’Tis the Season for Oscar Controversy |
Sometimes an Oscar-season controversy is very silly. (Who else remembers the First Man kerfuffle over the American flag?) Sometimes it’s much more serious.
I’m Rebecca Ford, and we are now in the thick of Oscar-contender drama. A few things have bubbled up already, like family members of one of the people depicted in Song Sung Blue expressing their disapproval of the adaptation. Honestly, if you look hard enough, you can find a minor or major gripe about any film that’s in contention; last year the Vanity Fair staff made a list of controversies for each and every best-picture contender. The Brutalist’s AI controversy and a few Catholics not loving Conclave feel like teeny issues a year later. But one scandal can’t be so easily forgotten: that of Emilia Pérez.
Karla Sofía Gascón’s old tweets sunk the Netflix front-runner’s hopes of a best-picture Oscar win, making for one of the most significant Oscar controversies in recent memory. And it broke just about this time last year. After the movie landed 13 nominations, her tweets came out; the film swiftly fell from grace.
Now this season’s biggest controversy (so far!) has just landed. A Page Six report describing an incident that occurred on the set of the 2017 film Good Time paints an ugly picture of the directing team of Josh and Benny Safdie, just after Josh’s latest film, Marty Supreme, earned nine Oscar nominations. The story attempts to explain the rift between the brothers, who previously collaborated on all of their films. This season, though, they released two separate projects for A24. More importantly, it alleges that the rift can be traced back to a disturbing incident between a 17-year-old actress and another member of the cast on the set of the Safdies’ movie Good Time.
As I wrote here, this controversy comes at a time when Josh Safdie would normally be preparing to attend public-facing events almost every week—a schedule lasting for the next month and a half, all the way until the Oscars. How he and his team will navigate this is an open question, as is whether the possible fallout might affect the film’s star, Timothée Chalamet, who is arguably the front-runner to win the Oscar for best actor. Often, an actor who wasn’t involved with their project’s problem (like Emilia Pérez’s Zoe Saldaña, who won best supporting actress last year) can remain unscathed. But it’s going to be a bumpy road for anyone involved with Marty Supreme for the next several weeks. |
