Conclave, The Brutalist Bafta wins make Oscars race confusing

Conclave now feels like it has a real shot

Anora – director Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning fractured fairy tale about a Brighton Beach sex worker (Mikey Madison) who marries into the family of a Russian oligarch – has claimed its place as the front-runner for best picture at the Oscars. It won top prizes at the Critics Choice Awards, and then the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild. Then it won best original screenwriter from the Writers Guild of America (although much of its Oscars competition wasn’t eligible, due to weird rules). These guild prizes tend to be predictive because they’re the first awards given by industry insiders who are also members of the Academy. The upcoming Screen Actors Guild awards will be the true indication of how much the industry favours it, since the actors’ branch is the largest in the Academy. Post Baftas, Anora is still looking strong, having taken the best actress prize for Madison and the casting award at the British awards show.

What’s more interesting, though, are the movies that came out on top at the Baftas. Conventional wisdom would have us believe The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet’s epic American saga – starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian Jewish architect who escapes the Holocaust and finds hostility in Pennsylvania – was the big fish in the race, and the one most likely to beat Anora for the top award. But then Conclave took Bafta’s best-film prize – along with the awards for outstanding British film, adapted screenplay and editing. The Brutalist took best director for Corbet, best leading actor for Brody, and cinematography and original score.

Because Conclave hadn’t really seemed like a serious contender in the mix until now, its Bafta win for best film seems more significant. Ostensibly about the tense election of a new pope, its director, Edward Berger, has called it a political thriller that could take place in Washington, DC, about an institution in crisis, and the struggle between men who seek to lead for the sake of power, and those who are trying to find a righteous path – and the difficulty in telling the difference between them. It’s worth noting Bafta loves Berger, the German-born director behind Conclave. The body’s enthusiastic support of Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022 – it won seven out of Bafta’s 14 awards – was a major factor propelling its nine nominations and four wins at the Oscars. Then again, Bafta’s affection for Conclave may not mean much. As Variety’s Clayton Davis points out, the film doesn’t have a best director nod from the Academy, which is usually a bad sign for a best picture win.

For now, it’s exciting to think of best picture as a three-way race, with Anora slightly in front, and Conclave and The Brutalist neck and neck on its trail.

Emilia Pérez may not be totally dead in the water

Emilia Pérez a Spanish-language musical about love and difference, stars Gascón as a Mexican cartel leader who transitions to being a woman and finds redemption. It had received 13 Oscar nominations, the most of any film, and Gascón became the first openly trans actor to be nominated for an Oscar.

Bafta voting had already been going on for a week when a journalist resurfaced tweets, written in Spanish, in which star Karla Sofía Gascón reportedly said Islam was “becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured”, called George Floyd “a drug addict swindler”, and mocked the 2021 Oscars as resembling “an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M” (a strike for women’s rights). “The Chinese vaccine,” she reportedly wrote in an August 2020 tweet, “apart from the mandatory chip, comes with two spring rolls, a cat that moves its hand, 2 plastic flowers, a pop-up lantern, 3 telephone lines and one euro for your first controlled purchase.”

Gascón apologised, but also, in statements and a tearful TV interview, seemed to paint herself as the victim. She said she would not withdraw her best actress Oscar nomination because she had committed no crime. “It’s as if she thought that words don’t hurt,” director Jacques Audiard said in an interview, adding that he wasn’t speaking with his Emilia Pérez star and didn’t want to, because her tweets were “inexcusable”.

That scandal doesn’t seem to have had a huge effect on Bafta voters. The film won two awards. (The Baftas are notorious for shunning the work of black artists, so take that for what you will.) From the Bafta stage, Audiard thanked “my dear Karla Sofía” upon accepting the award for best film not in the English language – marking an apparent détente that could serve as a prelude.

As the Oscars have drawn nearer, the Emilia Pérez downward spiral seems to have stalled. Gascón has apologised and pledged she’ll stay silent so the work can speak for itself; she was not at the Baftas, despite being nominated. Recently, Netflix’s chief content officer Bela Bajaria said on the Hollywood podcast The Town that the whole scandal had been “a bummer”, particularly for the other actresses, cast and crew and awards team who’d worked so hard to champion the movie. The message to Academy members was clear: If you liked the movie, don’t punish everyone for the actions of a single person. And given the Academy is filled with industry professionals who wouldn’t want to bear the consequences of a colleague’s mistakes, maybe the apology / it’s-a-bummer tour is resonating.

