97th Academy Awards Ceremony (2025 Oscars)

No huge surprises, including Chu getting snubbed (again!)

The Girl with the Needle' is an amazing film. Should have been nominated for best film.

And so bleak...

Bleak is my jam.

I watched it today. Excellent performances and fantastic cinematography. It's a shame that this film only got 1 Oscar nomination and a lesser film like Emilia Perez got 13 nominations.

Well there's no chance of me watching Emilia Perez, so I can't compare, but it's not surprising is it. The best films of the year rarely, if ever get nominated for Best picture Oscar.

So The Brutalist getting so much love means that the AI issue we discussed sometime ago isn't as big of a concern for academy votes/lotta acclaimed filmmakers atm right? no matter how "enhanced" is the believability of your accent with the help of this tool, you get enough good notice you'll have a shot...

( @AgrippinaX )

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HEI guys.

I don’t really have much that’s new to add to this discussion. IMO Oscar nominations really aren’t a particularly good gauge of public, or even industry feeling. Check out also Paul Schrader’s take on AI, here’s an evangelist.

I’ve looked through The Shoutbox to see where we left this conversation.

I haven’t discussed my take on The Brutalist, because I’m still thinking, in a way. It’s a good film that’s far too long. But I do think much of the problem and the issue I take with all this is to do with how easy it is to do something. The film wouldn’t have been as long as it is if sheer, raw human effort was required for every additional ten minutes. It would have forced everyone involved, but especially Corbet, to be far more selective with editing and storytelling, and the product would have benefitted immensely.

In crude terms, in the 1920s, if you wanted to film a scene with an acrobat or a ballet dancer, you’d need an acrobat or a dancer (even more recently in the case of Black Swan, you’d use some shots of Natalie Portman and some shots of her real dancer double — though even that resulted in a scandal as the dancer didn’t feel she was credited enough). You weren’t creating something out of nothing. Now, you very much are — even if you do still need a living actor (debatable), any actor can be made to do any level of gymnastics/dancing/singing, so it’s really just a real-ish face slapped on top of the fake body doing fake things.

To a large degree, I’m already uninterested in films that rely on CGI. I don’t watch any of the Marvel or the Marvel-adjacent stuff, and while there are many reasons for this, it’s mainly that I’m not interested in a computer-generated/computer-abetted Tom Holland (is there a difference?) doing gymnastics and sliding off buildings, there’s nothing in it for me. I’m marginally more interested in Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible, because I know he does his own stunts and find that genuinely very impressive. In fact, that was the only reason I watched the latest MI instalment. I almost didn’t, and then my brain went, But he does his own stunts!, and I did. Still hated it, though.

Unlike @mattiasflgrtll6, my issue with it isn’t even that it would take jobs from countless people involved in the art and process of filmmaking (although that is a huge and valid concern). But a lot of CGI/AI/whatever the thing might be makes the film inherently uninteresting to me, not so much out of principle, but just because I keep thinking, ‘What is it I’m looking at? The actor didn’t even get off the couch for that (if in fact there even was an actor.’ — that last part is already here, see Ian Holm vs Alien). So I absolutely agree with mattiasflgrtll6 that if Meryl Streep hadn’t done her own accent work in her films, that would have made her less deserving of all her accolades/Oscars. It is very much about effort, too, and that’s the angle people seemingly ignore in these discussions of technology. It’s the effort that’s valuable as an end in itself and worthy of praise. In terms of people saying, ‘The films are still good, who cares how they are made?’, that’s a separate topic, but they aren’t as good, I for one feel far less emotional and, more importantly, intellectual investment in something I know didn’t really require ‘people’ to be created.

I more or less write for a living. In my current role, I supervise a bunch of juniors doing the same. Do I inherently care that they use ChatGPT for first drafts and even public-facing emails they send out into the wild? Not as such, but I do see the ability to take a huge report and isolate concrete ideas from it or write a byline from scratch is in freefall.

There have been quite a few reports suggesting Gen Z now use AI for most admin/office work tasks, and I’m personally witnessing that my juniors are now unable to face a blank page/Word doc and write even a few sentences without props. It’s horrifying, and no, I’m not trying to extrapolate from my juniors to humanity at large, but it is my view that once the difficulty and grind is taken from any process, there is less value to the process itself and the output, and yes, the resulting output is less deserving of accolades.

'Nickel Boys' is absolutely superb. They strapped steadycams to the actors heads to give the feeling of POV capture. Some of the camerawork and imagery is really beautiful. So of course it hasn't been nominated for best cinematography.

