The Golden Globes, which were awarded Sunday night in Los Angeles, are closely watched for two reasons: the glitz of the celebrity-studded red carpet and the fact that they are considered predictive of the Oscars.
But this year there was a third element worth noting: In a year of rising antisemitism and anti-Israeli sentiment around the world, the two big winners of the night, The Brutalist and Emilia Perez, both featured Jewish and Israeli characters and themes.
The Oscar race this year was considered wide open prior to the Golden Globes, but now it seems to be shaping up into a competition between these two movies.
The Brutalist, the story of a fictional Hungarian-Jewish Bauhaus architect who moves to the US after surviving the Holocaust, won three Golden Globes, for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director for Brady Corbet, and Best Actor for Adrien Brody.
The hero, his wife, and niece are portrayed as having suffered immeasurable trauma during the Holocaust. Late in the film, the character of the niece marries an observant Jew and moves to Israel. The niece gets to deliver a speech that provides an important coda to the story in a scene set at the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Emilia Perez is a Spanish-language musical directed by Jacques Audiard, a Frenchman, about a Mexican drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón) who gets in touch with his feminine side by becoming a woman, courtesy of a sensitive Jewish-Israeli doctor, played by Mark Ivanir, who performs the operation in Tel Aviv.
It won four awards, for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldana, Best Motion Picture, Non-English Language, and Best Original Song Motion Picture for “El Mal.”
Both of these quirky films are not blockbusters, but they raise trendy issues in an inventive way, and movies that do that have been winning big in the 21st century.
The Brutalist, which has a brutally long running time of three hours and 26 minutes, plays like a biopic, although the hero is fictional and much of the movie focuses on his relationship with an arrogant millionaire who becomes his patron and seems similar in many ways to Donald Trump. The patron is played by Guy Pearce, who was one of only two attendees to wear an Artists4Ceasefire pin, referencing the Israel-Hamas War, on the red carpet.
Pearce was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Brutalist but lost to Kieran Culkin for his role as a young Jewish man visiting sites of Jewish interest in Poland with his cousin to honor their grandmother in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. Eisenberg’s movie, which is expected to be nominated for multiple Oscars, puts its main characters’ Jewish identities front and center.
Jewish background
Brody, in his acceptance speech for The Brutalist, referenced both his character’s Jewish background and his own ancestry:
“You know, this story is really the character’s journey is very reminiscent of my mother’s and my ancestors’ journey of fleeing war and coming to this great country. I owe so much to my mother and my grandparents for their sacrifice, and although I do not know fully how to express all of the challenges that you have faced and experienced, and the many people who have struggled immigrating to this country, I hope that this work stands to lift you up a bit and to give you a voice. I’m so grateful.”
Brody is best known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of a musician who survives the Holocaust in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.
The Golden Globes telecast featured jokes about Trump and other American domestic political matters, but Hollywood seems to have gone quiet when it comes to the ongoing war.
Israeli actress Gal Gadot, one of the Golden Globes presenters, rubbed shoulders with fellow A-listers in a slinky black gown but did not wear a yellow-ribbon pin to draw attention to the plight of the hostages, as many hoped she would.
The day before, however, Gadot posted about the proof-of-life propaganda video just released by Hamas of hostage Liri Albag on her Instagram account, which has 108 million followers.
It will be interesting to see how The Brutalist, with its story of a 20th-century Jewish outsider – which has parallels to last year’s big Oscar winner, Oppenheimer – and Emilia Perez, with its sensitivity to trans issues and its clear identification of the doctor who helps the title character as an Israeli Jew, will fare at the Oscars.
The Oscar nominations will be announced on January 17, and it’s likely both films will receive a double-digit number of nods.