David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and it is that time of year again. It's awards season, and I'm joined by two of The New Yorker's critics, Alexandra Schwartz, co-host of our podcast, Critics at Large; and film critic, Richard Brody. We're going to talk about the past year at the movies and the prospects for the Academy Awards, but much more importantly, Richard Brody will pick the winners of the award we call The Brody.

The Brodies are far more exclusive and more coveted than the Oscars, of course, though they don't have the little statue guy to go with it. This is an annual tradition here at The New Yorker Radio Hour. Richard, how many years have we been doing The Brodies?

Richard Brody: Seven, eight.

David Remnick: Seven or eight years? My God.

Alexandra Schwartz: We're getting close to a decade. It's true.

David Remnick: Now, first, let's talk about the other awards show, the Oscars. Let's have Alex talk to The Brutalist. Why would The Brutalist be a favorite? Because you've written about it quite wonderfully for The New Yorker.

Alexandra Schwartz: Yes, I profiled the director, Brady Corbet. I mean, it's a small movie comparatively. It was on a $10 million budget, but it is a huge movie both thematically and in its form. It is close to four hours when you include its 15-minute intermission. Rather than scare away audiences, this seems to have enticed people. It's an immigration story. It's the story of a Jewish architect following World War II. It has a lot of themes Hollywood might like or consider certainly, to be serious. It's really being hailed as a filmmaker's film.

Richard Brody: Uh-oh. [chuckles] As opposed to a shoemaker's film?

Alexandra Schwartz: Well, as opposed to Brady Corbet, both in his profile to me and more generally, has talked quite a lot about how much importance he gives to creative control, to having final cut. This was a theme of his speech at the Golden Globes, where he won for Best Director, for instance. He does not wish to compromise his filmmaking ideals to make a movie that might be more palatable to studios or to audiences.

David Remnick: For once, I want-- Don't you want to see a director get up and say, "I'm a complete compromiser. I'm absolutely compromising from the word go"?

Richard Brody: As opposed to the shy, retiring, and modest Christopher Nolan.

David Remnick: All right, now, Richard, you put Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis as the third Best Movie of the Year. That is not a universal.

Richard Brody: I'm well aware of it. I think that Megalopolis has been reviewed for its publicity rather than for what's actually on screen. That the story of Francis Ford Coppola, spending $120 million of his own money and above all, the greatest Hollywood sin of all, not caring whether he gets it back, has cost that film significantly in reputation.

David Remnick: What Oscar nomination actually surprised you the most, Richard?

Richard Brody: Dune: Part Two.

David Remnick: Okay, I'm with you on that.

Richard Brody: Dune: Part Two shocked me because I think it's a terrible movie. I think it's a sludgy movie. Dune: Part One at least had an impressive sandworm. This one is an extreme close up of a vacuum cleaner hose. The pacing of it is--

David Remnick: You can literally get that at home.

Richard Brody: The pacing is lugubrious. The dialogue, it's like written to fit into cartoon bubbles.

David Remnick: Okay, we'll come back to some of the Oscar favorites, but let's get into the main event here, the presentation of the Brody Awards. Our first category is Best Actor. Alex, who was nominated?

Alexandra Schwartz: The nominees for the Brody Award for Best Actor are Adam Driver for Megalopolis, Ethan Herisse for Nickel Boys, James Madio for The Featherweight, Glen Powell for Hit Man, and Jason Schwartzman for Between the Temples. Richard, the winner is--

Richard Brody: The winner is Adam Driver for Megalopolis. Adam Driver is the actor of his generation. He's almost like John Wayne or Cary Grant. He is inevitably, always himself. That, to me, is an enormous virtue, especially in a movie like Megalopolis, where he's playing such an extravagantly composite character, essentially a Leonardo da Vinci of urbanism. Yet he brings a real physicality, a real command to this role and takes this $120 million, and essentially puts it on his back with the sheer force of his personality.

David Remnick: I have this sneaking suspicion that Timothée Chalamet is going to win for his Bob Dylan.

Alexandra Schwartz: And you're upset about it, aren't you, David?

David Remnick: Look, he's a perfectly good actor, but he's too sweet. He's a sweetie pie. Bob Dylan is many things, but he's not a sweetie pie.

Alexandra Schwartz: See, I actually thought that Adrien Brody had it kind of locked up for the Oscars until this recent controversy around generative AI being used to help perfect the Hungarian accents of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, who played the main couple in The Brutalist.

David Remnick: Wait a minute. If we went back in time and we inspected, I don't know, the Polish accent in Sophie's Choice of Meryl Streep, would we get perfect, beautiful Polish?

