oscars March 04, 2025
Winner: Conan O’BrienAs a longtime Conan-head, I was hoping the comedian would bring some of his old late-night flair to his first Academy Awards hosting gig. Within minutes, Conan delivered, parodying The Substance by emerging out of Demi Moore’s bo...
REVIEW: ‘The Brutalist’ March 03, 2025
The most impressive film of 2024, up for 10 Oscars this weekend, is The Brutalist. It is an extraordinary achievement—nearly three-and-a-half hours and never less than gripping, beautifully rendered dialogue, stunning cinematography and music, all in...
Who Killed the Oscars? February 28, 2025
In the 1990s, there was a failed experiment in the Arizona desert called Biosphere 2. The idea was to create a self-sustaining orb where pretend astronauts of the future could live without contact with the real world for at least a year. They would g...
The Eight Biggest Story Lines Heading Into the Oscars February 28, 2025
How strange and unpredictable has this awards race been? Consider this: At this time last year, the most burning question wasn’t whether Oppenheimer would win a bunch of awards but whether there were any awards Christopher Nolan’s biopic wouldn’t win...
Late Night's New King February 20, 2025
On a Tuesday in February, Hollywood is in the throes of a “Bonfire of the Vanities” moment. Karla Sofía Gascón’s old social media posts, with shocking takes on George Floyd (“a drug addict swindler”) and Islam (“an infection for humanity that urgentl...
How the Oscar Race Got as Messy as “Conclave” February 07, 2025
Stop me if you’ve seen this one. A committee of august personages convenes, with much pomp and circumstance, to choose the best of their lot. Time-honored rituals are observed. Fancy outfits are donned. The ogling public is kept at bay. The contender...
Latinos Would Like a Word with ‘Emilia Pérez’ February 04, 2025
Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón’s recently resurfaced tweets — including one that posited Adolf Hitler “simply had his opinion of the Jews” — have put the 13 Oscar nominations for French narco musical “Emilia Pérez” in turmoil. The fallout is...
‘Emilia Pérez’ and the Curse of Oscar Bait January 28, 2025
Last week, the nominees for the 2025 Academy Awards were announced. The leading contender with 13 total nominations? Emilia Pérez, a French-produced Spanish-language musical about a transgender Mexican druglord and her underappreciated girlboss defen...
Anora’s Body and Soul January 27, 2025
Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which recently won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is a strong Oscar contender, is not an easy film but rather a complicated jumble of conflicting themes, ideas, and tones. It’s also the sort of movie your mom tol...
‘The Substance’ Is One of the Best Food Movies in Years January 24, 2025
Not long after Elisabeth Sparkle’s 50th birthday, her boss, a boor named Harvey, delivers some bad news to her over a plate of shrimp: He’s giving her the pink slip. An Oscar-winning actress, Elisabeth (Demi Moore) has spent the second chapter of her...
Forget the Oscar Noms January 24, 2025
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”— Jean BaudrillardAmerican films don’t feel like films. It’s a hard thing to describe — but we all know it; or those of us who remember what movies were like at ...
The Winners and Losers of the 2025 Oscar Nominations January 24, 2025
The lead-up to the 97th Academy Awards has been anything but ordinary. Last week, the Oscar nominations were delayed on account of the devastating wildfires across Los Angeles. “We will get through this together and bring a sense of healing to our gl...
How the Academy Awards Adapted to Catastrophe January 24, 2025
Until two weeks ago, Oscar pundits were describing this awards season as “weird.” Unlike last year’s slate, dominated by Barbenheimer, the new crop of contenders had been thinned out by the actors’ and writers’ strikes, leaving room for such polarizi...
The Monumental Achievement of 'The Brutalist' January 21, 2025
The Brutalist has been much garlanded already as the awards season gathers pace. At Venice, creator Brady Corbet took the Silver Lion for best director. At the Golden Globes, it won Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor. At the Baftas, it was nomi...
The 12 Oscar Contenders of Christmas December 23, 2024
The awards circus takes a two-week break around the holidays,* returning on January 5 for the Golden Globes. That makes the week before Christmas the perfect time to zoom out and take stock of the wider race. Which Oscar hopefuls have done enough to ...
Sofia Coppola Is Launching an Imprint December 18, 2024
Sofia Coppola has often thought that if she weren’t a filmmaker, she’d want to be the editor-in-chief of a magazine—or at least her own zine. The Oscar-winning auteur’s favorite way to unwind after a long day on set is by cutting out her favorite pho...
Pamela & Mikey December 18, 2024
Mikey Madison, who got her start on the FX series “Better Things,” is among the discoveries of Oscar season with Sean Baker’s “Anora.” As the title character — a Russian American stripper in Brooklyn who allows herself to fall for a client — she is a...
The Anti-Woke King of Hollywood Lets Loose December 13, 2024
It’s not often that a TV show not only nails the zeitgeist but anticipates it—that zeitgeist being the election of Donald Trump and concomitant rebuke of the Democratic political-cultural agenda. Make that TV shows, plural, all from the ridiculously ...
The Rare Eccentricity of Isabella Rossellini December 10, 2024
Most great female actors get to play a nun at some point in their career: a kind of thespian rite of passage that comes to many in their grande dame years. Isabella Rossellini, however, checked off that box in her very first screen appearance, aged 2...
