A postwar epic about a Holocaust survivor, a contemporary comedy about Holocaust tourism and a biopic of a Jewish musical legend helped lend a formidable Jewish presence to Thursday’s Oscar nominations.
Meanwhile, nominations for a documentary about the West Bank and a docudrama about the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes also kept Israel in the conversation. The nominations announcement, delayed multiple times by historically destructive Los Angeles wildfires, arrived amid calls in some corners to cancel the Oscars altogether out of deference to the fire’s victims.
Whether or not there is an awards ceremony this year, “The Brutalist,” a three-plus-hour historical drama starring Adrien Brody as a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect inspired by real Jewish designers, is well positioned with 10 nominations, tied for second-most of the year. Those included the major categories of best picture, director, lead actor for Brody, original screenplay, supporting actress for Felicity Jones, and supporting actor for Guy Pearce. The film was also nominated in the categories of original score (for work by British Jewish composer Daniel Blumberg), cinematography, editing and production design.
Directed by 36-year-old Brady Corbet, filmed in Hungary as a substitute for Philadelphia, and steeped with details of the Jewish immigrant experience, the film has been heavily lauded this awards season. It could repeat the success of last year’s heavily nominated epic about a Jewish genius, “Oppenheimer,” which went on to win best picture and numerous others.
“The Brutalist” has also been the subject of some late-breaking controversy, as members of the film’s crew recently admitted to using artificial intelligence to craft some aspects of the movie — including perfecting the Hungarian accents for Brody and Jones, a crucial detail of their performances. (The revelation came after voting for Oscar nominations had already closed; Corbet has defended what he said was a very limited use of AI and said the actors’ performances are “completely their own.”)
Brody, who spoke Hungarian for the role and is a favorite in the best actor category, is the son of a Jewish father and Hungarian artist mother. He also won in this category in 2002 for playing another Holocaust survivor, in “The Pianist.” Jones, who is not Jewish, plays his character’s wife, who is a Hungarian convert to Judaism; Pearce plays a WASPy industrialist who employs Brody’s character while letting slip some sinister views about Jews and immigrants.
Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg) are seen at far right in a scene from “A Real Pain,” directed and written by Eisenberg. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)
“The Brutalist” isn’t the only Jewish movie this year with Holocaust ties to earn awards attention. “A Real Pain,” which follows two Jewish cousins on a tour of Poland to commemorate their survivor grandmother’s passing, received two nominations: supporting actor for Kieran Culkin and original screenplay for the film’s writer-director-star, Jesse Eisenberg.
Eisenberg based the film on his own experience reconnecting with his family’s Polish Jewish heritage; his co-star Culkin, who is not Jewish, is heavily favored to win the supporting actor trophy.
Nominated films about Israel and the Palestinian territories, meanwhile, took on new dimensions in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
“September 5,” a docudrama about the journalists who covered the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis and massacre of Israel’s athletic delegation by the Palestinian terror group Black September, was nominated for original screenplay. The film was shot before Oct. 7, 2023, but its hearkening back to another Israeli hostage crisis has led to the film being accused in some corners of being “Zionist propaganda” — including by a Brooklyn movie theater union that unsuccessfully petitioned its employer not to screen it.
“No Other Land” (Antipode Films)
Notably, the best documentary category nominated “No Other Land,” co-directed by an Israeli-Palestinian filmmaking collective. That film, which chronicles the Israeli military’s orders to destroy the Palestinian villages of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank from the perspective of the villagers, was also shot almost entirely before Oct. 7. But it has become a rallying cry of sorts for Israel’s critics in the movie world. Its directors have decried Israeli “apartheid” in awards speeches, and the movie remains without a U.S. distributor despite racking up prizes across the globe.
(Another Israel-themed documentary contender, “The Bibi Files,” was shortlisted for the category but not nominated; meanwhile in the international feature category, “From Ground Zero,” a movie shot in the Gaza Strip and submitted by Palestine, also failed to make the final list of nominations after clearing the shortlist.)
Jewish actor Timothée Chalamet portrays Bob Dylan in the new biopic “A Complete Unknown.” (Macall Polay, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures)
In lighter Jewish stories, the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” strummed its way to a surprising eight nominations, including for best picture. Lead actor Timothée Chalamet, who has notable Jewish heritage and does his own singing as Dylan, was also nominated, as were co-stars Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Melissa Barbaro as Joan Baez; the film also received nominations for best director, costumes, sound and adapted screenplay. It was based on the book “Dylan Goes Electric” by Jewish author and musician Elijah Wald.
The film itself is light on Jewish content, but does include a brief glimpse of Robert Zimmerman’s bar mitzvah (before he became Dylan) in a photo album as a symbol of the life he left behind to become a folk singer.
In the lead actress category, Jewish performer Mikey Madison scored a nomination for playing a stripper and sex worker who is descended from Russian immigrants in “Anora.” Neither the character, nor the young son of a Russian oligarch with whom she jumps into a whirlwind marriage, are explicitly defined as Jewish, but a stray menorah plays a key role as a weapon in one scene. Jewish “Saturday Night Live” cast member Sarah Sherman recently revealed an “Anora menorah” prop that was cut from a sketch on the show.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Strong — who has Jewish heritage — was nominated for best supporting actor for playing the virulently anti-Communist Jewish lawyer and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn, in Trump-critical biopic “The Apprentice.” His co-star Sebastian Stan was also nominated in the lead actor category for playing Trump, for a movie the now-president had tried to stop from being released.
Other nominees had notable Jewish connections, as well. Jewish super-producer Marc Platt was nominated for producing “Wicked,” a best picture contender, for which Jewish composer Stephen Schwartz (who also wrote the Broadway musical’s original music) was also nominated for original score. And in the best original song category, Jewish songwriter and erstwhile nominee Diane Warren — who has now been nominated 16 times without winning a competitive Oscar — received another nod for the WWII film “The Six Triple Eight,” about the U.S. military’s only all-Black female regiment to serve in the war.
Jewish composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein also has a connection to “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” nominated for best documentary short: the film focuses on bassist Orin O’Brien, who became the first woman in the New York Philharmonic when Bernstein hired her.
The nominations were announced by Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott, the latter a non-Jewish actress who has carved out a niche playing Jewish roles in films such as “Shiva Baby” and “Saturday Night.”
The year’s most-nominated film, the Netflix drama “Emilia Pérez” — a Spanish-language French musical about a trans cartel boss, which picked up 13 nominations — also has an unexpected Jewish tie-in. The doctor who performs the gender-reassignment operation on the main character is Israeli and sings a Tel Aviv-set duet with nominated actress Zoë Saldaña.
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