Why The Brutalist Will Win Best Picture
Just a couple days now until the Oscars, and no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. This also appears to be a far more competitive race than in years past, which has often spat out at best two-horse races (like The Power of the Dog vs. CODA in 2022, or 1917 vs. Parasite in 2020), but more often a runaway coronation (as we've had in the last two years, with Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All At Once).
No, this one genuinely feels wide open in large part because of how many new names are up for the big awards. For the first time in history, the 5 Best Director nominees at these Oscars are all first-time nominees. Only 1 out of the 10 combined Best Actor and Best Actress nominees has ever won an Oscar, and only 4 of them have even been nominated before. But it's not just the absence of bona fide star power helming the nominated movies; it's the fact that there isn't a traditional frontrunner, as a small handful of films have split honors across the awards circuit thus far.
Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge in 2022 all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 2nd.
The Brutalist is a sweeping, 3-and-a-half hour epic period drama by Brady Corbet, director and co-writer with Mona Fastold. The film, split into two parts (with an intermission!), tells the fictional story of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor-- portrayed brilliantly by Adrien Brody --who immigrates to America and struggles to find his place in the new world until he happens to cross paths with a wealthy client familiar with his talent for brutalist architecture. The two parts have their own titles, as does a brief epilogue, and almost function as different stories within themselves; the themes are basically revealed in the aforementioned titles: "The Enigma of Arrival." "The Hard Core of Beauty." "The First Architecture Biennale."
If you're thinking to yourself, 'A 210-minute movie about a fictional Brutalist architect and his and his family's immigrant struggles in post-WWII America doesn't sound like box office gold', well, you would be correct. It had a very meager box office opening at first, but ticket sales and screenings shot up as the immense word of mouth spread. Indeed, The Brutalist is one of the few Best Picture nominees this year to earn near-universal acclaim from critics. Famed Guardian movie critic Peter Bradshaw gave it a five-star review and deemed it a "dizzying epic," while Rolling Stone declared it the new "American masterpiece." It can't come as much of a surprise, then, that the film opened awards season with a win at the Golden Globes for Best Picture - Drama and became the odds-on favorite to take home top honors at the biggest of them all.
Oddly enough, that momentum stalled; be it merely the rise of more "easily digestible" nominees, the minor controversy over the revealed use of A.I. in tailoring the Hungarian dialogue of the two main actors, or some combination of both, the fact is the Satellite Awards held the only other Best Feature win for The Brutalist. They have remained in the final cut in each and every predictive race for the Academy Award, though: Critics' Choice, Directors' Guild, Producers' Guild, BAFTAs, you name it. And most importantly of all, they are the most likely of any nominee to have what 3 of the last 4 winners have had: an Oscar win for its leading actor. Both the Best Actor and Best Actress races feel excitingly open this year compared to most years, much as the Best Picture race does, but the most comfortable prediction out of any of those is that Brody will take home his second statuette. Corbet, winner at the Golden Globes, is also a co-favorite along with Anora's Sean Baker for the Best Director award, and the movie's editing team is the odds-on favorite to win for Best Film Editing. That's three of the most predictive awards for Best Picture in recent years right there. A win in any one of them sets The Brutalist up nicely for a possible win in Best Picture; a win in all three? It's near impossible to see it going home without the main prize.
Then there's the small matter-- okay, the large, 3+hour matter of the film's content itself. As the raving critics themselves said, it's an epic tale, told in dizzying beauty, through breathtaking performances. In many ways, The Brutalist has perhaps the most well-rounded argument of any nominee we've previewed thus far. It marries the awe-inspiring "cinema" angle of Dune with the 'bona fide star turn' from its lead actor, a la A Complete Unknown and The Substance. It also centers heavily on the immigrant experience in America, meaning that, like both Wicked and I'm Still Here, it features relevant themes to today's turbulent sociopolitical times.
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