An Oscar with artificial taste?

Artificial intelligence (AI) could cost Adrien Brody an Oscar, hailed in recent days for his subtle and powerful performance in The Brutalistby Brady Corbet. The American actor is notable as László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Bauhaus architect, who like his wife survived the death camps before going into exile in the United States after World War II.

Brody won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama earlier this month. He is also in all the predictions for the Oscars, the finalists of which will be revealed Thursday morning, in the best actor category, alongside Timothée Chalamet (as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown), Ralph Fiennes (as cardinal in Conclave) and Colman Domingo (as a playwright prisoner in Sing Sing).

Which could hurt his chances of winning a second Oscar after his portrayal of another Holocaust survivor, Wladyslaw Szpilman, in The Pianist by Roman Polanski in 2003? The few sentences he pronounces in Hungarian in The BrutalistGolden Globe for best dramatic film and one of the favorites for the Oscar for best film. They were retouched by the Ukrainian artificial intelligence software Respeecher, in order to be more credible.

He is the Hungarian editor of The BrutalistDávid Jancsó, who spilled the beans last weekend, in an interview with the technology magazine Red Shark News. He must be biting his fingers. The issue of artificial intelligence is particularly sensitive in Hollywood. His supervision was at the heart of the studios’ conflict with the actors and screenwriters, which lasted 100 days in 2023. The actors, we remind you, account for the majority of Oscar voters…

A campaign in anticipation of the Oscars is akin to an electoral campaign. The slightest misstep is highlighted and anything goes. Harvey Weinstein has long been considered the master of this. In LA, we don’t give quarters, even in times of climate crisis.

We were already wondering if the questionable accusations of transphobia against Emilia Perez would harm his candidacy with the Academy. Here are those of The Brutalist and Adrien Brody in particular are tainted by this new controversy, which also splashes Emilia Perez and actress Karla Sofía Gascón.

Jacques Audiard’s film also used Respeecher software so that the voice of Karla Sofía Gascón, expected to be the first transgender finalist for the Oscar for best actress, was married to that of the singer Camille and was more accurate during the sequences. sung.

This use of artificial intelligence software has been known since the presentation ofEmily Perez at the Cannes Film Festival last May, but we’ve been talking about it especially for two days. It’s like being in the backstage negotiations and games of Conclavea more conventional and consensual film by Edward Berger, which risks taking advantage of these various controversies to win a particularly close Oscar race…

I waited for its 70mm projection to see The Brutalist this week. The film intrigued me since its presentation at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion for Best Director. Brady Corbet, also winner of the Golden Globe for best director, does not lack ambition or know-how. His fresco with accents of Citizen Kane makes him the favorite for the Oscar for best director, despite the undue length (3 hours 20 minutes) of his film, interspersed with a 20-minute intermission, and its superfluous last part, worthy of a Wikipedia page.

My main reservation about this very beautiful film is not linked to the credibility of the Hungarian spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones (who plays László Tóth’s wife) – I don’t understand Hungarian – but to the stage a reunion of lovers who, after years of separation, spontaneously speak to each other in English.

What annoyed me even more was this borrowed Central European accent which mixed with the overly mastered English of these recent immigrants (even if Felicity Jones’ journalist character studied at Oxford, this trying to explain that ). American cinema has these absurd conventions that we accept like many other arrangements with the guy in the views, because it is hegemonic.

There are very few Hungarians in The Brutalist. Barely a few minutes, when we hear off-camera the voices of the spouses reading their post-war correspondence. Felicity Jones and Adrien Brody, whose mother immigrated to the United States from Hungary during the 1956 revolution, used a Hungarian language coach.

“But we wanted it to be perfect and that even Hungarians wouldn’t hear the difference,” explained Dávid Jancsó in an interview, whose own voice was used by the Respeecher software to make the actors’ accents more credible. Only certain syllables were modified in order to make the dialogue more authentically Hungarian, filmmaker Brady Corbet said earlier this week. The production team, which had a very modest budget of US$10 million, says it turned to AI due to lack of time. “Otherwise we would still be in the editing room,” said Dávid Jancsó.

For a film that prides itself on doing things the old-fashioned way – The Brutalist was shot on 35mm film in VistaVision – these actor performances enhanced by artificial intelligence pose ethical problems. Does Adrien Brody deserve to win an Oscar? The question arises. Even if we have accepted since the beginning of cinema the special effects that accompany it.

We already know that artificial intelligence threatens the dubbing industry, which is flourishing in Quebec. Nothing, it seems, will be able to prevent Tom Cruise from being dubbed by the AI ​​in French, Hungarian or Tagalog. The danger that this highlights is the progressive erasure of national cultures in favor of a quasi-American cultural monopoly, which today is as televisual as it is musical and cinematographic.

Many of us are undoubtedly hoping that foreign actors speak with a credible Quebecois accent in a film set in Quebec. But will we be able to prevent Hollywood from possibly invading national markets with scenarios written by artificial intelligence, shot on a green screen with actors to whom the AI ​​will have lent typically Gaspésie, Marseille or Brazilian accents?

This catastrophic scenario seems implausible? In the United States, politics has become a grotesque reality show featuring a president condemned by the courts. All scenarios are possible.