Oscar Nom Bomb: 2025 Drops a New Deus ex Machina in the Oscar Machine

A plot device where an unexpected event resolves a seemingly unsolvable problem is called a “deus ex machina” which translates to “god from the machine” in Latin; it often refers to a sudden, unlikely occurrence that conveniently solves a difficult situation in a story.
– AI Overview, Google

He just signed a confession. How much proof do you need? – Dana Scully, “Ghost in the Machine”1

Genies are only fun in the movies if you define and limit their powers.
– Roger Ebert2

* * *

“Pepper’s Ghost.”

The term gained media traction after perhaps a century of disuse when it turned up again, surprisingly, after Coachella. It was Tupac in 2012 who had used it cleverly to reappear on stage at the famous music festival, or rather Tupac not-himself, posthumously – courtesy of his copyright keepers and illusionists. The trick of the eye for thousands of viewers – and the viral media cycle that surrounded it after – was a long-forgotten smoke and mirrors ruse, according to Ars Technica: Pepper’s Ghost. 3 Stuff since the 16th century of the theater or funhouse, now updated to be more credible than ever for 21st-century fandom with a “proprietary mylar foil,” the new technology for the old illusory trick delivered “54,000 lumens of incredibly clear projected imagery” of an undead, dancing Tupac to the world.4

“What’s happening in Coachella is virtually the same thing that was happening in 1862,” illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer told the Wall Street Journal in 2012.5 “One difference: In the Victorian era, Pepper’s Ghost was normally used to reflect actual, physical objects or actors, making them appear ‘dimensional’ in ways that the projected or computer-generated imagery typically … do not.” Enter the posthumous live celebrity.

Avengers 4: Endgame (2019), Anthony and Joe Russo (Dirs.)

Murder most foul – as in the best it is –
But this most foul, strange and unnatural – King Hamlet’s ghost6

When the 19th-century cultural critic Walter Benjamin started to observe voyeurship and spectacle in the new shopping arcade malls and exposition hall amusements of Paris, he began to see the flying objects and moving chairs of the seance or haunted house as indicative of a newly liberated commodity value.7 Like piles of brand-name boxes and status items in windows, the object as commodity itself comes alive on its own. Likewise, the legible impressions left in the detective novels of the time – the marked cushions and surface “traces” of the household – Benjamin surmised, were a fascination with finding the vanishing physicality of the object in consumer society.8 “To hide something means to leave behind traces. But unseen ones. It is the art of the sleight of hand.”9

Phantasmagorias. Rappers.

But these are the things of euphoric mass spectacles and 19th-century midways: circus showman P. T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid” and the winking humbug; painted, living carnival statues the likes of which we have not seen since – the civic snake oil salesmen of Coppola’s Megalopolis, interestingly enough. What is the illusion and the simultaneous wink?10 Can you figure out how they did it (or in this case, why)? Figure out the humbug? “Sometimes … this advertising acknowledged uncertainty about the artifact’s authenticity,”11 wrote Michael Leja about magical cures and humbug spectacles in his book on early illusion peddlers in the entertainment 20th century, Looking Askance. Why create illusions of veracity, then, and simultaneously undo them for the viewer at the same time?

Megalopolis (2024), Francis Ford Coppola

For Leja, such productions of turn-of-the-century, technical humbuggery as P. T. Barnum’s also encouraged the public to acquire a kind of ironic cultural literacy12: the fake discerned, and done in good jest – or at least for a few harmless pennies13 – at a time when convincing protagonists and yellow journalism could circulate global conflict, and more “serious” mediated illusions could circle the world.14 “The mermaid, at the time it was exhibited, was represented to be as I represented it,” explained Barnum on the stand at the Mumler hoax trial, “and I have not seen anything to the contrary.15 … I had no reason … to doubt what it was represented to me at the time. I never owned it. I hired it.”

Entity IP.

The Feejee Mermaid. Detail of postcard. Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

When the Lumière brothers first exhibited their 1896 film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the story goes that the film so compelled the audience with its credibility that viewers fled from the train. Other scholars rebuke the myth even as a rush of haunted house frenzy,16 one considering that viewers could have instantly mistaken the new technology for a camera obscura – which would indicate the projected image actually occurring outside the cinématographe salon in real life.17 As with ’60s media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous fishbowl analogy, our perception adapts to the technology surrounding it.

