The Upset That Wasn’t Really an Upset
Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” took home the Best Picture Oscar at the 97th Academy Awards on March 2, 2025, and if you’ve been anywhere near film discourse this week, you know the internet has been absolutely combusting. But here’s the thing that makes this particular victory so complicated: nobody is actually surprised that it won. What they’re furious about is everything surrounding the win—the questions it raises about how we make prestige cinema, who gets to tell which stories, and whether artistic integrity even matters anymore when algorithms are rewriting dialogue.
Corbet also took home Best Director, and Adrien Brody claimed Best Actor for his performance as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect navigating post-war America. The numbers alone tell you this is a serious film. At 3 hours and 35 minutes, “The Brutalist” sits among the longest Best Picture winners in Academy history. It was shot in VistaVision, a widescreen format that largely disappeared from cinema after the 1960s. This isn’t a film made for the algorithm. It’s audacious, demanding, and completely uncompromising in its vision.
The Format Is the Message (And It’s Gorgeous)
Let’s talk about VistaVision first, because this choice matters more than you might think. The format creates an image so wide, so impossibly detailed, that it demands your complete visual attention. You cannot check your phone during “The Brutalist” without missing architectural detail. You cannot watch it passively. Corbet understood that his story about a Brutalist architect—a man obsessed with structure, proportion, and the uncompromising integrity of concrete and steel—needed to be told in a format that mirrors that obsession with spatial precision.
This is the kind of formal commitment that divides audiences immediately. Some viewers find it transcendent, a welcome rebuke to the aesthetic poverty of contemporary cinema. Others find it pretentious, a deliberate barrier that exists only to exclude casual moviegoers. The Academy clearly landed in the former camp. But that three-and-a-half-hour runtime became significant in unexpected ways, particularly when questions about the film’s production started surfacing.
The AI Question That Broke Everything
In early 2025, before the Oscar win solidified the film’s cultural dominance, reports emerged that AI tools had been used to subtly adjust Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian-language dialogue for accent consistency. The revelation hit like a grenade in a monastery. Here was a film that seemed to stand against every contemporary compromise, shot in an obsolete format, asking audiences for nearly four hours of their time, and it had secretly deployed artificial intelligence to “fix” performances.
The debate that followed felt genuinely important and genuinely complicated. Critics asked: Where exactly is the line between technical correction and artistic manipulation? If we accept AI color grading, which nobody questions anymore, why is this different? Others pointed out that accent coaching is ancient practice. If an AI does what a dialect coach does, have we crossed an ethical line or simply automated an existing process? The conversation became less about whether the film cheated and more about what we’re willing to accept as craft versus what we condemn as fakery.
What made this particularly explosive was the timing. Here was a film that seemed to be about authenticity—about a Jewish immigrant’s struggle to create genuine art in a culture obsessed with patronage and commercialism—and it turned out to be using cutting-edge technology to erase linguistic authenticity. The irony was almost too perfect. You couldn’t have scripted a better metaphor for our anxious moment in film history if you’d tried.
The Box Office Numbers Everyone Is Trying to Ignore
“The Brutalist” grossed approximately $12.7 million at the U.S. box office before its Oscar win. Let that number sit with you for a moment. This is one of the lowest theatrical grosses for any film in the Best Picture conversation in recent memory. For comparison, “Oppenheimer” opened to over $40 million. Even “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a prestigious three-hour-plus Western that also seemed to target a narrow audience, made significantly more.
This number matters because it forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality about prestige cinema in the post-pandemic market. Can we actually sustain films of this ambition and length if audiences won’t show up? Is the Best Picture category now a museum exhibit, a preservation of high art that exists mainly in the Academy’s imagination and the pages of film criticism? Academy Awards Official Results show “The Brutalist” competing against films with stronger cultural penetration, yet the Academy chose the most expensive gamble.
The low box office doesn’t negate the film’s artistic achievement, but it does complicate the narrative around it. If cinema is a collective experience, and fewer people are collectively experiencing this film, what does that say about the Academy’s role in cultural conversation versus cultural preservation?
Architecture, Identity, and What the Experts Actually Think
Architectural historians have been particularly vocal about “The Brutalist,” and their takes reveal fascinating fractures in how we interpret the film’s politics. Architectural Record Film Review and similar professional publications praised the film’s visual language and its serious engagement with Brutalist aesthetics as moral and philosophical proposition rather than mere style.
But they also raised more complex questions about the film’s portrayal of Hungarian-Jewish immigrant identity and mid-century American patronage culture. Some critics argued that the film reproduces a patronizing relationship to its protagonist’s ethnicity, that it aestheticizes struggle rather than interrogating structural power. Others defended the film’s complexity, arguing that Corbet deliberately refuses easy moralizing about his protagonist’s compromises and choices.
What’s remarkable is that the film generates this level of specialized critical discourse. It’s not just film critics talking anymore. Architectural historians are weighing in. Cultural studies scholars are examining questions of diaspora and artistic compromise. The film is doing what good art actually does: giving multiple disciplines and perspectives something real to fight about.
So Why Are We Fighting About It?
The answer is that we’re not really fighting about “The Brutalist” at all. We’re fighting about what cinema is, what we want it to be, and who gets to decide. We’re fighting about whether artistic integrity can coexist with commercial viability, about whether AI is a tool or a corruption, about whether prestige cinema should be accessible or uncompromising. The film just happens to be the perfect lightning rod for all these questions.
Brady Corbet made a film of genuine strangeness and formal courage. The Academy recognized it. The audience for it remains smaller than seems sustainable. The production used technology in ways that made people uncomfortable. None of these things cancel each other out. They coexist, and the tension between them is where the interesting conversation lives.
If you haven’t seen “The Brutalist” yet, I’d genuinely encourage you to watch it, not as a directive but as an open question. Watch it and decide what the VistaVision format does to you. Notice the dialogue work and think about what authenticity even means in filmed performance. Sit with a film that refuses to make things easy, and ask yourself whether cinema needs more difficulty or less. The answer you arrive at probably says something true about what you believe art should do.