Keeping pace with Hollywood’s perpetual awards horserace. Sign up for the newsletter here.
This is the best awards narrative for Bugonia this season.
Photo: Stefano Rellandini/AFP via Getty Images
We’re still a few days away from the first award-nomination announcements of the season — the Gothams and their unconscionably early nods will give us plenty to talk about next week — and that means I have time to linger on one of the more fascinating and uncertain films of this season: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia.
As an artist, Lanthimos has been impossible to ignore over the last 15 or so years, whether his films garner Oscar attention (as in the case of Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Favourite, and Poor Things) or not (the more inscrutable Alps, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Kinds of Kindness). His biggest Academy successes have come when partnered with Emma Stone; Bugonia is her fourth film with Lanthimos, and after picking up a Best Supporting Actress nomination for The Favourite and a Best Actress win for Poor Things, Stone is once again in the thick of the Oscar conversation. As with most of Lanthimos’s movies, the question is whether audiences (and voters) will be receptive to whatever outré warping of reality he’s up to this time. If they are, Lanthimos and Stone could be in line to chase some awards history.
Having seen Bugonia several weeks ago, I’ll say I think the movie really works until the very end, and much of what is funny and compelling about the film to that point can be chalked up to leads, Stone and Jesse Plemons. She plays a CEO well versed in the language of corporate virtue and strategic contrition. That comes into play for her when she’s kidnapped by a pair of conspiracy-addled cousins (Plemons and Aidan Delbis), who believe Stone’s character is a member of an alien race that has secretly been pushing Earth toward destruction. Typical of a Lanthimos movie, the narrative is both absurdly funny and darkly unsettling. The cousins shave Stone’s head and slather her with a cream to keep her from contacting her mothership, ironically giving her a more alien appearance in the process. Armed with her C-suite-honed ability to bullshit her way through crisis, Stone’s character must manipulate her captors to get free. Here, Stone has certainly raised the bar for herself (two Oscars will do that), delivering a smart, serpentine performance worthy of being grouped with the best lead actresses of the year.
Stone was previously nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Lanthimos’s The Favourite alongside co-star Rachel Weisz in 2018, plausibly splitting the Favorurite-leaning voters en route to a Regina King win that year. Two years ago, Stone pulled ahead in a neck-and-neck race with Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon), ultimately winning her second Oscar (after winning for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land in 2016) for her role in Lanthimos’s Poor Things and ripping her dress in the process. With a third nomination for the same director, Stone and Lanthimos will join a rarefied tier of Oscar history. Only two other actress-director pairs have ever pulled off three acting nominations. Jennifer Lawrence did this recently in her trio of David O. Russell films (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy); before that, you have to go all the way back to Bette Davis, who got Best Actress nominations for three William Wyler films in the span of four years: 1939’s Jezebel (for which she, like, Stone, won her second of two Oscars), 1941’s The Letter, and 1942’s The Little Foxes. Oscar stats can sometimes be misleading, but it’s impressive any time your name is in close quarters with Davis.
This is the best awards narrative for Bugonia this season. With One Battle After Another having staked its claim as the timely contender of 2025-2026, speaking to unrest in a nation at war with itself, Bugonia’s darkly comedic take on conspiracy-pilled men and slick corporate attempts to evade liability doesn’t seem as urgent. And while Plemons garnered a ton of word-of-mouth buzz around his performance before Bugonia screened, he’s facing a formidable field of Best Actor contenders that include Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael B. Jordan, George Clooney, and Timothée Chalamet.
Focus still might want to lead its campaign with Plemons — he has amassed a résumé full of Oscar-favored movies, from The Post to Killers of the Flower Moon to The Power of the Dog, for which he got his first (and, to date, only) Oscar nomination. And only two years removed from her Poor Things Oscar, the possibility of Emma Stone fatigue does factor in. Her performance is not far removed from her work in Showtime’s The Curse, which could make the Bugonia character feel overly familiar, too. Reviews like the New York Post’s have been frustrated at Stone remaining in the Lanthimos realm, but even more complimentary takes have used phrases like “predictably strong” or “predictably great” to describe Stone’s performance. This kind of discourse leaves ample room for more surprising contenders — Chase Infiniti coming out of nowhere; Amanda Seyfried doing a Shaker musical — to edge her out for votes.