Divers at Work on the Wreck of the Maine (1898), Georges Méliès

George Méliès’s own transversal of magic to early film was not only in knowing his magic tricks but also the material – his mastery of the substitution splice of film, that space of the editor’s painstaking sleight of hand between frames. The magic itself occurs in what happened between the film – how the lenticular parts18 of two film cuts re-stuck together could sync continuous meaning as illusion, because a viewer is seeing it unfold, screened in real time. Eventually, the technology of sync sound layered onto the performative elements one contends with through the magic of the visual cuts of film, but viewers still, viscerally, put together the film for themselves in their mind’s eye with the course of a convincing movie. This is not even to speak of the human need for continuity through story; the critic John Berger pointed this self-preservation out – in his film essay “About Time” – to be so important to us that prisoners, surviving in the camps, would network their last pieces of bread together to pay the evening storyteller in their midst.19

It is not unlike what psychologist Viktor Frankl summed up in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, utilizing the stripped-down conditions of war he experienced: man finds his meaning, his truth, in how he creates and maintains it in his particular journey, in choosing what can be done versus what, in a perfect universe, should be. We find our self-actualization within, and despite, the conditions at hand. “The inexorability of time, the inevitability of death, the desire for immortality – all that, in a nutshell, is still what interests us,” Berger explains.20 “Sometimes I say to myself that the storyteller is Death’s secretary: when you tell a story about a life, you try to touch its meaning, the meaning of that life, to hold it, to preserve it, against the onrush of chaos. Secretly, or openly, we all know that there are meanings, moments, forces, which seem to us to outlast time.”21

Berger speaks of the beyond-time of folktales and photographs, but the film applies. Humans are co-creators of their illusion, as much as the frame rate uses the camera of their eye, and the time passage of the mind, to put it together as continuous moving image. The longue durée, the performance of the film, becomes – like the meaning-making man – individually self-actualized.22 Is this a space too close to the personal, the intangible inside us, to dare make it perceivably a hoax? Or a humbug? To encroach on immortality with AI?

“I never took money from a man without giving him the worth of four times over. These pictures that I exhibited I did so as a humbug, and not as a reality, not like this man who takes $10 from people.” – P. T. Barnum23

The movie industry.

Categorical questions have long plagued the impulse to merit film through awards, and people get angry about it. It gets personal. How can we forget The Banshees of Inisherin, posited at the Golden Globes in 2023 as primarily a comedy including (spoiler alert) self-mutilation, off-screen suicide, and a dead donkey to the backdrop of the Irish Troubles – or that the film’s inclusion in the AFI honors as a non-American film was tucked into a new “special award” mention.24 And how exactly was it that Barbie, which ingeniously rolled pop culture history research into a genre-bending script of avant garde musical-vaudevillian slapstick-to-real life drama, soon came to be known as an “adapted screenplay” by the Academy (despite campaigning under the WGA consensus “original”)?25

A Leonardo Best Actor snub, you say? Fuhgeddaboudit. No one’s even counting anymore. As Daniel D’Addario pointed out in Variety this time last year, the line between Art and (self-conscious industry) Life barely becomes so blurred as in the way the effortlessly talented playboy DiCaprio must abjectly suffer in a production to get nominated by Hollywood.26 Sadly, Killers of the Flower Moon last year just apparently wasn’t enough.

The perfect, non-“plainspoken”27 role: it is a challenge that inspires and perhaps vexes filmmakers and actors. How to train, how to endure the accent and grueling set challenges, the historical and regional authenticity. How to consistently perform. How to conjure something to the authentic root of humanity, to the hindbrain of our trials and motivations and reality, and then transcend it in the fishbowl of a difficult, dramatized reality. Ask a digital age Futurist what he thinks about the purpose of film and you might be surprised:

“The story of film begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around this fire are primates of a certain species, our ancestors, an animal distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns,”28 explained William Gibson at his 2003 Directors Guild of America Digital Day speech. “There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire looks like nothing else. It generates light in darkness. It moves. It is alive.”29 From trompe l’oeil to film, the essential element becomes life.

A recirculating user post by All the Right Movies on X.com, Feb. 2025

“When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it.
– David Lynch30

No wonder the controversy outlined in Vanity Fair over The Brutalist’s Academy Award nominations. According to a media trail that emanated out of production nerd literature with the film’s editor (just prior to Oscar nominations that dropped, hard), the film had used AI voice-generation tech out of Ukraine to improve dialect accents in postproduction.31 This includes those of the lead actors, Felicity Jones and Adrian Brody. “Most of” the “trickier” dialect scenes, according to Vanity, are actually achieved through a vocal portmanteau of Hungarian film editor Dávid Jancsó speaking, as well as the “preserved performances” of Brody and Jones as they spoke in the actual filming.32 Finally, it seems, AI can provide us a deus ex machina of continuity for that requisite of actors maintaining the fourth wall in challenging roles. If only Pacino had it in 1990 for his Cockney.

In fairness, the Vanity Fair article outlines many benefits of trimming down preparations for accent credibility in postprod: the acceptance of global audiences (and respect to the dialect culture of choice), the ability to keep a low budget when, let’s be honest, slogging dramas are underfunded in a sea of snappy blockbusters.33 But what happens when those manipulated roles are then nominated for Oscars – the Best Actor nomination no less? Does a “generated” perfection cheapen the human touch?34 What is a convincing, long-suffering (or just highly skilled) performance, if not an ability to manage the uncanny valley a role demands between the fictional and real – throughout the course of filming? Did we not come here for the triumph of both human and story?

In real life, Adrien Brody’s looking a little too playboy handsome (like DiCaprio) to get off that easy. Did he suffer enough consistently, convincingly, almost superhumanly? Or are these successes of endurance to be reserved to the domicile of a technical award? “People might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of – or because of – his suffering,”35 wrote director David Lynch in his Catching the Big Fish. “I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great – I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.”

