7 Big Oscar Categories AI Will Blow UpAn awards season of smears and accusations over the technology can't stop what's coming
Erik Barmack writes every other Tue. for paid subscribers. He recently wrote about how AI reasoning will DOGE Hollywood’s exec ranks; interviewed writer-director David S. Goyer on his new AI-powered startup; and explained why 2025 will be the year of the full-length AI movie.AI is already mucking up Hollywood’s biggest night. It all started on Jan. 11, when The Brutalist’s editor Dávid Jancsó admitted that the production team used Respeecher — an AI voice-cloning tech whose website promotes it creates “AI voices that transform reality” — to enhance Adrien Brody’s and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian dialogue. The resulting online outrage was, you might say, a bit over the top:
When the news went viral, prognosticators said it could hurt Brody and The Brutalist’s chances at an Oscar. Timothée Chalamet’s somewhat surprising best actor win at the SAG Awards did nothing to alter that theory. I’m not necessarily endorsing AI, but we’ve seen Brody try to do accents before (Peaky Blinders), and technology may have saved us from another verbal mangling. Then, someone unearthed a French-language interview from Cannes where the re-recording mixer for Emilia Pérez admitted to using Respeecher to blend Karla Sofía Gascón’s singing voice with Camille’s, the co-writer of the score. (The Emilia Pérez team wishes AI were the only controversy it had to weather during awards season.) Not that Chalamet’s A Complete Unknown can claim to be 100 percent made with human hands either. A couple of weeks ago, news broke that it used Revize.ai — machine learning-powered VFX software often used to create “ML-generated doubles” — to make a stunt actor look more like Chalamet. Elsewhere in the Timmy-verse, Dune: Part Two used Foundry’s AI-infused Nuke CopyCat tool to automate the turning of all the Fremen’s eyes blue. The Oscars have always been about almost everything but finding the best movies of the year. Yet this AI Red Scare that’s stormed through awards season this year feels like something far worse than the usual Oscar campaign nonsense. It not only risks overshadowing great work that deserves to be recognized but it could also chill the advancement of what we can do on screen to wow audiences. Imagine if Titanic was effectively the target of a negative smear campaign that ruined its Oscar chances because James Cameron pushed out advanced CGI techniques. I can’t say I’m surprised that the already maligned two-letter swear word in town (AI) is making the rounds as the bête noire of this year’s Oscar circuit. Big tech and weird IP butchery make for good villains that would make Thanos proud (though the Oscars will never give any superhero movie its proper due). Yet as tech analyst Benedict Evans says, we reserve the AI moniker for “anything that hasn’t been done yet.” We’re freighting AI with that much power because of our fear of the unknown. But these examples all showcase that the term is so overused that we don’t even really know what it’s referring to a lot of the time! AI is a catch-all — a spectrum from tiny visual tweaks to a full scene generated by a computer — all of it lumped together into one big, bad, evil word. Whatever AI really is, it isn’t going anywhere. Is the Academy going to ban films that have used AI, even if legitimate artists are using the tech to advance new creative achievements? Will guardrails be put in place? Will they be effective? Following The Brutalist controversy, the Academy floated the idea of making everyone disclose AI usage. If it did, let’s be honest: It’ll end up like those California Prop 65 warnings that make it seem like everything you buy will give you cancer but doesn’t change anyone’s behavior. So as AI starts to permeate every aspect of film production and with the Oscars on Mar. 2, which category will be the first to give AI its Oscar? In this issue, I will tell you:
I. Best DirectorThis column is for paid subscribers only. Interested in a group sub for your team or company? Click here for 20 percent off for four more days. For full access and to continue reading all Ankler content, paid subscribers can click here. Erik Barmack is a working producer and the founder of Wild Sheep Content. He also runs a news site dedicated to AI in the entertainment industry called AI in Hollywood. Jocelyn Wexler contributed additional research to this piece. Follow us: X | Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky ICYMI
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