The Architecture of the Oscar Nominees
The Brutalist ©Universal Studios
The 2025 Oscars came and went, and with no shortage of excellent films nominated from this past year. What many of the films have in common is a stunning and real focus on multifaceted architecture within their stories and cinematography. From a three-and-a-half-hour plus post-war exploration of a tortured Bauhaus architect, to a subversion of the classic Cinderella-story that stars a sex worker and the son of a Russian oligarch, this past year’s films explore different forms of architecture and the miraculous effect that architecture can have on storytelling.
A Real Pain
(Oscar for best actor in a supporting role)
Jesse Eisenberg’s monument to his Jewish ancestors and the trauma of their experience, A Real Pain, takes place in Poland and follows two cousins who journey through Poland to honor their late grandmother. Both comic and heart wrenching, the storyline of the film is enhanced through the beautiful film locations and settings. As the cousins embark on a World War II tour, they encounter historic monuments, such as the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw and the Warsaw Uprising Monument, as well as the Old Jewish Cemetery in Lublin. The audience encounters and learns about these monuments with the characters, with various facts given by their informative tour guide. The film portrays these architectural features not for aesthetics or because they make for artful B-roll, but as looming monuments for us to take in, appreciate, and learn from. Didactic and unsentimental.
Eisenberg undercuts the bleakness of Poland’s involvement in Holocaust history with a fresh representation of Poland’s colorful and dynamic architecture. Particularly in the city of Lublin, the film presents the vibrant and warm side of the city, a side that is not usually represented in American cinema. This duality furthers a theme of the film: how to honor and reconcile traumatic family history within the context of modern privilege.
The Brutalist
(Three Oscars, including best actor))
The epic film The Brutalist received a resounding ten Oscar nominations (and don’t forget, has brought back intermissions to the cinema!). Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian architect who studied at the Bauhaus and was forced to emigrate to the United States during World War II. A major theme that director Brady Corbet dissects is the tense and compromising struggle between art and commerce. The creation of a monumental Brutalist piece of architecture is at the heart of this movie, making its connection to architecture, well, obvious. Besides Tóth’s culminating design—a Brutalist style utopian community center with key stylistic features such as concrete material, geometric shapes, and simple structural forms—the movie showcases a few other key locations. Tóth practices at Teleki Square Synagogue in Budapest, a humble and unique synagogue for Hungarian Jewish practitioners. This modest relic of faith contrasts greatly with the imposing and enormous designs that make up the bulk of the film’s focus—wealth tycoon Van Buren's grand Pennsylvania country mansion and Tóth’s visionary project. Wealth, art, design, and faith clash and intersect throughout The Brutalist in a visual marathon of striking imagery.
Anora
(Five Oscars, including best picture, best leading actress)
Award season’s “Cinderella-story” Anora has been racking up nominations and awards and, in a surprise twist, won best picture. The low-budget indie film has exceeded expectations in the lead-up to the Oscars. Arguably the least focussed on architecture of the films on this list, Anora utilizes architecture and interior design in a metaphorical way. In Brooklyn, stripper and occasional sex worker Ani visits the house *ahem, mansion* of one of her clients, Vanya. The mansion features floor-to-ceiling windows, a spiral staircase, gated entrance, sprawling interiors, and sleek sculptures and glass coffee tables. The house effortlessly captures the immense wealth that Ani has unknowingly stumbled into, showing rather than telling us who Vanya is. Tangentially, the house is full of empty spaces and isolated from its neighbors—an empty promise of grandeur and wealth-related happiness. This illusion is reinforced when Ani’s storybook romance with Vanya shatters with the arrival of his parents from Russia, threatening to take away everything Ani has grasped. With this, the pristine living room and potential for wealth, love, and happiness fall apart. Literally. A clash with Russian henchmen results in the glass coffee table being shattered, the once-pristine living room torn apart, and furniture upended: the physical destruction mirroring Ani’s crumbling dreams. The $30 million contemporary mansion is not only incredible to look at, but is so important to the storyline that it almost acts as a character itself.
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