Will The Brutalist’s AI cost Adrien Brody a second Oscar?

Adrien Brody seemed like a sure thing for the Best Actor Oscar, but the news that his accent was enhanced with AI may slow his momentum.

With a little more than a month to go until the 97thAcademy Awards, it looks like The Brutalist will be the one to beat, with many favoring it to take Best Picture and Brady Corbet Best Director. The odds have also skyrocketed for Adrien Brody to win his second Best Actor Oscar. But he may be hitting a roadblock as it’s been revealed that he’s taken the most powerful performance-enhancing drug in the business today: AI. While Brody has earned continuous praise for his portrayal of Holocaust survivor and architect László Tóth, it turns out that AI was used to enhance his Hungarian accent.

Seam The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó (a Hungarian native) told RedShark Newsdespite being of Hungarian heritage, Adrien Brody is still notoriously difficult to nail. “It’s not that simple. It is a very unique language. We trained (Brody and Felicity Jones) and they did a great job, but we also wanted to perfect it so that even the locals wouldn’t notice any difference.”

Even still, as big as Brody is, the team went through several routes to make sure his accent was perfect. “If you come from the Anglo-Saxon world, certain sounds can be particularly difficult to understand. We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them entirely with other actors, but it just didn’t work. So we looked looking for other opportunities to improve it.” Jancsó added, “Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me speaking in there. We were very careful to keep their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there. You can do this yourself in ProTools, but we had a lot of dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process or we would still be in the mail.”

Although that’s certainly a good thing The Brutalist team didn’t immediately try to improve Adrien Brody’s accent with artificial intelligence (instead wisely trying other methods before ultimately making the decision), the fact that the technology was used – even in a seemingly minor capacity – will undoubtedly be a problem for many when it comes to Oscar voting. Is this fully Brody at work here, or is the push from artificial intelligence serving to detract from his performance? Oscar nominations are this week and there’s no arguing that Brody will be on the ballot, but will this news hurt his chances as a front-runner for Best Actor?

What do you think? Was the use of artificial intelligence justified? Will it cost Adrien Brody the Oscar?