Zoe Saldaña and Kieran Culkin feel like locks

After winning practically every other precursor, Zoe Saldaña yet again won the supporting actress prize for Emilia Pérez and Kieran Culkin won the supporting actor prize for A Real Pain. Saldaña’s win is more significant (although her speech, with a few expletives, was cut from the BBC broadcast). She appears to have been unscathed by the scandal surrounding her co-star’s tweets. Both her nomination and Culkin’s have been dinged as “category fraud” by critics who argue both actors are essentially coleads of their respective movies, giving them an unfair edge over the actors who played true supporting roles with less screen time. It’s a totally fair criticism. But Bafta voters, who loved Conclave, could have given an award to Isabella Rossellini for her performance in a true supporting role as a nun in that film; instead they honored Saldaña.

Don’t count out Mikey Madison

Brody, who had already nabbed a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice award for his lead role in The Brutalist, won another bauble from Bafta, which picked him for best actor. He’s feeling like a lock for the Oscar, especially given the Bafta voters didn’t give the award to Fiennes even though they loved Conclave. I’ve been pulling for Colman Domingo, of Sing Sing, this whole time, but he’s just going to have to make do with winning every best-dressed award this season.

The Academy’s choice for female lead is less settled, and therefore more fun.

In early January, after her barn burner of a speech at the Golden Globes about being dismissed as a “popcorn actress” for her entire career, Demi Moore emerged as the front-runner for The Substance. That hasn’t changed. But as the industry keeps showing how much it loved Anora, the drum beat for Mikey Madison’s performance as a young sex worker swept up in a capitalist fairy tale keeps growing louder. Bafta voters have now added their voices to the chorus.

Anora – which, again, may win best picture – is nothing without Madison holding it down in the centre. Winning best actress at the Baftas, she gave an utterly charming speech, thanking her mum for driving her to hundreds of auditions. Madison also took the opportunity to recognise the sex worker community. “I just want to say that I see you. You deserve respect and human decency,” she said. “I will always be a friend and an ally, and I implore others to do the same.”

Whether that message resonates with the Academy as much as Moore’s she’s-due narrative remains to be seen, but Madison has a shot. The SAG awards on February 23 will be the next test of strength for her Oscar bid.

Documentary, best director and original screenplay are still up for grabs

Here’s where the real confusion comes in. Anora also won best original screenplay at the Writers Guild Awards, but because of weird rules, the only other Oscar contender eligible was the screenplay for A Real Pain – which then won at the Baftas. The likely outcome is that Anora wins at the Oscars and Culkin’s prize is the recognition for A Real Pain, but consider our take to be a giant shrug emoji.

Best director is also a total blind dart throw. Anora director Sean Baker won the biggest precursor, the Directors Guild award. And although Corbet took Bafta’s director award for The Brutalist, Baker has what feels like a more solid track record: He has been pounding the boards for 25 years, 15 of which followed his breakthrough feature, Tangerine. Corbet has what is arguably the most ambitious film of the year, a 3.5-hour epic made on a $10 million (NZ$17m) budget, but some critics find it a bit incoherent. As The Washington Post’s Ty Burr writes, the film “piles a lot on its plate” but doesn’t “add up to a wholly memorable feast”. An actor turned director, Corbet is still a young filmmaker whose last feature, Vox Lux wasn’t celebrated in the way Baker’s The Florida Project was. Long-simmering respect for Baker probably wins out here, but Corbet’s swing-for-the-fences style will make this one tight.

As for documentary, it really seemed like it would be a no-brainer for No Other Land, which documents Israeli aggression in Gaza, to take the prize. But Bafta and the PGAs awarded Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story – a beautiful, and far more mainstream, tearjerker that’s been playing on HBO for months. Porcelain War, about trying to make art in the midst of the war on Ukraine, won at the DGAs.

Both war films, though, have struggled with US distribution, and neither are available for streaming – and Super/Man isn’t Oscar-nominated, so that’s out. As Academy members scramble to watch every film they’ve missed, documentaries may fall through the cracks. Does that then give a leg up to Sugarcane, a film about the traumas inflicted by indigenous residential schools in Canada – a uniquely North American tragedy that may resonate with Academy voters? It’s been available on Hulu since December, so don’t count it out.

The 97th Acadamy Awards takes place from 1pm Monday March 3 (NZ time). The full list of nominees are as follows:

Best picture

Best actor in a leading role

Best actress in a leading role

Best actor in a supporting role

Best actress in a supporting role

Best director

Best cinematography

Best international feature film

Best adapted screenplay

Best original screenplay

Best live action short film

Best animated short film

Best animated feature film

Best documentary short

Best documentary feature film

Best original song

Best original score

Best makeup and hairstyling

Best costume design

Best editing

Best sound

Best production design

Best visual effects