In today’s edition, our coverage of this morning’s Academy Award nominations. And Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports on the mastermind behind the President’s fixation with tariffs. Plus:
Ian CrouchNewsletter editor
The 2025 Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, after they were twice delayed because of the ongoing Los Angeles fires. (Michael Schulman has written about how the Oscars have responded to catastrophe in the past.) Netflix’s musical melodrama “Emilia Pérez” led with thirteen nominations; the epic drama “The Brutalist” and the smash musical “Wicked” garnered ten apiece. “The drop-off from the year’s best to the rest is relatively sharp,” Richard Brody writes today, taking in the picks, and presenting his list of preferred alternatives—such as Adam Driver’s performance in “Megalopolis.” (The actor “hurtles and lurches, dances and whirls, strides and struts and even crumples while bearing up the weight of Coppola’s heroic fancies,” Brody notes.) As in years past, there’s not much overlap between lists—critics, alas, don’t get to vote. But that didn’t stop Justin Chang from weighing in with his own alternative-universe Oscar picks earlier this month; he was compiling his list after evacuating his home during the L.A. fires. “The movies are my escape as well as my professional concern,” he writes, “and the process of watching and thinking and writing about movies has been my own welcome distraction through many a difficult stretch, if seldom one as difficult as this.”
During the past year, in addition to reviewing many of the films up for awards, The New Yorker has covered film culture from every angle. In December, Alexandra Schwartz profiled Brady Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist,” who made the case for why American audiences might have an appetite for a three-and-a-half-hour movie (including an intermission) in the distraction era. As part of the New Yorker Interview series, our writers conducted deep conversations with Colman Domingo (up for Best Actor, “Sing Sing”), Isabella Rossellini (Best Supporting Actress, “Conclave”), and Jesse Eisenberg (Best Original Screenplay, “A Real Pain”). On the Critics at Large podcast, the hosts discussed “The Substance” (up for Best Picture, and more) and the new horror of the modified body in the age of Botox and Ozempic. And, in a video commentary, RaMell Ross (Best Adapted Screenplay) takes the viewer through a key scene in his film “Nickel Boys,” which both our critics and the fine voters of the Academy agree belongs on this year’s Best Picture slate.
Two New Yorker films received Oscar nominations this morning. Bill Morrison’s “Incident,” which uses body-camera and surveillance footage to examine a police shooting in Chicago, was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film. And “I’m Not a Robot,” a darkly funny story, written and directed by Victoria Warmerdam, about a woman’s struggle with a series of online CAPTCHA tests, will compete in the Live Action Short category. Read more about the directors and watch the films here »
P.S. Édouard Manet, who was born on this day in 1832, “invented modern—and, while he was at it, postmodern—art,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in a review of a major show in Paris. What’s more, “He did it in 1858, when he was twenty-six years old.” 👨 🎨
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.
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