Who, or what, has produced this magic? What is the price of admissibility? As Coppola demonstrated in the cinematheque hall of his film Dracula, we think we come for shock, amusement, the perfection of cinematic illusion: a film of a train pulling into a station in La Ciotat. What we’re really looking for is a transcendence of the human condition, the impossible immortalization of life, a glimpse into the soul of the wolf not far behind. Our ancestral history is to “see the faces of wolves and of their own dead in the flames,” Gibson told the Directors Guild in his dot-com era speech.36

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Francis Ford Coppola

In 2015, three authors (Flavia Montaggio, Patricia Montaggio, and Imp Kerr) put out a circulated scientific paper on a “DNA-based prediction of Nietzsche’s voice,” in which touch DNA was collected from Nietzsche archives and used to isolate a “phenotypic expression of the vocal tract and larynx structure and function.”37 Through this experiment, “an SNP-based voice profile of Nietzsche was inferred” and an approximate, undead voice of Nietzsche was recorded – for the first time ever – reading a phrase of his own work.38 The provocative report, however, proved to be the clever and successful hoax of performance artists, much as was the airport TSA Emotional Support Peacock, or Joaquin Phoenix’s ruthlessly paraded 2009 media “mental breakdown,”39 which turned out to be – like Andy Kaufman’s wrestling debacle – an art-versus-life-shattering media ruse (mostly at least. For what price, art?). These acts extend beyond the known canvas (or screen) of what we call art.

A painter who was known for blurring the space of art and life himself, Jackson Pollock was recently cited in a U.S. Copyright Office report rejecting copyright protections for AI. Pointing to Pollock’s randomization of humanly controlled color choices, “texture, placement … and body movements,” the report is used to back up why only parts of AI-assisted work with “perceptible human expression” can still be copyrighted.40

Allan Kaprow – the oft-forgotten Fluxus artist who once palled around with John Cage – wrote a landmark essay to open up the ’60s, when the “action painter” Jackson Pollock died. For Kaprow, Pollock’s establishment of art as movement, as “act” versus object, as “personal mark” on the canvas didn’t just create “some magnificent paintings.41 It “also destroyed painting,” where the action of the painting extended beyond and could not be contained by the edges of the canvas.42 Rather than be read as any embroiled statement against an institution of art – like Duchamp’s infamous signed urinal as modernist sculpture – Pollock “may well be a return to the point where art was more actively involved in ritual, magic and life than we have known it in our recent past,” wrote Kaprow.43 “If so, it is an exceedingly important step, and in its superior way, offers a solution to the complaints of those who would have us put a bit of life into art.”44 Rather than modernist irony, Pollock suggests a need for something living, sacred in the dialogue of life into culture.

Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea (Study of the Aurora Borealis), ironic art by Alphonse Allais (1884)

Irony poisoning.

We have seen the Golem on screen before: Carrie Fisher in The Rise of Skywalker, Marlon Brando in Superman Returns. They are like inhuman art collages, cinematic homages of media lives past here preserved for posterity – never sold as an autonomous, living role. If the Adamic myth holds that man can access the divine on earth through his creations of technology,45 the 2023 Hollywood strikes showed that even Iron Man doesn’t want it forever.46 At least not in a non-elective Disney role.

“Nachdem Du mich entdeckt hast, war es kein Kunststück mich zu finden: die Schwierigkeit ist jetzt die, mich zu verlieren / After you discovered me, it was no great feat to find me. The problem now is how to lose me.” – Nietzsche’s voice47

Just like the live-cam milk chuggers who crashed Shia LaBeouf’s contemporary performance art using his own celeb status and films, life crashes in. As the pursuit of AI – and perhaps more primarily our obsessive need for technological progress, IP immortality, and, yes, more magic – crashes in on the scene of our treasured stories, things may happen while we still don’t know what to do about them. No one should feel they have to individually live down the embarrassment of these public AI implosions, just as Robert Downey Jr. could care less about his lawsuit threats to Disney, or really anything he’s done that produces personal growth. It’s all public now, might as well laugh about it on Joe Rogan and go home. But like Shia vs. Reddit, it is a life/art beast still unknown, both terrifying and exhilarating as life itself. As William Gibson wrote, “in the watching of the fire and the telling of the tale lie the beginning of what we still call film.”

May the fire help us to fend off the wolves.

Wild at Heart (1990), David Lynch

Screenshots:

1. A Trip to Jupiter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XdN8SXGKIs
2. Endgame: https://youtu.be/yu6WaM2u82I?si=Qiz6Y-ECqjlB-7NV
3. Megalopolis: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/megalopolis/umc.cmc.4a4dlwi05nu8x5f4fanucc5nv
4. Divers at Work on the Wreck of the Maine: https://youtu.be/DAkz4KwBQzo?si=5nUxXh8Yx_H-m8MV
5. Dracula: https://youtu.be/EnnoUU4hRIk?si=oxtqSwSKRmjmKS2m
6. Wild at Heart: https://archive.org/details/wild-at-heart