A Parents’ Guide to the Sick and Dying Children of Awards Season

Nate Jones · 2026-01-02T17:00:52.818Z

There’s not much happening on the awards front over the holidays, so this week’s edition of Gold Rush is delving into an unfortunate trend in 2025 Oscar contenders — one I’ve personally been avoiding. Regular readers may have noticed that, for your faithful columnist, this awards season has not been like the others. The Oscar statuette is no longer the most important tiny bald person in my life. In September, my wife and I welcomed a baby girl. It would have been very poetic for One Battle After Another to have been the last movie I saw before going on leave, but it was only the second to last; the last was, unfortunately, After the Hunt, which didn’t really teach me anything about fatherhood, but did make me less likely to pressure my kid into going to Yale.

I’ve been back at work for six weeks now, but as the first person in history ever to have a child, it’s still an adjustment. There have been moments of despair, when I came close to breaking down because I couldn’t handle what was happening in front of me. And besides seeing Ella McKay, I’ve also been parenting. Last month, in the span of a few hours, I went from changing a diaper in the parking lot of a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike — an experience that was not especially glamorous but did feel, on some level, meaningful — to attending the Gotham Awards — an event that was incredibly glamorous but also essentially meaningless.

In my battle against awards-season anhedonia, I have been dealing with the sheer number of movies in this year’s Oscars race that are about dead children, dying children, sick children, or just generally unfortunate children. This was not an unforeseen development for anyone who could read a release calendar, so I spent the summer begging to be allowed to see these films while I was, for the moment, childless. For one reason or another, that did not happen (with one exception, which I’ll get to later). And so for me, catching up on the 2026 awards slate has meant signing up for an unofficial Dead Children Film Festival. This is a task I have approached with my usual forbearance and grit, which is to say I’ve been complaining about it to anyone who will listen. Here’s how it has gone.

Hamnet was the first film I saw when I came back to work. Literally on my first day back! The thought was to rip the Band-Aid off, getting the year’s most acclaimed dead-child movie out of the way early. However, the plan backfired. I was simply not in the mood for a film about William Shakespeare writing Hamlet as a way to process the death of his similarly named kid.

Vital context: While I was on leave, someone in my life lost their son. It’s not my grief, so I don’t want to be the Death Police, but suffice it to say that the themes of Chloé Zhao’s film were less abstract to me than they might have been earlier. Seeing actors in Elizabethan garb play out versions of scenes that I had lived through gave the film an uncanny feeling of dress-up. I was not ready to see the death of a child lead to any sort of catharsis, particularly not in the way Hamnet does it, full of what others might call daring acts of imagination, but what I found to be, and this is a scientific term, “woo-woo bullshit.”

Weirdly enough, the stubborn resistance I felt to Hamnet is similar to what happens to Jessie Buckley’s character at the end of the movie when she sees Hamlet for the first time. Unlike her, though, I knew where the story was going. For much of Hamnet, I was acutely aware that I was sitting around waiting for a child to die. I still cried at the end — I’m only human — but I left feeling the way Justin Chang felt about Train Dreams: that I’d just seen a beautiful movie but didn’t entirely trust its beauty.

I’m sensitive to the fact that Hamnet has become the early leader in the Oscar-villain race, and I don’t want to impugn anyone who did find genuine catharsis in it. It is a film made with craft and care, and I don’t think anyone behind it went into the project with any cynicism. Plenty of other parents have been moved by it, including our own Bilge Ebiri and IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. But I have to agree with the other Brooklyn-dad film critic David, Sims, who says, “The Big Idea of this narrative fundamentally just clanked off the backboard for me.”

The Testament of Ann Lee

Around ten years ago, there was a trend in criticism to treat it as offensive or illegitimate if a story depicted bad things happening without being entirely about those things. In part, this was a reasonable response to tropes like fridging, but it always seemed overly dogmatic to me. (I always wondered how these critics would have responded to Casablanca: “The invasion of France is NOT a plot device!”) I was thinking about this during my screening of The Testament of Ann Lee, the day after I saw Hamnet. Like Hamnet, Ann Lee is also about a woman in Olde England who loses a child — multiple children, in fact — but it is not strictly about their deaths. Rather, that loss is a character motivation for what she did afterward: found the Shakers, a religious community built around ecstatic worship and also, quite crucially, celibacy.

The historical Ann Lee really did have four children who all died during infancy — a series of events that Mona Fastvold’s film handles in a musical montage. (If you were not aware, the movie is a musical scored to Shaker hymns.) But it didn’t feel like the film was brushing past these tragedies or losing sight of them. Fastvold draws a natural line between the deaths of Ann’s children and her understandable desire to avoid procreation altogether, while also taking her often alienating religious views seriously. (Ann Lee’s handling of period spirituality stands in stark contrast to how Hamnet conveniently hand-waves away 16th-century Christianity so as not to put off today’s secular audiences — and I promise this is the last time I will compare the two!) I have no idea if my preference for Ann Lee’s comparatively breezy method of depicting child death, versus the more wallow-heavy version in Hamnet, has anything to do with becoming a parent, but I do know that it is a fantastic film that deserves more recognition than it has received this awards season, particularly for Amanda Seyfried’s totally committed performance.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

After our daughter was born, my perspective shifted in innumerable ways. For example, while previously I rarely spent much time thinking about the potentially imminent deaths of those I hung out with, I could now only go a few hours without worrying whether the baby was about to perish — choke on her own spit-up, dash herself against concrete, or just spontaneously combust. There was something else I realized: how, even after birth, the child remained an extension of my wife’s body. Not only because she was physically dependent on her for the sustenance of life, but because they’d already lived with each other for nine months. They were not strangers; they’d already been a “we.”

