And the Oscar goes to...
There hasn't been a Best Picture race this close in years. Somebody pass the popcorn
In just three weeks’ time, Conan O’Brien will dust off his hat and greet the world’s biggest stars for cinema’s biggest night. Since 2002, the Oscars have been held in the Dolby Theatre at the foot of the Hollywood Hills – fortunately, one of the buildings unaffected by the fires; unfortunately for the attendees, still an area they don’t wish be caught dead in.
The Dolby Theatre’s geographical shortcomings have long drawn unfavourable analogies. It sits at a crossroads (a metaphor for LA’s glaring disparities), and along a fault line that pushes upwards into the mountains. But perhaps the most relevant analogy is to this year’s Oscars race.
Bestriding the city of angels right behind the Theatre is the Hollywood Freeway, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the United States – and one of its most cutthroat. Show even the smallest sign of weakness and you’ll get stuck in the slow lane for days. The path to victory in all the top categories in this year’s Academy Awards is similarly gridlocked.
With no film quite as obviously epic as Oppenheimer was last year, the contestants have been caught in a stand-off. The race for Best Actor is neck-and-neck between Adrien Brody and Timothee Chalamet; that for Best Actress is neck-and-neck between Demi Moore and Mikey Madison. And then there’s Emilia Perez – which, per a helpful graph made by Tortoise Media below, is one of the year’s most wildly unpopular films despite being its most widely nominated.
Campaigners on all sides have turned those they feel most threatened by into pariahs. Brady Courbet, director of the Brutalist, is under fire for using AI to create architectural designs. Anora – a movie with a lot of sex – has been dinged for its failure to employ an intimacy coordinator. Fernanda Torres, who won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Drama), was revealed to have done blackface in 2008. And Karla Sofia Gascon, the trans star of Emilia Perez, has been outright cancelled by Netflix and the film’s director Jacques Audiard after old tweets resurfaced last week. One of them referred to Hitler as someone who merely “had opinions about Jews”.
It’s a dog-smear-dog world out there – all this for an award that isn’t even solid gold (I’ve held one – it felt cheap) and which Gwyneth Paltrow uses as a doorstop in her garden in Montecito.
No complaints, though. We at Gauche love the chaos. In fact, we want to throw more names into the mix which we think have been tragically overlooked by the Academy. Every Friday for the next three weeks, we will be surmising the latest developments in the Oscars’ race and sharing one of our writers’ hot take on a movie they feel should win Best Picture – but won’t.
Separately, and due to popular demand, we will be supplementing each newsletter with our kinks and cringes. Scroll down to find out more.
Love, W xx
Nosferatu
Robert Egger’s remake of the 1922 German expressionist film is not a horror. It is not even a drama. It is a comedy.
I am personally forced to reflect on this fact every day since my boyfriend decided to follow me round the house every day chanting “I vaaant to suuuuck your bluud”. I’d tell him it’s getting tiring, but it’s not. It is, lamentably, hilarious.
Nosferatu is a porno with a $50 million budget. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is waiting for Nosferatu to come and seduce her; her husband, Thomas (Nicholas Holt) is just trying to make it out in one piece; while Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), our man of the hour, wants to ravage anything in his sight like Caligula. The tangoing refrains of Ellen and Orlok’s “Come to me” and “Succumb” wrap around each other throughout the film like a gothic striptease. Congratulations are in order for Depp on her absolute mastery of the female orgasm – perhaps it’s her French roots that make her so adept at bringing “la petite mort” to life.
We’re not alone in having recognised Nosferaty’s comedic proclivities. An iconic scene in which a carriage heads up towards Orlok’s lair has already been rebranded as a meme ( “when I tell the groupchat I’m on my way”). Neither are we the only ones to have noticed its pornographic penchants. Even Nicholas Holt decided he was obsessed with the giant, uncut prosthetic penis worn by Skarsgård in the movie and decided to bring it home with him to have framed.
The Academy failed to see Nosferatu for the joyful, comedic masterpiece it really is. Critics put too much stock in Eggert’s homage to the original film and kept trying to over-intellectualise what made it so entertaining (it’s a Frankestein of a film, people opined: a perverse yet oddly meticulous revision of an original idea to which it is both in debt and in control of). It should have paid far more attention to the film’s bawdy and ridiculous aspects: the camp and the grotesque. It worked for Emilia Perez, so why not here?
Considering how much buzz there was around Babygirl (a horny, but fundamentally unsexy film), it’s shocking not more attention was paid to the serpentine seductions of a virile vampire. Checking myself today, I found that Google still auto-fills my “does Nosferatu say…” search query with “you must bounce on it”. I can confirm, sadly, that Orlok does not say this in Egger’s film. But we can always pray for the next remake.
By Amber Sidney-Woollett
Kinks and Cringes 07/02/25
Kinks
A$AP Rocky wearing head-to-toe Saint Laurent to his trial in Los Angeles
Adrien Brody’s nose in The Brutalist
Maria Grazia Churi potentially leaving Dior
Cringes
Beyoncé’s career Grammy (she should have won Album of the Year for Lemonade back in 2017)
Bernard Arnault rebranding being laid off as being “promoted outwards”
Gino D’Campo’s handsy with more than ingredients