Alexandra Schwartz: The problem that people are having is that not about the perfection or the imperfection, the fact that it was perfected using AI. Some people say, "Well, it's just using a tool to augment the work of an actor, not to replace the work of an actor." Other people are coming in and saying, "It's not fully his performance. He can't get the Oscar."

David Remnick: Bunch of Luddites.

Richard Brody: Okay. Essentially, in this category, it's The Brutalist versus The Cutalist.

David Remnick: I think The Cutalist is going to win.

Richard Brody: Yes, I think The Cutalist has a very good chance.

David Remnick: If I have to hear one more time how in five years he learned how to play four chords, it's enough already.

Alexandra Schwartz: I thought he was pretty good, but--

Richard Brody: Grump, grump, grump.

David Remnick: Now, Alex, moving on to the next category for The Brodies. The nominees for Best Actress are--

Alexandra Schwartz: Yes, they are Joanna Arnow for The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Maria Dizzia for Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, Léa Drucker for Last Summer, Karla Sofía Gascón for Emilia Pérez, and Carol Kane for Between the Temples. The Brody goes to--

Richard Brody: It goes to Maria Dizzia for Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, a film that relatively few people have seen and almost everyone who's seen loves it.

Speaker 1: You don't get rid of the police. You keep the police. Like, what, are they nuts? Huh? You get rid of the bad guys, right? The bad people. You keep the good, huh? That's the way it's always been and always will be. Because if not, chaos and insurrection.

Speaker 2: Okay, Brucey?

Alexandra Schwartz: One actress who made the Oscars list but didn't make yours is Demi Moore, who's back with The Substance. She won the Golden Globe. It seems like she's a strong contender for Best Actress at the Oscars. What do you think about her Oscar nomination and why is she not on The Brody's list?

Richard Brody: I think Demi Moore is a wonderful actress, and I think part of the problem in the acting categories is that pretty much everybody is a wonderful actor or actress. The technical level of acting now is extremely high, that they simply have a level of training that makes them virtuosi. I think that Demi Moore is in a special category. I think she is a essentially sort of like the Joan Crawford of her generation. She really excels in melodrama. I felt that way ever since seeing her in St. Elmo's Fire in the 1980s.

The problem is, she came of professional age in an era that made very few melodramas. The best years of her life, of her professional life, were spent in something like a wilderness.

David Remnick: When she went up to collect the Golden Globes, Demi Moore, she was not only overcome, but she said that she had been told that she was essentially not a serious actress. I forget the phrase that she used for it.

Richard Brody: Popcorn actress.

Alexandra Schwartz: Popcorn actress.

David Remnick: Yes, popcorn. That's it. She had been diminished in some way and then given the chance to have a "serious role", she embodied it, she fulfilled it, and she won the award. What do you think of that narrative, Richard?

Richard Brody: I think it's a correct assessment of the industry's complete misuse of her talent over the last 30 years. The substance is not a popcorn movie, but I don't think it's a movie that really shows the range of her art.

David Remnick: Now, Alex, the next award.

Alexandra Schwartz: Okay, we're getting to the big ones. It's our third category. Richard, who are your nominees for Best Director of The Brodies?

Richard Brody: Zia Anger for My First Film, Francis Ford Coppola for Megalopolis, RaMell Ross for Nickel Boys, Paul Schrader for Oh, Canada, and Tyler Taormina for Christmas Eve in Miller's Point.

Alexandra Schwartz: And The Brody goes to--

Richard Brody: Goes to RaMell Ross for Nickel Boys.

David Remnick: Wow.

Elwood: How would you do it?

Turner: Well, I wouldn't run into the swamp, hide in there until the coast is clear and hitch somewhere West or North. That's how they get you.

David Remnick: Richard, RaMell Ross didn't even get nominated for Best Director.

Richard Brody: Didn't even get nominated.

David Remnick: But this picture was really innovative, and not only for its use of point of view. What happened?

Richard Brody: What makes it innovative, also makes it seem to some viewers, even in the industry, somewhat unorthodox, somewhat inherently unpopular by design. What's distinctive about what he does in Nickel Boys is that all the dramatic sequences are filmed from the point of view of one of its main characters.

David Remnick: Has that been done before?

Richard Brody: It's been done many times before in Hollywood in a movie called Lady in the Lake, directed by Robert Montgomery in the mid-1940s. I think that's the premise of The Blair Witch Project, if I'm not mistaken. Those films treat it like a gimmick. For Nickel Boys, it has a philosophical dimension, and I don't use that word loosely. RaMell Ross is something of a cinematic philosopher. We've seen many, many movies in which horrific inflictions beset the protagonist, in which the main characters suffer terrible fates at the hands of brutal overseers.

