Our Hollywood expert on this year's Oscars

"As demonstrated by the two big winners of the year, One Battle After Another and Sinners, old-fashioned grand-scale filmmaking seems firmly back on the menu. Both films and their respective teams went to great lengths and spared no cost to ensure their worlds looked and felt tangible: places you could see, hear, and almost smell, with as little digital manipulation as the story allows.

"These movies lean on production designers creating believable physical spaces in which actors can move and interact naturally, and on locations that lend themselves to being filmed from any angle and through any lens, from a close-up of a face to the vistas of a desert or a Louisiana swamp. In this, they join the growing ranks of filmmakers returning to practical filmmaking after a period when digital technology seemed to make everything visually possible but ultimately difficult to believe.

"The worlds of One Battle, Sinners, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, F1, Train Dreams and many more feel real both emotionally and physically, something that is increasingly recognised and rewarded not just by critics and awards bodies, but also by audiences, particularly younger ones." 

Focusing on authenticity

"Moviegoing among the latter is returning in numbers greater than expected and perhaps feared. Gen Z now attends cinemas 6.1 times a year in the USA, more often than before the pandemic. This is a generation that seems to favour authenticity over excessively artificial experiences and narratives. Films that lean into this dynamic are likely to capture their attention far more than those overloaded with digital effects, especially big spectacular films, the so-called movie experiences that cinema exhibitors say audiences crave most.

"Eschewing digital trickery in favour of slower, more complex, more costly, but also more tangible and authentic approaches to filmmaking aligns perfectly with this ethos. This year looks set to continue the trend. A significant number of movies have bet big on putting the real back into realism, and the physical back into the worlds we experience. The Odyssey, Disclosure Day, Dune 3 and Project Hail Mary have all gone to great lengths in production to ensure the worlds their characters inhabit, however fantastical, have as many physical components as possible.

"Designers, actors and cinematographers can respectively decorate those sets, move in them and film them with a degree of tactile artistry that makes the entire film feel more authentic, more real. That is precisely what younger audiences seem to want, and what older audiences are used to from films made before the advent of digital technologies.

"This year’s Oscars, wittingly or otherwise, acknowledged and awarded the grandeur of cinema not just in terms of stories and genres, but also in filmmaking choices. It is a healthy recognition that filmmakers are artisans mastering their tools, rather than tools at the mercy of technology."

_{Gianluca Sergi is Professor of Film Industries at the University of Nottingham. He is currently leading the Screening Out Loneliness (SOL) project, an interdisciplinary project over four countries that explores how shared film going can bring people together and help reduce the current crisis of loneliness and social isolation.}