Oscars for Strange Days
The Awards Squad on Nominations and Hollywood's Quest for Relevance
Dear Wags,
What do this week’s Academy Award nominations reveal about America in 2025? At the very least, they expose two distinct polities: one cosmopolitan and focused on personal liberation, the other nationalistic and contemptuous of elites. One side dominates Oscar voting; the other just won a far more consequential election.
The Oscars are a predictable culture war battleground, but their challenges go beyond politics. As award shows decline in relevance, the Academy perpetually struggles to balance high art and low commerce. Long before wildfires devastated Los Angeles, it wasn't easy playing a cultural institution and a profit center.
Among this year’s Best Picture contenders, only two—Wicked and Dune: Part Two—qualify as blockbusters. The rest are daring, idiosyncratic projects that reflect the preoccupations of the creative class. Whether the general public is even aware of them is another matter.
The film with the most nominations—Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez—is a fantastical Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug lord’s gender transition. Close behind is Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a sprawling, three-and-a-half-hour critique of the American Dream that tied Wicked with 10 nods. The rest of the Best Picture field includes Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s impressionistic adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; Sean Baker’s gritty romantic comedy Anora; I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’s wrenching story of Brazil under military dictatorship; and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a feminist horror film. James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown reimagines the celebrity biopic with an enigmatic subject, while Edward Berger’s Conclave delves into Vatican politics with a thriller centered on scheming cardinals.
They are all worthy nominees. More than ever, they represent the Oscars as a highbrow international competition. In most major categories, the races are wide open, with a few genuine surprises. Yet, even with two heavy hitters among them, the Best Picture class of 2025 has brought in about $1.7 billion in global box office revenue—a sharp drop from last year’s $2.7 billion.
Not so long ago, major studios routinely produced Oscar-caliber films that also filled theaters, bridging the gap between the avant-garde and the mainstream. Today, with fragmented audiences and streaming platforms upending traditional distribution, the industry increasingly gambles on a handful of big commercial movies to keep the lights on. The result is a Hollywood that often feels remote from the everyday people it once entertained.
Tentpoles like Wicked and Barbie rake in millions, but they prop up a shaky industry. The middle ground—pictures that manage to be both creatively ambitious and commercially viable—keeps contracting. Netflix has become a major player at the Oscars by bankrolling adult dramas, but these movies often vanish into the algorithmic abyss where they make a faint cultural impact. For original, serious films, breaking through has never been harder.
These transformations are beyond the ability of TV producers to remedy. If the Academy Awards lean too heavily into cinematic art, they leave behind a broader public. If they pander to popularity, they risk alienating the creative constituencies that sustain them. Academy voters gravitate toward art, while the telecast scrambles to keep drifting viewers entertained. An incremental ratings bump cannot resolve those underlying tensions.
The struggle reflects an old dilemma: Who are the Oscars for? The entertainment business is growing increasingly insular in a tribalized America and less confident in its appeal to the mainstream. The idea of a movie star who can reliably open a film and unite audiences across divisions feels archaic. Yet abandoning that idea entirely amounts to a surrender—one where the industry only caters to narrow interest groups or ends up talking only to itself.
That disconnect is magnified by our fraught politics. In 2024, American voters tilted toward Trump for a tangle of reasons, some rooted in divides Hollywood struggles to bridge. Like it or not, the Oscars always collide with history. From The Apprentice (featuring acting nominees Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong as Trump and Roy Cohn) to the trans themes of Emilia Pérez and the anti-authoritarian undertones of Wicked, the festivities will likely be read as a rebuttal to MAGA. The hiss from the right is inevitable—a familiar dance.
Despite being caricatured as Middle America’s cultural adversary, Hollywood mirrors its country in myriad ways. The nation is increasingly diverse, secular, image-obsessed, and perpetually reinventing itself. It has somehow elected a reality TV star as president—twice. If the Hollywood establishment struggles to connect with the public, perhaps it’s because familiarity breeds contempt in a country choking on show business.
This paradox underscores the real challenge for the Oscars and the industry that created them. We’ve all peeked behind the curtain, and the spectacle no longer dazzles as it once did. To win us back, Hollywood must reclaim the audacity that once made movies matter—a belief in the power of stories to transcend borders, politics, and demographics, connecting with the intricate, diverse fabric of humanity. That is populism in its best sense. Such ambition can’t be distilled by an algorithm; it springs from raw talent and an enduring hunger to captivate the world.
Yours Ever,
Marcello Rubini
CultureWag is the brainchild of JD Heyman, former top editor at People and Editor-in-Chief of Entertainment Weekly (among other gigs), and staffed by the Avengers of Talent. Our goal is to cover interesting topics with wit and integrity. We serve smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy. Questions? Drop us a line at intern@culturewag.com.
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