If I Had Legs expresses both this paranoia and this sense of connection in a way I’d never seen before. Mary Bronstein’s film stars Rose Byrne as a Long Island mom unraveling while dealing with her daughter’s mysterious stomach ailment. Byrne’s performance has been rightly hailed as one of the best of the year, and it has to be, because Bronstein keeps her camera firmly fixed on the actress’s face for almost the entirety of the film. The little girl’s face is never seen onscreen; in effect, the onscreen child becomes an extension of the mother — there is no boundary between the illness of the one and the guilt and anxiety of the other. They form an infinite-feedback loop, each fueling the other. Because isn’t that the way we treat mothers?

The film’s ending is ambiguous about what happens to the kid, which was fine by me. Our child is so young that she has never been sick, and I am not looking forward to the day that happens. That wasn’t the only way I got off easy — like a typical man — when it came to Legs. The film’s theatrical run came and went while I was on leave, so I watched it on a screener on a laptop over Thanksgiving. I do wish I’d been able to see it in a theater, where I would have felt even more locked in with Byrne’s character. There’d be no escape. Just like parenthood.

The Voice of Hind Rajab

I’m spending the holidays around some of my nieces and nephews, and I’ve been thinking about how kids are basically the same everywhere. They order you around and they never say “please.” They get indignant when you don’t do exactly what they want, exactly when they want it. And you have to be extremely careful in how you talk to them, because you’re never sure what they do or don’t know, what’s important to let them know, or what they’re better off not knowing.

It’s hard not to think of the actual children in your life while you’re watching The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Tunisian submission for the Best International Film Oscar. Hind Rajab was an actual child, too, who was killed alongside members of her extended family during Israel’s invasion of Gaza in January 2024. (For this reason, I went back and forth over whether it was appropriate to include the film in this roundup or exclude it, before ultimately deciding it was worth covering.) Though the IDF initially denied responsibility, multiple investigations have concluded the family was likely killed by an Israeli tank, an act of deliberate targeting that the United Nations Human Rights Council has suggested could be a war crime. The 5-year-old Hind was the only survivor of the first strike on her family’s car; before her death, she spent hours on the phone with emergency services begging for rescue. Though an ambulance was only a short distance away, Red Crescent workers had to navigate a telephone game of bureaucracy in order to clear a safe path through the war zone. And then, once they’d finally gotten the okay and the ambulance was almost there, the IDF blew it up, too — with an American-made missile.

Kaouther Ben Hania’s film is built around the real audio of that call, a creative decision that has sparked some good-faith debate around questions of exploitation. It’s set in the Red Crescent offices in the West Bank, as aid workers debate whether to prioritize a speedy rescue or the safety of the first responders, whose deaths would mean fewer rescues in the future. (As we viewers are aware, the point was ultimately moot.) They also agonize over how best to talk to Hind herself. Does she know her family members are dead, or should they pretend they’re sleeping? Should they try to calm her down, or meet her in her grief? There are no right answers, only anguish.

Ben Hania is a documentarian who often blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, and her decision to use Hind’s actual voice is of a piece with her other choices. (At times, she includes footage of the real call-center workers, and the actors playing them, in the same shot.) My colleague Alex Jung called that decision “brilliant and awful … so alive it has the effect of pulling you into an immediate present where she could still survive.” In a film where some of the fictional characters occasionally suffer from first-day-on-the-job-itis, the choice also makes Hind herself feel painfully real. This is not a movie child; this is an actual child. When Ben Hania cuts to pictures of Hind, I couldn’t help comparing them to photos of my 5-year-old niece. They have the same silly smile.

Though I did not know this going in, I did manage to see one of this year’s dead-child films ahead of time. The fact that a child dies in it functions as a second-act twist, so I’m not going to spoil which film it is. All I’ll say is that I found the moment to be a genuine gut punch, but other viewers I respect consider it an example of the film’s edgelord nihilism. I don’t want to get too gender essentialist, but only while writing this post did I realize this is the only movie on the list directed by a man. Makes you think!

Though Lynn Ramsay’s film is often grouped in with other portraits of “maternal ambivalence” like If I Had Legs, the child in this one is fine. (Well, not “fine” exactly, but not in mortal peril.) Still, I wanted to mention it because, barely five minutes into the film, Jennifer Lawrence’s character’s first response to motherhood is to skulk through tall grass and attempt to masturbate with a knife, which made me wonder if we aren’t getting the full parenting experience.

Thankfully, not every film in this year’s Oscars race is about dead children. There’s also the trio of Jay Kelly, Sentimental Value, and Marty Supreme — all of which, in their own way, are cautionary tales about what not to do as a father. The bar is low!

Oscars Futures: New Year, Same Predictions

Every week* between now and January 22, when the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced, Vulture will consult its crystal ball to determine the changing fortunes in this year’s Oscars race. In our “Oscars Futures” column, we’ll let you in on insider gossip, parse brand-new developments, and track industry buzz to figure out who’s up, who’s down, and who’s currently leading the race for a coveted nomination.

*Since everyone but the Marty Supreme cast is still on holiday, Oscar Futures has not shifted since the last newsletter.

Best Picture Predix

Avatar: Fire and Ash, Frankenstein, Hamnet, It Was Just an Accident, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams

Best Director Predix

Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another; Ryan Coogler, Sinners; Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident; Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value; Chloé Zhao, Hamnet

Best Actor Predix

Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme; Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another; Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon; Michael B. Jordan, Sinners; Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

Best Actress Predix

Jessie Buckley, Hamnet; Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You; Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: For Good; Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another; Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value

Best Supporting Actor Predix

Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another; Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein; Delroy Lindo, Sinners; Sean Penn, One Battle After Another; Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value

Best Supporting Actress Predix

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value; Amy Madigan, Weapons; Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners; Ariana Grande, Wicked: For Good; Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another