What books are the characters from this year’s best picture nominees reading?
It’s that time of year again, when Hollywood’s eyes turn to That Golden Man, the big man-shaped award, that wonderful action figure we all want to hold but cannot play with: Mr. Oscar himself.
This year a lot of the movies nominated for Best Picture are based on books—Conclave, Wicked, A Complete Unknown, Dune, Nickel Boys, Emilia Perez, and I’m Still Here. But I got curious about the reading lives of the characters within these movies—what might we find on those fictional bookshelves?
ANORA
Mikey Madison’s Ani seems like she’d be into some classic melodramas like The Inheritance or Mansfield Park, but I could very easily see her on the N train with some Ali Hazelwood or Abbi Jimenez—something escapist and fun after a long day.
Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) is not reading a lot of books, I think. One of his friends definitely turned him on to some new AI thing that summarizes business books into a couple quick paragraphs—I bet he blasts through a dozen summaries of airport-bookstore bestsellers before getting bored. He’s a big video game guy, so he might be into Russian translations of what we might call The Gamer Canon: Ready Player One, Ender’s Game, The Murderbot books, maybe also including things like Battle Royale or The Gunslinger too?
I have a hunch that the henchman Igor is probably the secret bookworm, and that he’s read all of the Russian classics and probably a lot of Dad History books like Stephen Amobrose and David McCullough. But I also bet he’s taking away all the wrong political lessons from everything he’s reading.
NICKEL BOYS
This is one that I have to break form here and recommend the book alongside the movie—both are so excellent and in such different ways.
Ethan Herisse and Daveed Diggs both play the main character Elwood, who I’m sure from school age was reading the great Harlem Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay, and maybe even more contemporary writer like Ishmael Reed. I can also see him being into some interesting, radical new history—I’ll bet he would love The Reckoning, Black Spartacus, or We Had a Little Real Estate Problem.
THE SUBSTANCE
Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle probably started off with the classics of self-improvement back in the day, stuff like The Power of Positive Thinking and Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution. But clearly none of that was working, hence The Substance.
As the movie marches along, I imagine eventually she’d be tempted by cooler body horror like Uzumaki, Her Body and Other Parties, or The Cipher, in an attempt to understand or inspire what’s going on with her.
Margaret Qualley’s rebooted Sue is going to read the latest romantasy, whatever’s new and everyone’s into. I bet she’ll also get really into The Hunger Games books, which confuses everyone around her because they can’t believe she’s only just now hearing about them.
And Dennis Quaid’s character Harvey doesn’t read, not even the scripts he greenlights.
WICKED
I haven’t seen Wicked in any iteration, I’m sorry to say—many friends and acquaintances hear this and look at me like I should be immediately confined to a pit. Perhaps someday I’ll watch it at home, but I didn’t see it in theaters because I start to feel physically unwell if I’m around too many Disney Adults.
So much to say, I had to turn to my colleagues for tips on this one. Brittany Allen suggested that Galinda would have The Bombshell Manual of Style on her coffee table, which promises to tell readers “what makes a Bombshell tick.”
Brittany also said “for reasons I’m not prepared to explain, Elphaba’s on a Benjamín Labatut kick. She and Adrien Brutalist Brody are discussing When We Cease to Understand the World next week in the grimmest book club ever.” I feel like some of the more intense dudes in Dune might also be in this book club.
My editor Emily Temple thought that Galinda is probably reading what everyone is reading—lots of Onyx Storm and such—or a high-school-assigned reading classic like Catcher in the Rye that she claims is her favorite, but in reality is the only book she’s ever read.
Emily also suggested that Elphaba would be a Kafka fan, because of her lonely childhood. Maybe something like Amerika, about struggling in a different world, would make sense?
EMILIA PÉREZ
I asked my colleagues for help with Emilia Pérez too—what these characters might be reading had us all confused as the movie is tonally. This isn’t a movie that does a lot of subtlety, so when Emilia’s back in Mexico City, I can imagine her reading something on the nose like OJ’s If I Did It or Hillary Clinton’s What Happened.
Rita might find some inspiration from something epic and operatic, with themes of escape and evasion like The Count of Monte Cristo.
Though, I think the thing to do here is not worry about Emilia Perez and pick up something by Torrey Peters, or Danez Smith, or preorder Mattie Lubchansky’s new book instead.
I’M STILL HERE
Apologies—I haven’t seen this one yet either, but seems like a good chance to talk up some good Brazilian writers: the essential, indelible Clarice Lispector and the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I also recently read and liked Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Jr. and The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel.
I’ll get back to you about this one! That’s The Blogger’s Promise.
