'Artificial' Earns Oscar Buzz at London Premiere — SkimNews
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- Andrew Garfield sparked Oscar buzz for playing Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino's 'Artificial,' following rave reviews at the New York Film Festival premiere and an enthusiastic ovation inside the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday.
- Yura Borisov entered the lead-actor Oscar race as OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, a year after his supporting nomination for 'Anora,' while Garfield campaigns in supporting.
- Amazon MGM Studios dropped the film in June shortly after Amazon announced its $50 billion investment in OpenAI; Neon picked up distribution and is now mounting the awards push.
- Sam Altman told Vanity Fair he had no contact with anyone at Amazon — including Jeff Bezos — about the film being dropped, and claimed he waved at Garfield while the crew filmed outside his house; Garfield told Variety he never saw him despite actively looking.
- Ike Barinholtz, cast as Elon Musk, joked 'I had never heard of him. Just not a news guy!' and said the role required separating Musk's current 'DOGE and chainsaws' persona from his early-OpenAI 'god'-like reputation in Silicon Valley.
- Guadagnino called 'Artificial' 'the most complicated movie to imagine because the world of Silicon Valley is the least seductive visually,' but told the London crowd, 'I hope you will be seduced by the movie.'
- Artificial is set to debut in U.S. theaters on Dec. 25 and in the U.K. on Jan. 22, with a full cast including Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton.
Why it matters: For two-time nominee Andrew Garfield, who has never won, this is a serious best-supporting-actor campaign vehicle — and the film's Amazon-to-Neon trajectory, where Amazon MGM dropped it just after Amazon pledged $50 billion to OpenAI, now sits inside the movie's own narrative about tech-world entanglements. A Dec. 25 U.S. release lands while the real Altman-versus-board saga is still in public memory.
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