‘A Real Pain,’ ‘The Brutalist’ and ‘Nobody Wants This’ rack up Golden Globe nominations
The awards are brimming with unexpected Jewish connections
There’s a lot of Jewish content up for the Golden Globes — and it comes with a lot of Jewish trivia. Photo by Canva/Searchlight Pictures/©2024 Paramount Pictures/Lol Crawley/Stefania Rosini/Netflix
By PJ Grisar December 9, 2024
The nominees for the 2025 Golden Globes, announced Monday, pose many questions that to any reasonable mind sound frankly insane.
Among them: Do you prefer your Chalamet as space Moses or baby Bob Dylan? Is Adrien Brody only destined for major nominations when he plays Holocaust survivors? Which work of screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes is most deserving of recognition — the one about a tennis throuple or the one where James Bond is a stand-in for William S. Burroughs?
Still, if one considers the nominees, we can pick up on interesting trends and connections, particularly as it applies to the Jewish players.
The Chalamet-Kuritzkes connection
Luca Guadignino’s Challengers is nominated for four awards and his other film Queer is up for yet another for Daniel Craig’s lead performance. Both Challengers and Queer are the work of Jewish screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, whose wife, Celine Song, was a contender in the awards race last year for her own love triangle film, Past Lives.
Guadignino’s regular collaborator Timothée Chalamet is in competition with Craig for that lead actor role for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. But to get things even more confused, Chalamet’s costar in Dune: Part Two, nominated — like A Complete Unknown — for best picture drama, is Zendaya, who got a nod for best actress for Guadignino’s Challengers (up for best musical or comedy).
The tl;dr here is, if you’re gunning for an awards haul, you should probably involve some iteration of Chalamet-Zendaya-Guadignino-Kuritzkes.
No business like Shoah business?
Jesse Eisenberg’s Holocaust tour dramedy A Real Pain is up for best picture musical or comedy, best performance for Eisenberg, featured performance for Kieran Culkin and best screenplay by Eisenberg.
Joining it is Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, an American epic about a Holocaust survivor’s struggles to reach the American dream (the film, Corbet, the film’s stars, screenplay and composer are all nominated). Leading the film — which is as much about the pitfalls of Christian patronage as it is about an architect’s pained process — is Adrien Brody, speaking Hungarian for much of the film.
The conventional wisdom still suggests that the Holocaust is a good way to get attention come awards season, though films like White Bird and the German-produced Treasure, took on similar themes and aren’t in the conversation.
The riveting September 5, a potential lightning rod for controversy for its depiction of the live broadcast of the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli hostages, is nominated for best drama, but was shut out of other major categories.
Emilia Pérez, the bombastic musical about a drug lord’s gender affirmation surgery, that leads the Globes with 10 nominations, makes a brief detour to Israel, but that is likely to be among the least controversial things about it.
A (Jewish) star is born (and reborn)
Jeremy Strong — along with Sebastian Stan (also up for the film A Different Man) — is in the race for his portrayal of Donald Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn in The Apprentice (Cohn’s cousin has endorsed the performance).
But that film, which spends a bit of time in the Trump developments in Coney Island (two years ago Strong was in another film, Armageddon Time, also featuring an actor playing Fred Trump) lags behind Sean Baker’s Anora. Anora, nominated five Golden Globes including best picture musical or comedy, gives a thorough walking tour of Brighton Beach.
Jewish actor Mikey Madison, playing a lifelong Brooklyn resident who strips before marrying a ne’er do well Russian oligarch’s son, is up for best performance, and could well win.
Other Jewish standouts include Ebon Moss-Bachrach, once more eligible for The Bear, Kevin Kline with his first major film nomination in years for the miniseries Disclaimer. There is also Gabriel LaBelle — pivoting from Young Spielberg to Young Lorne Michaels — in Saturday Night. Hannah Einbinder, whose mother, Laraine Newman, is a character in that film about the first episode of the late night sketch show, is once again nominated for Hacks.
SNL alum Adam Sandler is nominated for his stand-up special while Harrison Ford (mentioned in the original “Hanukkah Song” as erroneously a quarter Jewish — he’s half!) is up for AppleTV+’s Shrinking with his Jewish costar Jason Segel. If you wanna get really trippy, Jake Gyllenhaal is nominated for AppleTV+’s Presumed Innocent for the lead role Ford originated in the 1990 film adaptation of Scott Turow’s novel.
Did everybody want this?
Never bet against Brody — this time I mean Adam, not Adrien.
Brody, who co-starred with fellow nominee Jesse Eisenberg in Fleishman is in Trouble, is nominated for his role as hot rabbi Noah Roklov in Nobody Wants This. The show — the source of much Shabbat meal debate — is also up for best TV series musical or comedy and for best actress for Kristen Bell.
It remains to be seen if any of this is good for the Jews.
Second chances to settle the score
Hans Zimmer passed on scoring Gladiator II, but is nominated for work in Dune: Part Two. Danny Elfman returned for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but was not nominated.
Getting witchy with it
To the surprise of no one, Wicked Part I is in the running for four Golden Globes including best picture musical or comedy. And though there are endless think pieces likening Elphaba’s circumstances to the Jewish condition — or the more interesting proposal that it’s all about Hitleresque propaganda — it is not the most Jewish witch content being feted at the Globes.
No, that honor would have to go to Agatha All Along, for which star Kathryn Hahn is nominated.
Wicked may well be a popular b’nai mitzvah theme for the next two years, but Agatha All Along had a full bar mitzvah scene, supervised by and starring an actual rabbi from the suburbs of Atlanta.
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