Oscar front-runner The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody, in the storm?

The triumph of The Brutalist at the Golden Globes 2025

As every year, one film has already emerged as the clear front-runner for the Oscars. After Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in 2024, The Brutalist, the third feature film by American director Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux), is now the bookies’ favourite.

The film won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice International Film Festival in 2024, and the awards for Best Motion Picture Drama, Best Director and Best Actor for Adrien Brody at the 82nd Golden Globes on January 5th, 2025.

Featuring an exceptional cast, including Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody, who eventually replaced Joel Edgerton, the film focuses on László Toth, a visionary Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor. In 1947, in the aftermath of the Second World War, he emigrated to the United States with his wife Erzsébet to impose his architectural ideals while battling against numerous addictions…

Brady Corbet’s masterpiece starring Adrien Brody is set to be sensational at the Oscars

Long, pretentious and inconsistent for some, a masterful period drama with exceptional direction and lead actor for others, The Brutalist has left no one indifferent. Although the film features very explicit sex scenes, everyone will first and foremost remember the performances of its two protagonists, embodied by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.

After the screening at the Venice Film Festival, the film received a twelve-minute standing ovation… As it has imposed itself at the Golden Globes, alongside Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, The Brutalist remains one of the big favourites for the Oscars today, one that could gather nearly a dozen nominations…

“Final cut tiebreak goes to the director”, Brady Corbet said during his acceptance speech at the 82nd Annual Golden Globes, before adding: “It’s sort of a controversial statement that shouldn’t be controversial at all. I was told that this film was undistributable, that no one would come out and see it, that it wouldn’t work. I don’t resent that, but I want to use that as an opportunity to lift up filmmakers, not just my fellow nominees, but all the extraordinary directors in this room. Films don’t exist without filmmakers. Please, let’s support them, let’s prop them up. No one was asking for a three-and-a-half hour film about a mid-century designer on 70 mm, but it works.”

The divisive question of the use of artificial intelligence

The news set social media on fire, without anyone really knowing whether it was an issue or not… In the columns of Red Shark News, a digital magazine specialising in video production techniques, Dávid Jancsó, the film’s editor and collaborator of Dev Patel on the film Monkey Man, pointed out that the team used artificial intelligence on several occasions for The Brutalist, in particular to perfect the accents of the actors. “We were very careful about preserving the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” he emphasized.

Some people got carried away online. Can actors, whose work has been transformed using this tool in post-production, be celebrated in the same way as those who haven’t used AI? Bill Skarsgård comes to mind in this case, with his striking performance in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, in which he speaks in Dacian, a dead language spoken in medieval Romania. “We should be having a very open conversation about it. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster,” Dávid Jancsó added.

The Brutalist by Brady Corbet, starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, in cinemas on February 12th, 2025.

Traduction Emma Naroumbo Armaing.