The A.I. outrage around The Brutalist seems much ado about nothing, to me. This video is clear and balanced, following the facts and deconstructing the uproar.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Yeah, I think this is more about precedent for people. It's becoming a "no animals were harmed in the making of this film." There are uses for AI that are really minimal, pretty non-threatening to creative work, and really make low-to-mid-budget-filmmaking a lot more viable, but there's no clear logical stopping point, so I think a lot of people are assuming that you need a zero-tolerance approach, social censure-wise, to establish the norms here. Not sure that's going to work but I think that's why.

I believe I have touched on the whole AI thing in The Brutalist briefly, and I continue to be alarmed by what seems to me a lack of more nuance and more deeply carefully considered analysis as to what the whole thing means.

Now, just a disclaimer: I do not think the performances in the movie should be disqualified, entirely, just because of the AI thing. Also, I understand that probably for 99% of moviegoers, it is very likely to be something that goes completely unnoticed.

So should anyone care about what this means, if not just for this movie, in the long run?

I think the answer is, absolutely yes!

Try to put yourself in the shoes of an actor. Try to imagine what this new technology would mean for you and your professional prospects.

If you are an actor who is immensely talented when it comes to learning accents, dialects, and generally being able to sound like a native speaker of other languages, then this new AI thing is an absolute disaster. One of your most unique talents is not going to mean a lot going forward. Everyone will be able to use AI in their performances to be able to sound like a native speaker in any language. One of the talents that would have set you apart from other actors has just been rendered absolutely irrelevant. Nobody is going to care that you could have been the Meryl Streep of you generation.

Now, consider the opposite case. You're an actor who was always terrible at being able to sound like anyone with an accent different to your own native accent. You can't even do a bad southern accent to save your life. But, along comes this new technology, and suddenly - presto! - you can be as good as Meryl Streep ever was. You no longer even have to try. You can just be lazy about the whole thing and just coast by on your looks, because directors absolutely won't care that you can't do accents at all. They'll just fix it in post. You can now have an easy time not worrying about something that would otherwise have meant lost opportunities, or the challenge of spending years trying to improve your vocal skills.


So, evidently, it is going to have long-range ramifications that go beyond what happens with The Brutalist.

And it's also true that a lot of viewers aren't going to care at all.

But for me, as someone who isn't an actor but was raised in a multi-lingual environment, and who still has an above-average ear for the nuances of pronunciation in multiple languages, it is a deeply sad event. Something that some people had an innate talent for will soon be rendered meaningless.

To use a different analogy, what happens when AI lets any person sound like the greatest singers that have ever lived? At that point, will professional singers even be wanted any more? The whole point of some people becoming famous singers was that they could do things that most people couldn't.

Anyway, I do not ask you to care in the same way that I do about this, just that you consider why some of us do care. Thanks.

Brody, whose mother is Hungarian, and Felicity Jones both learned Hungarian for their roles. Both spoke Hungarian in the film. In the post-production process the editor and director decided to go for perfection and to replace essentially vowels in some pieces of their dialogue. Not entire words or phrases but syllables and fractions of syllables. If they had more time or a larger budget, they would have done this process using ProTools. Because of the time crunch and because they were a $10-million dollar budget rather than $70 or $100 or $200, they used an A.I. program. If they had instead done this with a team of engineers you likely never would have known about it, just as you have no idea what myriads of technical departments do to create the final product you eventually see and hear on screen.

If that is deeply sad to you, so be it.

Yes, I already knew that, and I also read the article in its entirety.

That has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said.

Sorry, but I do have a good ear for European languages... even from the first time I watched it, I did find it striking that both of their accents sounded so remarkably genuine. At first I assumed they had done it the hard way, and it seemed fairly impressive. Then I learned the truth, and felt like a fool for having given them the benefit of the doubt.

Fool me once.... etc etc etc

I will not be fooled again.

If someone sounds too good to be believable, I will assume they had AI help.

Definitely the logical conclusion. I am very sorry you felt duped. Sounds like a horrible experience. If you set up a Go Fund Me, I will contribute.

So if this process had been done in ProTools you would have been OK with it, I presume? I hope the diabolical film industry has learned their lesson. If you are going to fool him, folks, do so in a painstaking matter or don't do it at all!

"That is impossible! No one can [speak Hungarian as fluently] as you appear to be."

I don't think the sarcasm is really necessary here. Just because something is important to me that's not at all important to you, you immediately feel like it calls for some passive-aggressive response?

Anyway, back to the Oscars....

If you were hoping for Amelia to come back, here's some good news!

Well, it looks like some of the mud-slinging is getting ugly... I don't know what Academy voters will make of this mess!