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When reacting to Oscar nominations, actors traditionally err on the side of hyperbole. This year was no exception. “I don’t know if I’m quite in my body,” said Demi Moore, on learning she was shortlisted for The Substance. “I looked at my phone and fell on the floor,” said Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. “I actually haven’t stopped sobbing,” offered Ariana (Wicked) Grande.
Karla Sofía Gascón, however, bucked the trend. The first out trans actor ever nominated for an Oscar took the opportunity to address the executive order signed by Donald Trump earlier this week, restricting US government recognition to only biological sex.
“He is shameless,” she said. “I hope that whatever needs to happen happens to shut everyone up, on both sides.”
Gascón continued: “Now it is time to focus on my performance and put aside my ethnicity, sexuality or hair colour, to move forward in ‘integration’. Today it is proven that art does not understand hate. No one can question my work, even less the fact that I am an actress. An actress who deserves to be recognised solely and exclusively for her sublime performance in Emilia Pérez.”
Such focus in the debate until the ceremony on 2 March seems unlikely. This year’s Oscar contenders amount to a collective broadside against a president campaigned against by almost everyone in the industry. His re-election – and the collapse in celebrity leverage that it revealed – remains a sore point. As the Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser reminded her A-list audience earlier this month: “You’re all so famous, so talented, so powerful, you could really do anything. Well, except tell the country who to vote for.”
Hollywood has therefore opted to vote with its Academy ballots, giving a leg-up to films that conspicuously critique the Maga worldview. Hence, perhaps, such an extravagant embrace for Emilia Pérez, a French musical about a trans Mexican gangster that has been criticised as “offensive” by both Mexican and trans communities, and met with a mixed reception from critics and audiences (with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 76% and 30% respectively).
Nonetheless, the film has smashed the record set by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Roma for the most nominations for a film not in the English language, scoring 13 to their 10, putting it just one behind the all-time record earned by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land.
The only film on this year’s lists that is more of an explicit attack on the new president is The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s unflattering biopic of the young Trump, focusing on his rise to power and ill-treatment of his then wife, Ivanka, and one-time mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn. A “disgusting hatchet job”, was the verdict of its subject, who called its makers “HUMAN SCUM” and urged audiences to avoid it. US distributors ran correspondingly scared, despite strong reviews and an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes, until the small outfit Briarcliff eventually risked releasing it in October.
The film’s leading actor, Sebastian Stan, reported that Hollywood was so intimidated by Trump that none of his peers would appear opposite him in Variety’s annual Actors on Actors series, in which awards contenders quiz one another on video. “We couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them because they were too afraid to talk about this movie,” he said. Variety verified his claims.
Nonetheless, three days after Trump’s inauguration, Stan landed an Oscar nomination – as did the supporting actor Jeremy Strong (who plays Cohn). Both men expressed their shock, with the former calling the Academy “brave” and the later saying the nods felt “absolutely miraculous”.
Such a miracle, says Variety’s executive editor, Steven Gaydos, is thanks to a “stick it to the man” passion that has been brewing in Hollywood since 2016 and is now turbocharged by Trump’s re-election. (The fires that have destroyed many voters’ homes over the past fortnight, he suggests, may have fuelled a devil-may-care recklessness.)
Not only has this feeling propelled such films into pole position, says Gaydos, it may push some over the finish line: “This sentiment could benefit them all come Oscar night.” The competition may therefore be decided as much on how much the movie baits the president as its artistic merit.
Campaigns are likely to start to amplify such credentials. The smash-hit fantasy Wicked could be seen as an incisive critique of racism and fascism via a green-skinned witch and talking animals.
The team behind the Vatican thriller Conclave will be offering prayers of thanks to the Catholic backlash to their film. Edward Berger’s drama helpfully revolves around another election – that of a new pope – with reactionary factions pitted against liberal reformers, as well as an even more radical alternative. Last week a former prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith called it “anti-Christian propaganda” that could have been made “in the time of Hitler or Stalin”.
“I’ve seen some clips and read some reviews and that is enough for me,” Cardinal Gerhard Müller told the National Catholic Register. Such labelling of the film as incendiary can only help its chances in the current climate.
“Even A Complete Unknown,” says Gaydos, “with its nomination for Edward Norton as the communist-sympathising folk music legend Pete Seeger, benefits from Hollywood’s still potent anti-Trump animus.”
Indeed it’s hard to identify a film on the shortlist that can’t be interpreted as a salvo against the 47th president. The space opera Dune: Part Two cautions against colonisation; The Brutalist is scathing in its portrayal of the way the US treats immigrants. Nickel Boys addresses head-on the institutionalised murder of young Black men in the Jim Crow south. Anora examines sexual exploitation and the wealth divide; The Substance satirises reality TV’s obsession with eternal youth and Brazil’s I’m Still Here shows what life looks like under military dictatorship.
Both the latter film and Emilia Pérez have places on the international film shortlist and that for best picture – the first time more than one film has managed this, and an indication of the increasing internationalisation of an Academy untroubled by subtitles.
More than a decade ago, reeling from accusations of endemic sexism and racism, the Academy kickstarted a huge recruitment drive that prioritised women and people of colour. The fruits of this movement are easy to spot: the historic best picture win for Parasite five years ago, as well as significant victories for the likes of Roma, Minari, Drive My Car, All Quiet on the Western Front, Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest.
Writing in the New Yorker after this year’s nominations, the critic Richard Brody said 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 crystallised 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.”
