Someone really doesn’t want Marty Supreme to win big at the Oscars.
Every year, genuine dislike or quiet whispering campaigns threaten to kneecap one or more top Oscar contenders, for reasons ranging from obvious to dubious.
Last year, old tweets from Emilia Perez star Karla Sofía Gascón hurt the film’s odds, as did minor use of AI in The Brutalist. Anora escaped an attempted takedown over its lack of intimacy coordinators, and director Sean Baker went on to break Oscar records.
Maybe voters just vote for the film they think is best. But knives-out whisper campaigns have been part of campaign season for decades, especially when Harvey Weinstein became infamous for reputed sharp-elbowed awards campaigns, before he became infamous for being convicted of worse things.
There’s plenty of legitimate, healthy debate this year about whether, say, Sinners or One Battle After Another is a better pick for Best Picture. (One Battle director Paul Thomas Anderson is way overdue, but Sinners director Ryan Coogler is a young and exciting filmmaker with a stunning record of hits.)
But then there’s the talk around Marty Supreme — which actually has little to do with Marty Supreme.
It’s more about the movie director Josh Safdie made two movies ago, with his brother Benny: the electric 2017 crime thriller Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson as a man on the run through the Safdies’ typically crazy, chaotic New York.
Anatomy of the Marty Supreme ‘Scandal’
The outcry started with the January 26 launch of California Post, a West Coast offshoot of America’s oldest tabloid, the New York Post. With a front page headline that declared OSCAR WILD!, the new paper claimed the Safdies, who stopped directing movies together after 2019’s Uncut Gems, were part of an “H’wood Scandal.” The paper also purported to tell the “shocking truth behind director Safdie brothers’ mystery split.”
The Post‘s gossip column Page Six contended that the brothers cut ties in 2023 after Benny Safdie, who this year released the solo directorial effort The Smashing Machine, learned the full details of an incident on the Good Time set.
The paper cited “Good Time sources” who said a 17-year-old girl was cast to play a sex worker in the film and “was thrust into a scene that involved nudity and simulated sex with ‘actor’ Buddy Duress during production in New York.”
Duress, a non-actor hired for them film, had been jailed numerous times dating back to 2009 on drug charges, weapons violations, fencing stolen property and motor vehicle theft, according to the Post, and died of a heroin overdose in 2023.
The paper said that as “Josh watched the action unfold on his monitor, and Benny stood in the corner holding the boom, Duress, who was high at the time, pulled down his pants, exposed himself and asked the girl if ‘he could stick it in’ as the cameras continued to roll.”
The paper said Josh Safdie, who is up for Best Director for Marty Supreme, learned of the girl’s age on the day of production.
Neither Benny or Josh Safdie has spoken out about what happened, and the two have said their parting of ways was a natural part of their creative evolution.
The Post said the full details of the incident didn’t come to light until 2022, when their former producing partner, Sebastian “Sebo” Bear-McClard, was divorcing with actress Emily Ratajkowski. The Post also said Bear-McClard had become romantically involved with the Good Time actress after production was over, which had become a factor in a custody battle with Ratajkowski.
Fallout
The matter has become serious enough to draw lengthy stories in both The Hollywood Reporter and The Ankler, among other trades, getting a level of attention than typical Oscar gossip.
The Ankler‘s Katey Rich went deep on the story behind the story. She shared that since the story broke, she has “been texting almost nonstop with fellow journalists and awards season pros, speculating about the timing for the story, who the sources might have been and which rival Oscar campaigns might have been behind it.”
THR, meanwhile, said in a story entitled “Oscar Season’s Messy Side Comes for Marty Supreme” that there were “suspicions of a smear campaign.” THR‘s story noted that the Post article’s writer, Tatiana Siegel, had previously reported key aspects of the story in 2023, when working for Variety.
Long ago, stories needed a news peg to re-emerge. But in the internet age, when social media junkies can resurface any story at any time, there’s little remarkable about a mainstream publication also reminding people of a complicated chapter in someone’s life — especially when that someone is riding high from an Oscar nomination, for example.
Will the story hurt Marty Supreme? Or will a backlash to the backlash help it? We’ll find out when the Oscar are handed out on March 15. Or maybe we won’t — which is the amorphous nature of Oscar debates.
Maybe the voters will just like another movie more for reasons having nothing to do with whatever happened on a Safdie brothers movie set nearly a decade ago.
Main image: Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. A24