The difference in Nickel Boys is that the way that the technique is deployed by Ross and the cinematographer Jomo Fray, you actually feel as if you are in the minds and in the bodies of the characters.

David Remnick: I agree.

Richard Brody: It's essentially history being created from within.

David Remnick: I thought it was the most extraordinary new release I saw this year. Now, the Academy nominated 10 films again this year for Best Picture. We've talked about a few of them. Nickel Boys, Emilia Pérez, A Complete Unknown, [unintelligible 00:10:33]. Let's add to that Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, and I'm Still Here. Any thoughts on any of those films before we give out the last Brody, Alex?

Alexandra Schwartz: Well, Anora is a movie that has been so critically beloved and I think also loved by audiences who have seen it. Sean Baker's movie about a sex worker in Manhattan club, who can get swept away in a romance question mark with the son of a Russian oligarch. It's been called, insanely to me, a Cinderella story. As I remember, Cinderella has a happy ending, but never mind. I just feel I loved Anora. I don't think it's going to get any Academy love. As we know, that's okay. We do not need the Academy to validate our feelings, critical and otherwise. Still, it hurts me a little to see it come up totally short, but that's what I'll say about that.

David Remnick: I thought Anora one of the great enigmatic closing scenes of any film I've seen in recent years.

Alexandra Schwartz: Yes, I'd agree with that, and one actor who's key to that scene is Yuriy Borisov, who is nominated as a Best Supporting Actor. I'm rooting for him. I think he has a shot.

David Remnick: Forget it.

Alexandra Schwartz: But not a big one.

David Remnick: Richard, you amends on Anora, if I remember right.

Richard Brody: Yes. I found Anora fairly superficially entertaining, but indeed, superficially entertaining.

David Remnick: That's what people say of me all the time.

Richard Brody: It's a relatively incurious film. In other words, it's a film about a sex worker that has very little to say about her life as a sex worker. It's a film about a descendant of a Russian immigrant family that has nothing to say about her life as a Russian immigrant. In other words, I don't think it's a bad setup for a movie. I think that it's done for entertainment value rather than for actual curiosity about the conflicts faced by its protagonist. Can I say something about The Brutalist?

Alexandra Schwartz: Yes, Richard, slaughter it here on mic.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Richard Brody: I'm actually somewhat shocked by the enthusiasm for The Brutalist. I get the impression that Brady Corbet is far more interested in László as a heroin addict, Erzsébet as a sufferer of osteoporosis, and Zsófia as someone who can't or won't speak than actually about their experiences in the Holocaust. It's Holocaust as metaphor.

David Remnick: The Brutalist is a contender at the Oscars maybe, but not at The Brodies. Let's get back to the nominees for the big prize of the day, The Brody Award for Best Picture.

Alexandra Schwartz: Okay. The nominees for Best Picture are Between the Temples, Blitz, Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, It's Not Me, Juror No. 2, Megalopolis, My First Film, Nickel Boys, and Oh, Canada. The Brody goes to--

Richard Brody: Unsurprisingly, to Nickel Boys. Nickel Boys was really head and shoulders above the competition. It's a film that I think will mark the year in history.

David Remnick: Alex, you agree?

Alexandra Schwartz: I love Nickel Boys. I think it's a terrific movie, and I wish more people had seen it. I understand maybe why they didn't. I think there's an expectation that you're going into a movie about pain and about Black pain specifically, and it might be preferable to hold off on that. It has been nominated for Best Picture. It has no chance at the Oscars. I would love to see it nominated for Best Director also, but mainly, I just hope people see it.

David Remnick: What's going to win?

Alexandra Schwartz: Ooh, good question. I think The Brutalist has a shot.

David Remnick: The Brutalist or Wicked?

Richard Brody: Shut up.

David Remnick: I think--

Richard Brody: Shut up.

David Remnick: Wicked might win.

Richard Brody: Wicked might win. I think there's a huge desire for cinematic-

David Remnick: I'm holding space for that cinematic comfort.

Richard Brody: -comfort food that makes a billion dollars.

David Remnick: There's that. There's that. Alex Schwartz, Richard Brody, as always, it's a great pleasure. Thank you so much. You can find Richard Brody's column on film The Front Row. Alex is writing all@newyorker.com and you can hear her hosting The New Yorker podcast, Critics at Large. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Speaking of awards, not to brag, but documentary short films produced by The New Yorker have been nominated for two Academy Awards this year. Not bad. You can watch those films at newyorker.com.

 

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