For left-leaning Hollywood, the stakes of the Oscar race might seem moot in light of the widespread panic around Donald Trump’s return to office. Shake off the shock, though, and you’ll realize we’ve been here before.
In 2017, an awards-season triumph reflected Hollywood’s anti-Trump sentiment, with a surprise best picture win for Moonlight coming just months after the shockwaves of the 2016 election. That movie, a sensitive and stirring look at racial neglect and sexual repression in the shadows of toxic masculinity, embodied fragile progressive values and also provided a sharp reminder of the potential victims at hand in the looming Trump administration.
Director Barry Jenkins was not afraid to lean in to the resistance vibes. In the midst of the Moonlight campaign in January 2017, days before the inauguration, he took a moment in his acceptance speech at the National Board of Review to address the bigger picture. “As we make America great again, let’s remember some inconsiderable things in our legacy,” he said, “because there was a time when someone like me was just not considered.” The potential for change persists, Jenkins reminded, even in the face of the insurmountable.
This time around, there are gripping reminders of disenfranchisement at the core of a number of major Oscar contenders, with stories of resilience that point a path forward for the country despite the seemingly daunting odds. The awards race won’t save American democracy, but it just might inject the country’s moviegoers with an invigorated sense of national priorities. Much has been made about the recent convergence of entertainment and media, of young men who listen to Joe Rogan the way previous generations would read the New York Times. This year’s Oscar contenders might not much sway that crowd. But they, too, use entertainment to advocate for serious-minded change.
Consider some of the most distinctive images at the heart of the current frontrunners: A Russian-American gig worker confronts the one percent on a tarmac. A closeted trans woman whisper-raps her desire to come out. The Statue of Liberty hangs upside down as a fragile promise to jubilant immigrants.
These striking moments — from Oscar contenders Anora, Emilia Pérez, and The Brutalist respectively — wouldn’t feel out of place in recent U.S. Democratic campaign ads. Mirroring the pulse of progressive America, they tackle issues of class disparity and oppression, blending dark ambiguity with the faint pulse of hope. They’re Oscar bait with bite — and make the case for a deeper purpose to the season than all the red-carpet pomp and empty virtue-signaling.
The Brutalist, indie writer-director Brady Corbet’s magisterial epic, centers on László Tóth, Adrian Brody’s Holocaust-surviving architect who finds sanctuary in Pennsylvania. Hollywood didn’t make The Brutalist but it certainly feels at home here, with the story of a Jewish exile seeking stability at the center of the industry’s history too. It isn’t until the second half of the movie’s absorbing three-and-a-half-hour trip that this journeyman faces a brutal wakeup call from a capitalist benefactor who intends to exploit him as just another plaything in his toy chest of wealth.
The Brutalist is a sobering and uncannily timely testament to the contradictions between American immigrant promise and the inequalities that keep it unfulfilled for so many. The argument for immigration reform often operates from the standpoint that America was built on the idea of a melting pot, but the wealthy benefactor in The Brutalist never actually cares for László as anything more than an ephemeral resource to be tossed once his use is complete. True immigration reform, it argues, will require not only better policies around the borders but improved treatment for the people lucky enough to cross them.
Among U.S. citizens, those who view Donald Trump as a cartoonish reality-TV character now threatening an American way of life will find much to identify with in the wakeup call endured by Brody’s character. Others who crave Trump’s more draconian approach to border control may not make it through The Brutalist, but the movie suggests a means of engaging with them just the same — with a reminder that America doesn’t just welcome immigrants as a matter of ideals but relies on their labor to function. In order to keep doing that the country must remain a sanctuary, not a fortress with spiked walls.
Anora, meanwhile, is a paean to the struggle of finding stability in a country that forces its lower-class survivors to hustle at all costs. The movie careens through a series of abrupt tonal shifts — screwball comedy, dark slapstick and heartbreak — with thrilling unpredictability. In the aftermath of an election year steeped in divisive rhetoric and uncertainty over both our political and economic trajectories, Anora plays as a barometer of the mood of the many unsure or uneasy about the election results — right down to the teary exhaustion of its closing moments, when two characters drawn together by happenstance melt into the frustrations of their shaky futures.
With equal relevance, Emilia Pérez gives cinematic form to the galvanizing battle cry that trans rights are human rights. Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical is a zany ride that imports the schmaltz of The Greatest Showman into the gritty milieu of Narcos. It may divide some of the LGBTQ community with its blunt depiction of its character’s transition, but the Netflix movie’s scintillating song-and-dance routine normalizes its subject matter for audiences that might otherwise be closed to it. In that way the film parallels the Oscar-winning weepie Philadelphia three decades earlier, mainstreaming identities with the help of familiar cinematic tropes.
And Saturday night brought the Los Angeles premiere of contender Wicked. While often remembered as a spellbinding set of showstoppers that gave the world Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, Wicked is also rife with themes of persecution, othering and scapegoating by a fascist ruler and his repressive army. Under the candy-coated production values and soaring numbers viewers might ingest another idea: the horror of a maniacal ruler deporting the innocent.
Producer Marc Platt reportedly pulled no punches on the premiere stage, according to social media reports calling “very prophetic” its years-old book and script. “What you’re about to see tonight I want you to remember because I think it will resonate and feel so relevant to you…and reflect the lives you’re living and the world you live in,” he said.
The splashy-musical context is telling: While these contenders have cogent ideas about society’s most pressing hurdles, they are also emotionally resonant popular entertainments, which can make them stronger vessels for facilitating change than activist slogans. Most audiences don’t want lectures. Stories, however, go down a lot easier. And by showing inaccessible “others” as conflicted everyday people, these movies also suggest new terms of social engagement. Oscar season won’t extend an olive branch to the Barstool Sports bros anytime soon, but the current best picture contenders make a vital case for more listening all around.
It’s clearer than ever that Hollywood needs the Oscars for more than just the clout its talent seeks. The season is an opportunity for a franchise-obsessed industry to seek out a vision of its ideal self, and for it to nudge America to follow suit.
The 2017 win for Moonlight both reflected and influenced a Trump-era bid for change. The choices the Academy will soon make can only do the same.
This story appeared in the Nov. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