En route to premiering in theaters this weekend, Bugonia was one of many Oscar contenders to stop by the Middleburg Film Festival. Held annually in the small town of Middleburg, Virginia, the festival was founded in 2013 by Sheila Johnson, the co-founder of BET and the first Black female billionaire in the United States. She’s also a Middleburg local, as are many of the festival’s well-connected patrons. Taking place at several venues around the small town (population: 650), including Johnson’s Salamander Resort and Spa, Middleburg is one of many regional film festivals held over the last few months of the year, forming a kind of circuit of screenings and press appearances for prospective Oscar contenders. The profile for these festivals is far smaller than your Venices and Tellurides; nothing that screens there will be a premiere of any kind. But regional festivals do provide an opportunity to further scrutinize how the movies are landing among a demographic that leans, at Middleburg at least, as wealthy as many longtime Academy voters.
This year, Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi attended Middleburg, and I was able to pepper her with questions about the buzz in between screenings.
Before I get to the films, what can you tell me about the mix of attendees?
Middleburg is a moneyed community, right? It’s a lot of horse farms and retired finance guys and lawyers. And so I have never really thought of it as a festival where they are playing to Oscar voters so much as a nice location for people on the campaign trail to stop for a couple days, stay at a resort, have a few photo opportunities, and attempt to talk about their film in an area that caters to a certain one percent.
It’s bringing film culture to this moneyed enclave.
Which does not have it otherwise. Because there is no movie theater in this town. The screening venues are in hotel banquet rooms and a Hill School auditorium. None of the seats are good. The community-center seats are the worst because they’re just folding chairs. And in terms of attendees, it’s a mix of people who are there because they are rich and retired and it is an event. There’s this woman who I met last year who runs the movie club for her retirement community. So she comes and sees the movies, and she makes note of them so that when they’re on streaming, she can play them in her retirement community. I think, honestly, so many of the people there actually seem genuinely interested in movies, and they wouldn’t get an opportunity to see these movies anywhere else. Which I think is very charming.
It really is eye-opening to me how many movies screened at Middleburg. Basically, every major (and many minor) contender that played any of the big fall festivals was there. And I wonder if a place like Middleburg serves as a demographic training ground or focus group for the demographic that we tend to think of as the old Academy, right?
Yeah, older Academy. What surprised me was that The Voice of Hind Rajab won the International Audience Award. This is a more centrist, slightly liberal audience than you would expect for this area of the country.
For movies that maybe don’t have a distributor, as in the case of The Voice of Hind Rajab, or a movie where the studio is perhaps skittish about how it will play with Academy audiences, if a festival like Middleburg can respond to that movie enough to give an award, that maybe encourages studios to put their weight behind a film.
One hundred percent. It is not as controversial as you would have thought if this group of wealthy, mostly white people can enjoy it, right?
So, what talent was in attendance? I saw photos of Chloé Zhao in Beats headphones and Diane Warren holding court at a luncheon.
Yeah, Chloé was there. Colin Farrell was there. The Jay Kelly casting team was there. Jafar Panahi was there. Joel Edgerton was there. Jon Chu was there. Kate Hawley, who did the costumes for Frankenstein, was there. Director Kleber Mendonça Filho was there for The Secret Agent. Nina Hoss of Hedda was there. Rose Byrne of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was there. Zoey Deutch of Nouvelle Vague was there.
Of those movies that you hadn’t seen before, did anything jump out at you as being particularly surprising given the buzz on these movies that already existed?
I was surprised people liked Jay Kelly. But I also think it was the exact right audience for Jay Kelly, a film about a self-reflective movie star dealing with his two daughters. I thought Jay Kelly was fairly mid, but it played very well there. Sentimental Value, a film about a self-reflective director dealing with his two daughters, also played very well. I mean, they’re arguably the same movie. People really liked how Sentimental Value ended. So I’m not surprised by that.
