What the Oscar Nominations Missed

In today’s edition, our coverage of this morning’s Academy Award nominations. And Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports on the mastermind behind the President’s fixation with tariffs. Plus:

• The New Yorker films up for Oscars
• The long shadow cast by the Chinese Exclusion Act
• An origami master who lost his lifework in the L.A. fires

Ian Crouch
Newsletter editor

The 2025 Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, after they were twice delayed because of the ongoing Los Angeles fires. (Michael Schulman has written about how the Oscars have responded to catastrophe in the past.) Netflix’s musical melodrama “Emilia Pérez” led with thirteen nominations; the epic drama “The Brutalist” and the smash musical “Wicked” garnered ten apiece. “The drop-off from the year’s best to the rest is relatively sharp,” Richard Brody writes today, taking in the picks, and presenting his list of preferred alternatives—such as Adam Driver’s performance in “Megalopolis.” (The actor “hurtles and lurches, dances and whirls, strides and struts and even crumples while bearing up the weight of Coppola’s heroic fancies,” Brody notes.) As in years past, there’s not much overlap between lists—critics, alas, don’t get to vote. But that didn’t stop Justin Chang from weighing in with his own alternative-universe Oscar picks earlier this month; he was compiling his list after evacuating his home during the L.A. fires. “The movies are my escape as well as my professional concern,” he writes, “and the process of watching and thinking and writing about movies has been my own welcome distraction through many a difficult stretch, if seldom one as difficult as this.”

During the past year, in addition to reviewing many of the films up for awards, The New Yorker has covered film culture from every angle. In December, Alexandra Schwartz profiled Brady Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist,” who made the case for why American audiences might have an appetite for a three-and-a-half-hour movie (including an intermission) in the distraction era. As part of the New Yorker Interview series, our writers conducted deep conversations with Colman Domingo (up for Best Actor, “Sing Sing”), Isabella Rossellini (Best Supporting Actress, “Conclave”), and Jesse Eisenberg (Best Original Screenplay, “A Real Pain”). On the Critics at Large podcast, the hosts discussed “The Substance” (up for Best Picture, and more) and the new horror of the modified body in the age of Botox and Ozempic. And, in a video commentary, RaMell Ross (Best Adapted Screenplay) takes the viewer through a key scene in his film “Nickel Boys,” which both our critics and the fine voters of the Academy agree belongs on this year’s Best Picture slate.

Two New Yorker films received Oscar nominations this morning. Bill Morrison’s “Incident,” which uses body-camera and surveillance footage to examine a police shooting in Chicago, was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film. And “I’m Not a Robot,” a darkly funny story, written and directed by Victoria Warmerdam, about a woman’s struggle with a series of online CAPTCHA tests, will compete in the Live Action Short category. Read more about the directors and watch the films here »

Photograph by Anna Moneymaker / NYT / Redux

• The man behind the tariffs: Trump has promised to impose twenty-five-per-cent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada by February 1st, and has said that he will establish an “External Revenue Service” to collect those tariffs and “other foreign trade-related revenues.” Today Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports on Trump’s trade guru, Robert Lighthizer, who failed to gain a spot in the Administration, but is “the man largely charged with converting the President’s protectionist instincts into theory and practice.”

• The Laken Riley Act: The first bill passed by the new Congress landed on Trump’s desk yesterday. Named for a twenty-two-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was killed by an undocumented migrant last year, the bill allows federal officials to detain unauthorized immigrants who have been arrested for other crimes. Opponents have argued that the bill deprives the accused of due process. Last year, David D. Kirkpatrick investigated how Riley had become an icon for the conservative agenda.

• “The biological reality of sex”: Earlier this week, Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, determined at birth, and that the federal government will recognize sex, rather than gender, in all its official capacities. When the first-term Trump team pursued a similar designation, in 2018, Margaret Talbot explored the dangerous political implications and the Administration’s disdain for science.

• The Long Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act
• After the Fires, a Slow Night in Hollywood
• The Master Origami Artist Whose Collection Turned to Ash in Altadena

“It says it’s nineteen degrees out, but the general lack of empathy in our current political climate is making it feel colder.”

Cartoon by Matt Reuter

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• Play today’s smallish puzzle. A clue: Ryan who starred in “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” Three letters.

P.S. Édouard Manet, who was born on this day in 1832, “invented modern—and, while he was at it, postmodern—art,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in a review of a major show in Paris. What’s more, “He did it in 1858, when he was twenty-six years old.”