Historically speaking, awards season almost always feels like a war between art and commerce — even if the victor just comes down to whose campaign coffers are fuller than everyone else’s. But after a year of tremendous cultural volatility, both in the entertainment industry and across the globe, the films nominated for screenplay awards, including “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “September 5,” “The Substance” and “A Complete Unknown,” seem to be drawing battle lines, some more clearly defined than others, between the forces of what’s right, true or honest, and what makes the most money.
By avoiding a “traditional” socioeconomic setting for exploring this theme — say, a Wall Street firm or an ambitious businessperson’s act of entrepreneurship — the writers of these films create stories that are universally, urgently relevant. Sean Baker’s “Anora,” for example, focuses on the chaotic romance between sex worker Ani (Mikey Madison) and the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn), but it’s the transactional mentality of its title character — who’s constantly monetizing her time, attention and emotional commitment — that leaves her vulnerable to far more personal danger than the legal repercussions of the quickie marriage she agrees to. A tireless hustler, Ani believes every act should reap a financial reward, but that mentality leads her down a path that reduces her choices from a matter of individual autonomy to a negotiable (and inevitably, undervalued) commodity.
The themes of Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” overlap with those of Baker’s film but approach them from a different direction. In it, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) chooses to literally transform herself via the eponymous process because she fears the loss of beauty, and relevance, that is foisted upon her by a marketplace that prizes youth over experience. However, what the character soon discovers is that she has internalized those harsh lessons of the larger world, and it’s her own lack of self-worth that holds her hostage rather than external metrics or even longstanding cultural standards.
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Similarly, James Mangold and Jay Cocks’ “A Complete Unknown” script and Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s for “The Brutalist” share thematic DNA — even more explicitly — in their respective portraits of creatives battling against powerful and inconsistently well-meaning benefactors. In the story Mangold tells, Bob Dylan’s career is just beginning when he discovers that the folk community from which he emerged, and even the luminaries he looks up to, want him to accommodate the needs of an audience eager to hear his established material. To Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), it’s not just a suppression of his iconoclastic impulses but a complete reversal of course at a moment when he’s determined to move forward creatively and grow.
Although Corbet’s Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is fictional, his resistance to compromise feels no less palpable to audiences, as the architect engages in a battle of wills with wealthy patron Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), Van Buren’s son (Joe Alwyn), a buffoonish intermediary (Michael Epp) and eventually an entire Pennsylvania community in order to fulfill his vision. Both Tóth and Dylan believe in consummate artistry and unfiltered personal expression, and their journeys ask provocative questions about where an artist’s responsibility lies — to the community that supports them, or solely to themselves.
By comparison, “September 5” superficially seems to canonize the ABC Sports team — a moneymaking media organization — and its coverage of the Black September terrorist attack at the 1972 Summer Olympics. But Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum and Alex David’s script suggests there’s a middle path where organizations can cover newsworthy events while remaining morally responsible, even if that’s a balance that must sometimes be negotiated in real time. Moreover, it acknowledges that mistakes will be made, and forgiveness can be granted.
Ultimately, however, it’s the unifying currency of compassion that flows through the nominees’ writing that makes them so special, powerful and relatable. At their most ambitious, inflexible, chaotic and even grotesque, they’re all films about people calculating the costs of their choices, who are hoping in the end that the price isn’t too high to remain themselves after making them.