I think the Frankenstein reaction was very muted.
I am all over the map as to how well I think Frankenstein will do. One week I think it’s on the outs, the next week I think it’ll end up sailing through, if for no other reason than the general love out there for Guillermo del Toro plus tech nominations.
The thing that I will say … well, two things I will say: One, there was a couple in front of me at Frankenstein. Older than late 30s, I would say, who were cuddling the whole time. And she kept asking him to explain what was happening. And I literally was like, Who doesn’t know the story of Frankenstein? But I worry that maybe people don’t know the story of Frankenstein and therefore Guillermo’s adaptation is working for them. Whereas I think if you have read the novel or even just seen more Guillermo movies, you might feel different. For me, it didn’t feel as opulent as it should have. It looked sort of cheap. And I honestly don’t think Oscar Isaac is good; I don’t think he goes to a place where Frankenstein is insane. Like, he is a madman. There was none of that fever-dream quality that I wanted in his performance.
I think people really loved Train Dreams. The last third of the movie was maybe abstract for them, but I think they really liked it visually.
Good.
Hopefully the strength of these little festivals is creating buzz around that film.
What movies were most talked about as you eavesdropped around the fest?
I think a lot of people liked Bugonia until the ending.
I did not like the ending.
I didn’t find the movie funny; I found it actually very depressing and sad. And in a way, that felt incredibly sympathetic to me. The crowd that I was in, I think because it was that liberal centrist demographic, was very much on her side. So every time she read him, it was a huge pop in the theater. So then, conversely, I think the ending did not land for them.
And then in my screening of No Other Choice, I think a lot of people really liked it. Though I heard a lot of talk outside the movie of people not understanding the ending.
I do wonder if No Other Choice is a Park Chan Wook lone director nomination rather than it getting into Best Picture, because I do feel like the people who will end up really appreciating that are the director’s branch.
In the same way that I think The Secret Agent plays well to directors.
You forwarded me a list of which films won the audience-voted awards, and it amused me to see that Hamnet and Rental Family tied for the Audience Award. Paired again. What was the word on the street about those movies?
People really liked Rental Family, which doesn’t surprise me, because, again, it’s a sentimental crowd. All of the men I talked to after Hamnet were completely unmoved. But all of the women were an absolute mess.
Fascinating. Were there other movies that seemed to skew demographically?
I heard younger women talking positively about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. And I heard a good amount of older women not getting A House of Dynamite. Not understanding why it’s three versions of the same narrative and it just ends abruptly. Seemingly, they thought it would be a different execution.
Another divisive ending. The Middleburg audiences weren’t having it.
Photo: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Good timing on Warner Brothers part, announcing that it is putting Ryan Coogler’s Sinners back in theaters for an IMAX run over the Halloween weekend. This is a great moment to get the one big Academy Award contender from the first half of the year back in conversation just as the precursor awards voting organizations are getting back together.
And in a prerelease show of faith, Netflix announced that it will be screening Jay Kelly theatrically in 35mm. While Netflix is exhibiting all of its Oscar contenders in short theatrical windows before they hit streaming, Jay Kelly will be screening in some of the nation’s most prestigious movie houses, including the Vista in Los Angeles, the Music Box in Chicago, and Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional. Further evidence that Jay Kelly’s path to Oscar runs through the revered Hollywood of old.
Bugonia, Hamnet, It Was Just an Accident, Jay Kelly, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams, Wicked: For Good
Photo: Chris Pizzello-Pool/Getty Images
Chloe Zhao appeared at the London Film Festival and talked about her career as a neurodivergent filmmaker. Zhao is a diretor who draws divisive reactions from film fans (this will happen when you win an Oscar during COVID lockdown and then direct a superhero movie as poorly received as Eternals), and her festival appearances this year have seen the director escape into her Beats headphones and lead prescreening guided meditations. Still, the conversation around Hamnet to this point has been more about the work and less about the audience’s relationship to the director, and her awards chances seem better for it.
