How the Oscar Race Got as Messy as “Conclave”

Stop me if you’ve seen this one. A committee of august personages convenes, with much pomp and circumstance, to choose the best of their lot. Time-honored rituals are observed. Fancy outfits are donned. The ogling public is kept at bay. The contenders, some representing progress, others tradition, jockey for supporters, though outright campaigning is frowned upon—and negative campaigning is taboo, although it happens in whispers. Unflattering rumors swirl, and the contestants are made to atone for their past sins. Secret ballots are cast and counted, in an arcane tallying system, and a victor is announced, to great fanfare.

This is, roughly, the plot of “Conclave,” in which the College of Cardinals meets at the Vatican, after the death of the Pope, to choose his successor. But it’s also the plot of this year’s Oscar race, in which “Conclave” is nominated in eight categories, including Best Picture. When I first saw it, last fall, the film immediately reminded me of awards season, with its ceremonial customs, its flair, and the pettiness of its esteemed voting body. (For the red robes and skullcaps, sub in the red carpet.) Just as Oscar nominees go on endless press rounds to talk about their artistic process without evincing a hunger for the little gold man, the film’s papal hopefuls profess that their aspirations are spiritual. Still, “every cardinal, deep down, has already chosen the name by which he would like his papacy to be known,” one character says in “Conclave”—just as every actor has, admittedly or not, delivered an Oscar speech in the shower.

It wasn’t until the Oscar nominations were announced, two weeks ago, that awards season started to resemble “Conclave” where it counts: in sheer, soapy drama. As in the movie, a succession of mini-scandals has threatened to derail one Best Picture contender after another, amounting to one of the messiest campaign seasons in recent memory. In “Conclave,” the calculus shifts each time a disgraced cardinal drops out of the running. In the awards race, the question looms: Will any of the nominees make it to the ceremony untainted?

Let’s start at the beginning. (“Conclave” spoilers follow.) Last year’s Best Picture winner, “Oppenheimer,” was a widely admired favorite, much like the beloved Pope who dies in the first scene of “Conclave.” This year’s race has never had a stable front-runner; instead, it’s populated by smaller, more polarizing movies, each vulnerable under the scrutiny of the Oscar spotlight. As in “Conclave,” in which Cardinal Adeyemi, of Nigeria, gets the most votes on the first ballot, “Emilia Peréz,” a potentially history-making entrant, seemed to be winning the numbers game, with thirteen nominations. But both contenders prove to be imperfect harbingers of progress. Adeyemi would be the first Pope from Africa, but he’s known among the cardinals to have regressive views on homosexuality. “Emilia Pérez,” a musical about a transgender drug lord in Mexico, seems like a boundary-breaking Best Picture winner, but it’s been saddled with criticisms from Mexican and trans viewers, who have accused it of retrograde misrepresentation. (Its director, Jacques Audiard, is French.)

Midway through “Conclave,” Adeyemi’s candidacy collapses when a nun arrives from Nigeria, revealing that he fathered her child when she was nineteen. “Emilia Pérez” has had a cascade of P.R. snafus from Karla Sofía Gascón, the Spanish actress who plays the title role. When Gascón landed on the Best Actress list, she became the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for an Oscar. Things immediately went sideways, when she had to walk back earlier comments she’d made to a Brazilian newspaper about a fellow-nominee, Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”). “I have never, at any point, said anything bad about Fernanda Torres or her movie,” Gascón had told Folha de S. Paulo. “However, there are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and ‘Emilia Pérez’ down.”

No sooner was the backlash subsiding than old tweets by Gascón “resurfaced” (the word every public figure dreads), in which she called George Floyd a “drug addict swindler,” likened the 2021 Oscars to “a Black Lives Matter demonstration,” and mused, “Is it just my impression or are there more Muslims in Spain? . . . Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.” Gascón nuked her X account and released multiple apologies, although she maintained that she’d been targeted by a plot to “sully” her name with “lies or things taken out of context.” Compare Adeyemi, when he’s confronted by Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes): “I am the victim of a disgraceful plot to ruin my reputation!”

Gascón was never a front-runner for Best Actress, but the revelations have all but scotched her chances, and they may well hurt “Emilia Pérez” over all—making the new front-runner uncertain. Perhaps it’s “The Brutalist,” which has not been immune to scandal itself. Last month, its editor revealed that A.I. had been used to tweak the Hungarian accents of its stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, and to create fictitious architectural plans and buildings for the closing retrospective of the main character’s career. This touched a nerve in Hollywood, where A.I. was central to the 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes, but opinions were split on the infraction. “Not all A.I. is created equal,” Sam Adams wrote in Slate. “You can argue that The Brutalist generating concept sketches deprived a human architect of work—although it was an architect who decided to use it.” If “The Brutalist” has a corresponding character in “Conclave,” I’d say it’s Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), who stands accused of the obscure sin of simony—the buying and selling of something spiritual, such as an ecclesiastic office. Not great, but a bit of a head-scratcher.

But wait, there’s more! Did you see the flak over Fernanda Torres, who had to apologize after a clip of her wearing blackface in a comedy sketch in 2008 resurfaced? (More of that darn resurfacing!) What about the essay that appeared in the Cut in December, titled “How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?,” by Lilly Jay, the therapist whose ex-husband, Ethan Slater, is now dating his “Wicked” co-star, Ariana Grande? (“As for me, days with my son are sunny,” Jay wrote. “Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker.”) As Hunter Harris observed last week, in her pop-culture newsletter, Hung Up, “This year is quite the Conclave; we are all Isabella Rossellini silently cryptic at an outdated copier.”

Of course, Oscar-season melodrama is nothing new, though it doesn’t date back quite as far as the papacy. In the nineties, Harvey Weinstein, at Miramax, spearheaded an aggressive campaigning style that made the awards ecosystem more cutthroat and bloated. The 1999 race, which pitted Miramax’s “Shakespeare in Love” against DreamWorks’ “Saving Private Ryan,” was the nastiest yet, after DreamWorks got word that Weinstein was bad-mouthing “Private Ryan” to the press. Three years later, the front-runner was “A Beautiful Mind,” about the mentally ill mathematician John Nash, and the Drudge Report posted that Academy members were discovering “shocking Jew-baiting” remarks that Nash had made during a schizophrenic episode. Everyone blamed the smear campaign on Weinstein, but someone from the “Lord of the Rings” team later admitted to having a hand in it. Nowadays, you don’t need a campaign strategist to leak oppo research from the shadows. On their months-long press tours, directors and actors have plenty of opportunity to step in it themselves. Social media can take care of the rest.