“In the midst of winter, there was in me an invincible summer,” Albert Camus once said. A beautiful thought. Then again, he never lived through the winter of awards season. Much less an awards season like this one.
Invincibility would not describe the past several months of premiering, predicting, campaigning, voting and all the other sundries that make up this strange time. Disposability would be more like it. There has been a favorite nearly undone by AI (very 2025), a favorite definitely undone by old tweets (very 2015) and an underdog that has in a matter of days become a favorite (very timeless).
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But focusing on the respective trajectories of The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez and Anora, compelling though they may be, does not tell the whole tale of the season. Not when so many other stories demand our attention. Who can forget September 5, a powerhouse film that came out of nowhere and then just as quickly seemed to disappear into it? Or Wicked, which seemed unstoppable, until it wasn’t? Or Conclave, a contender so omnipresent, it could sometimes seem to never truly be here at all?
It was in mid-September, just after the first batch of race-setting festivals, when the phrase “there’s no frontrunner yet” was first uttered. Just you wait until that changes, people said. Soon, that gave way to October, and then to November and the holidays and the January beyond, and it didn’t change, movies that surged to the front fading weeks or even days later. Only now, with Anora winning the top producers and directors guild prizes, could a credible case be made that a movie has an inside track. Because only three times in the past 17 years has the PGA winner not won the Academy Award for best picture.
And yet even now, with Oscar voting upon us, is anything certain? Would one more turn of the screw — A Complete Unknown and even I’m Still Here have been lying in wait, ready to make their move on the preferential ballot’s coveted No. 2 real estate — really be that surprising?
A feeling of ennui abides; this Camus comparison does not seem idle. It has been a time when everything fades, in the haze of an assault on both democratic values and the federal government; of an attack of nature preceded by our attack on it. A fellow journalist, unaware Camus had been on the mind, texted after the Sean Baker wins on Feb. 8, unconvinced by its new certainty. “Total chaos, nothing matters,” he wrote.
And can you blame him? Anora, actually the first big contender of the season when it won the Palme d’Or in May, is now the big contender again. Yet we don’t trust it, because how could we, given all that had risen and fallen in the interim? An Oscar movie’s chances died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I can’t be sure.
This confused, whiplashy season has been a fitting elegy for these confused, whiplashy times. Kamala Harris was up, then she was down. Donald Trump was going to make some changes to one department, and then another, and pretty soon we couldn’t keep track of what was being decimated and which Musk intern was decimating it. Awards groups and governmental bodies have radically different compositions and purposes. Yet one can’t help feeling an unmooring beneath both.
And in between all that came the wildfires, an interruptive tragedy that made us question, in ways both healthy and nihilistic, what we are even celebrating.
Perhaps it’s the loss of an animating industry dynamic that powers this feeling. If the late 1990s and 2000s were explained by a jostling between the indie and the studio, and the 2010s and early 2020s by a tussle between the studios and the streamers, perhaps we are now moving to a point past all that, where a jumble of good movies arrives with no clear industry narrative, no business justification for one set of choices over another. Perhaps the Emilia-related Netflix unraveling is symbolic, an end to the golden age of streamers that has abided over the past decade. Now they scrap and scar like everyone else. Where that leaves us, no one can say.
In the absence, we can only press on with the season. One filled with drama but, oddly, no suspense. One that has no frontrunners and yet will still resolve with a winner.
One that, far from providing distraction from that which has tossed us about, has only seemed to hurl us further afield.
Blessed is the heart that can bend, for it shall never be broken. Camus said that, too. Unfortunately, an Oscar also can do both. Let’s only hope it stays intact for a few more weeks.
This story appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