Photo: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Disney
The trajectory of the Avatar movies and the Oscars suggest that James Cameron may have a tough time getting traction for a Best Director nomination. But with Zoe Saldaña telling press that an Avatar documentary will premiere before Fire and Ash hits theaters, the re-mythologization of James Cameron seems to have kick-started.
Chloé Zhao, Hamnet; Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident; Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another; Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value; Ryan Coogler, Sinners
Photo: Sabrina Lantos/Sony Pictures Classics
I love it when an actor’s success with one movie helps amplify their chances with their Oscar movie. In this case, the Blumhouse horror movie Black Phone 2 performing well at the box office is a small boost to Ethan Hawke’s Oscar campaign for Blue Moon. (The real shot in the arm will be if he can get some love from the indie awards at Gotham and the Indie Spirits.)
Photo: Searchlight
As mentioned above, Rental Family tied for the Audience Award at the Middleburg Film Festival. That was something the film couldn’t pull off in Toronto. Brendan Fraser’s chances have been flagging since TIFF, but maybe the Middleburg award is a sign that Rental Family still plays well to the kinds of audiences who vote for Oscars.
Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme; George Clooney, Jay Kelly; Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another; Michael B. Jordan, Sinners; Jeremy Allen White, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Photo: Focus Features/Everett Collection
See all of the above regarding Emma Stone’s potential to make Bette Davis–style Academy Awards history with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. But I’m also taking the recent all-bald stunt screening of the film as a sign that Stone and her shaved dome have become the focal point of this movie’s promotional campaign. Good attention, in this case.
Photo: 20th Century Fox
Not-so-good attention was how I’d describe the latest trailer release for James L. Brooks’s Ella McCay. Personally, I’ll crawl over hot coals to be first in line to see a new James L. Brooks movie. But objectively speaking, the trailer looked a mess, with Emma Mackey getting lost in a confusing swirl of characters (her father! her brother! her kooky aunt! her neurotic brother!) and the try-hard cleverness of Julie Kavner’s voice-over. From a distance, this movie seemed like it might be an Emma Mackey breakthrough opportunity. She might have to wait until Narnia.
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet; Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: For Good; Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another; Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value; Emma Stone, Bugonia
Photo: Kasper Tuxen/Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
Stellan Skarsgård’s Vulture interview with E. Alex Jung is a good reminder that this nepo daddy is going to be a fun, compelling presence on the Oscar campaign trail over these next few months. Take, for example, this quote: “With all my eight kids, there’s one thing I’ve been afraid of every time I have a new kid. Not that they have Down syndrome or they’re autistic … that they’re boring. Luckily, none of them were.”
Photo: Focus Features
The good news for Stavvy is that the process of him crossing over from popular comedian and podcaster into the realm of film and TV — as discussed on the latest Good One podcast — is off to a good start with his role as a cop in Bugonia. The bad news is that the role is way too small for it to enter into the awards conversation.
Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another; Delroy Lindo, Sinners; Paul Mescal, Hamnet; Sean Penn, One Battle After Another; Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value
Photo: Chris Levine
Hamnet proving once again at Middleburg that it’s a huge crowd-pleaser, despite its weepy reputation, is a good sign for everyone connected to that movie. I wonder if that means we shouldn’t be looking a bit closer at Emily Watson. She plays Shakespeare’s mother in the film, a rather harsh and unsympathetic character at first, but in a few pivotal scenes, she provides crucial scene support for Jessie Buckley. Best Picture contenders often have long coattails, and a two-time Oscar nominee like Watson making her way back onto an Oscar ballot for the first time in 27 years would be a good use of Hamnet’s.
Photo: Netflix
This is less bad news for Laura Dern than different news. With her performance in Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On getting more and more traction over the past few weeks in Best Actress, her (already long-shot) odds for a supporting nomination for her relatively brief turn in Jay Kelly have gotten a lot longer.
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value; Amy Madigan, Weapons; Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners; Ariana Grande, Wicked: For Good; Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another