The Jewish Relevance of the 2025 Oscars
February 28, 2025
Ayelet Solomon ’25 and Lev Gottschalk ’26
The Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars, are an annual ceremony for the year’s best movies, documentaries, and short films. They are also, in the words of Aubrey Solomon, a once “self-centered” and now “self-important” demonstration. These awards, given by judges from the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, are based just as much on internal politics as the quality of a film.
This year’s ceremony will be the 97th, and ten films are nominated for the most important category, Best Picture: Emilia Perez, A Complete Unknown, Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, I’m Still Here, Wicked, Dune: Part Two, Nickel Boys, and The Substance. Over the years, there have been some controversial moments involved with the ceremony. Casablanca is popularly thought to be one of the best movies to win Best Picture. Many people consider The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Out of Africa to be among the worst winners.
The Oscars feature two notable “Jewish” narrative films, or films that center around Jewish characters and experiences. The first is The Brutalist, directed and written by Brady Corbet, which is nominated for nine more awards after Best Picture. The second is A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg also stars alongside Keiran Culkin, who adds a Best Supporting Actor nomination to Eisenberg’s Best Original Screenplay.
The Brutalist (R) is directed by Brady Corbet and centers on the fictional architect Laszlo Toth (Adam Brody), a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who now lives in Pennsylvania. For the first half, he is separated from his wife and niece, but they reunite at the beginning of the second half. He faces some antisemitism, insisting in one scene that “they don’t want us here,” referring to the Americans he comes to work with as an architect. The story also includes the background of Israel, beginning with its establishment in 1948, and later features his niece and her husband deciding to make aliyah. She wants their son to be Jewish, to which Laszlo responds, “Are we not Jewish?” By the end of the movie, Erzsebet, Laszlo’s wife, wants to live with their niece in Israel. (It is not said if they do move or not.)
A Real Pain (R) focuses on David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) as cousins who, despite their distance, travel together on a Holocaust tour to learn more about their Polish grandmother. This film is about two tragedies: that of the Polish Jews and that of the two cousins, whose grief for their relative drives them to reconnect. The audience follows David and Benji and their eclectic tour group (which includes, interestingly, a Rwandan survivor and convert) through monuments, cemeteries, and historic homes, little peaks into past lives that are captured with a soft lens and saturated, airy lighting. All of these are probably typical stops of such a tour, but the authenticity and uninhibited feeling of the journey gives the film both a dramatic and down-to-earth effect. It can connect with the viewer on a cultural, emotional, or even a purely aesthetic level — and each has its own meaning.
A notable film nominated in this year’s Documentary Feature Film category is No Other Land (not rated), which is directed by both Israelis and Palestinians. Its synopsis promises a story about “the destruction of the occupied West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers” and the alliance of a Palestinian activist and Israeli journalist. The film was almost entirely produced before Oct. 7, but the filmmakers have used it as a platform to speak against Israel’s actions in Gaza, according to The Jerusalem Post. No Other Land has similarities to 5 Broken Cameras, an Oscar-nominated 2011 documentary with similar creatorship and subject matter.
In the Original Screenplay category is September 5 (R), a historical drama following the ABC news team that inadvertently covered the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The events of the film have many similarities to that of Oct. 7, but September 5 was produced before the more recent attack. The film’s primary focus is about the news coverage of the terror event, which was orchestrated by the Palestinian militant group Black September, according to The Times of Israel. The Swiss director, Tim Fehlbaum, was influenced by having gone to school in Munich and through watching the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September.
Aubrey Solomon, a retired Hollywood writer and longtime cinephile, told Hamodiya his thoughts about the nature of the Oscars: “Are [Oscar nominees] really the best movies that win? No, not necessarily. Not always, but sometimes it [is] a stepping stone to some next level of production.” In particular, The Brutalist, which is a “$10 million movie among $100 and $150 million movies,” has benefitted from its nominations with the attention shown to its lesser-known director and crew. The Oscars are not without their share of politics, but they have the ability to help certain creators reach new heights.
Nevertheless, politics are an inescapable — and influential — part of the awards show. It is important to be aware of the films that are given a spotlight at the Oscars because they shed light on the interests of the Academy, filmmakers, and (to a certain extent) audiences. Whatever those opinions may be, Solomon says, the most important opinion is your own. “The best award show is your own personal award show, and you choose what you think is best, period.”