Dads Get Messy at This Year’s Oscars, with Bilge Ebiri
From Jay Kelly to Sentimental Value to One Battle After Another, Oscar season 2025 is overflowing with dads—absent ones, ambitious ones, ones who chose career over family and are now reckoning with the cost. We dig into how this year's best films moved beyond the “scary dad" trope to give us fathers who are flawed, human, and genuinely complicated, and what that shift says about how the world is thinking about fatherhood right now.
Credits
Host: Kevin Maguire
Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin
Sound Editor: Sam Williams
Theme Music: Sohn
More of Bilge’s work:
Review of One Battle After Another
Bilge’s Dad Watchlist
The Champ
The Shining
Bigger Than Life
Train Dreams
Jay Kelly
One Battle After Another
Walking with Dinosaurs
Other show references:
Timestamps
00:00 Hello
00:31 Becoming Nemo’s Dad
03:30 Let’s talk movies!
05:00 Film diaries c. 1940s
06:10 Apocalypse Now
07:20 Present dad award
10:43 Core memory of The Shining
15:00 Masculinity crisis
16:48 [SPOILERS] Train Dreams
19:15 Providing vs. protecting
19:58 [SPOILERS] Hamnet
20:20 [SPOILERS] Sentimental Value
21:04 [SPOILERS] Jay Kelly
23:50 [SPOILERS] More Train Dreams
27:24 [SPOILERS] Leo is best film dad
29:10 The Shining easter egg
31:21 Letting go in the teen years
33:00 Watching movies with your kids
36:43 The outcast dinosaur
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