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
I found Unknown Dylan hard to disassociate from Chalamet’s character in Ladybird, who’s performatively reading Howard Zinn in that one scene. This slippage and the haughty take on the singer makes me think he was deep in some kind of ‘60s fuckboy canon: lots of Beats—Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac—and maybe he’s dramatically reading poems by Dickenson and Rumi, too.
These days Dylan is reading some niche spooky books, so he turned it around.
Suze Rotolo, Sylvie Russo in the film, seems like the more interesting reader. She apparently introduced Dylan to Rimbaud and Brecht, but given her radical politics that brought her to Cuba, I can also imagine her reading Che and Fanon.
THE BRUTALIST
Ayn Rand’s stink is all over this movie—you sense The Fountainhead somewhere behind the camera with the same certainty that you know as soon as you walk into an apartment that someone has cats.
Also, I can imagine nearly every main character in this movie reading The Fountainhead and being into it. The rich father and son Van Burens probably also subscribe to Rand’s Objectivist newsletter. I could also very easily see the son Harry running off to try and join Rand’s Objectivist cult, but leaving when Rand doesn’t want to have an affair with him.
Adrian Brody’s László has definitely read the architectural classics, especially since he was Bauhaus educated—Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, the anti-oramentalism of Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner’s book on modern architecture, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, and Louis Sullivan’s essays on the skyscraper.
In his free time, I can see him stretching out to read some sad Russians, maybe Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, or a classic Hungarian book like Ferenc Molnár’s The Paul Street Boys.
DUNE: PART TWO
Paul Atreides is another character where I can’t unsee Chalamat—that picture of him reading Dune on the subway seems like a picture of him reading about himself.
Paul’s got crazy predictive powers so I can imagine he just needs to enter a Spice Trance to divine information from any book that has been or will be published. Of course he’s only going to use this to consolidate power, and maybe us The Voice to inflict lame spoilers on his foes (“Those Fight Club guys have a lot in common, do they not…”)
Paul also seems like a guy who’s really getting on the Fedaykin’s nerves because he won’t shut up about The Motorcycle Diaries.
Zendaya’s Chani is the real radical of the crew—I can see her reading The Autobiography of Malcom X and some of Mao’s writing. She’s also definitely way into some cool poetry like Carl Phillips or Maggie Nelson.
(Sidebar: do the Fremen’s spiced-up blue eyes mean they can read better in the dark? Do they have to use reading lamps in the sietches, or can they just glow-read?)
I imagine Florence Pugh’s Princess Irulan is the best read of the crew—she’s using her position in the Empire to get a ton of advance galleys, even the ones that seem impossible to get a hold of. Another sidebar: can someone photoshop her in the Beautiful World, Where Are You bucket hat for me?
King of the freaks Feyd-Rautha, played by Austin “Elvis Voice Forever” Butler, is definitely doing that thing where you pretend to read and are hiding something else behind it—you think he’s reading Moby Dick, but he’s actually just looking at messed up photos of in-process surgeries or something.
CONCLAVE
I love my Conclave boys and I really had to hold myself back on this particular movie’s book picks. So much to say if you want to chat ‘clave, my DMs are open.
Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence seems like he’s someone who is rereading Shakespeare a lot, but also a Malcolm Gladwell stan who’s deep into the Thinking, Fast and Slow kind of self-improvement book. He’s also definitely moved by poetry—I can imagine him tearing up reading some Seamus Heaney or Tracy K. Smith.
Has Cardinal Lawrence read Machiavelli? He’ll never tell…
I know I’m eliding actor and character here, but Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini seems like he’s poring over stuff like Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan and books on Italian architecture—he’s making the most of his time in Rome. I bet he’s also really into the Neopolitan novels and Sally Rooney—doesn’t he seem like he has a blog or an Instagram presence that’s corny, but pretty entertaining?
John Lithgow’s Cardinal Joseph Tremblay is the only one of crew who’s read Dan Brown, and I bet he’s tried to bring the books up with the other Cardinals at least once, only to have them laugh at him. Which of course he tries to play off like he was just kidding—“Brothers, of course I was joking, the whole time!”—only to be forced to sadly slink back to his room and put away his signed copy of Angels & Demons with a sigh.
Monsignor Raymond O’Malley, the oppo research assistant, is probably reading too many John Grisham legal thrillers. I can also see him getting a lot of out big political books like Nixonland or What It Takes. He’s probably also the only one up on interesting new writers who are tackling religion, like Christian Wiman.
Sister Agnes, played by the great Isabella Rosellini, is deep into her secrets and spies books. She’s probably read a lot of Alan Furst and I bet Harriet The Spy was formative for her. I also have a hunch that sometime after the Second Vatican Council, she read a bunch of Joan Didion too.
They’re all reading the Bible, of course, but the fact that it seems kind of low on their TBR pile is maybe part of the issue.
