The AI Debate Will Be Awards Season’s Biggest Controversy This Year

Last year, it was the new U.S. immigration policies with “One Battle After Another,” the year before it was… Karla Sofía Gascón’s tweets amid “Emilia Pérez”? Now, in the 2026-2027 movie awards season, the nucleus of all controversy has emerged: the debate over artificial intelligence.

On this week’s episode of IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast, co-hosts Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio unpack what it means for the future of an increasingly tech-company-dominated Hollywood that Amazon MGM Studios just dropped Luca Guadagnino’s movie “Artificial,” a Simon Rich-scripted biopic-exposé of Sam Altman, with Andrew Garfield starring as the OpenAI CEO.

Guadagnino’s latest, and third film with Amazon MGM after box-office hit “Challengers” and awards-season also-ran “After the Hunt,” is now looking for a home. Hush-hush distributor screenings of “Artificial” took place last weekend, as handled by CAA Media Finance. Word on the street is that this movie turned out to be darker and more negative toward Altman than Amazon expected, and the streamer saw no upside in releasing it just a few months after Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI was made public. Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman, after all, are pals. He attended the Bezos-Sanchez wedding in Venice, Italy. The major studios, including Netflix, A24, and Universal’s Focus Features, meanwhile, all reportedly passed on “Artificial,” with Neon and Mubi potentially circling. That’s not surprising, as most big corporations are in bed with AI in one form or another.

The larger corporate-owned entities will be careful not to take unnecessary risks going forward. Hollywood got away with “The Social Network”; whither “The Social Reckoning,” Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up, out October 9?

Google, meanwhile, just planted a $75 million stake in A24 as part of a new artificial-intelligence research partnership. The deal marks the first time Google has taken a stake in a studio. In other words, no question that the debate around AI will dominate this coming awards season. Amazon filmmakers and “Project Hail Mary” directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller will be asked on the campaign trail about their distributor dropping Guadagnino’s film. A24 filmmakers, from Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” and Jessie Eisenberg of “The Debut,” will be asked similar questions about A24’s new relationship with Google DeepMind.

Actors and writers are threatened by AI, but plenty of other people and companies are deep into it. We discuss what it means for the upcoming Oscar season.

Elsewhere on the podcast, we finally catch up on Olivia Wilde’s relationship comedy, the four-hander “The Invite,” which is more “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice” than “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and was one of the most competitive sales at Sundance this year before landing at A24.

Listen to this week’s episode of “Screen Talk” below or on your preferred podcast platform.