Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial is making a lot more noise than Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, about Meta and Mark Zuckerberg and whistle blowing, opens this Friday. Reviews are embargoed until tomorrow but from the early reactions that I’ve seen so far, the most common description is that it’s “solid”. Solid is good, but it is not spectacular, and I say this because Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, which is about Sam Altman and OpenAI, screened last night at the NY Film Festival, and it seems to be making a lot more noise.

Artificial is a December release, still over two months away, but since it premiered at the festival, full reviews are available and those reviews are now generating Oscar buzz – which tells you that NEON has some confidence in this project and will likely be putting some resources into campaigning behind it. It was confirmed yesterday that Yura Borisov will be submitted for consideration in the Best Actor category and that Andrew Garfield, who plays Sam Altman, will be campaigned in the Best Supporting Actor category making both categories that much more competitive this year. Monica Barbaro is also getting a lot of praise for her performance as Mira Murati, the chief technology officer at OpenAI who has gone on the record about Sam Altman’s bullsh-t. Monica will be positioned as a Best Supporting Actress contender although she was not at the premiere last night, probably because she’s in France working on Bradley Cooper and Margot Robbie’s Ocean's prequel. Andrew was asked about her on the carpet:

As previewed, one of the themes of this movie season and this award season is “Billionaires Suck”. The Elon Musk documentary is coming as is You Can See Everything, about Elizabeth Holmes and her sketchy husband. Maybe that’s why Vanity Fair chose to actually put Sam Altman on the cover of the new issue, a controversial decision judging from the comment section.

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On the one hand, VF has done some excellent and critical reporting on the modern class of billionaire scammers and also the Trump administration. On the other hand, as Jeremy O. Harris pointed out a few days ago in his own Vanity Fair feature, legacy publications like Vogue and Vanity Fair have also platformed the very people who are doing so much harm – to media, to governments, to local communities, to children, to the environment. Because even if the printed words in these articles are meant to interrogate the absence of humanity in these business decisions that are 100% fueled by greed and nothing else, it also amplifies the oligarch ego; they won’t hear the criticism, they’re too flattered by the flex of being in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

This debate between Jeremy and Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci is worth watching, even though there’s no question that basically Jeremy metaphorically lands all his punches. And it’s a beautiful example of how artists and media should be exchanging and engaging. The media needs to challenge artists and celebrities, but this is how artists and celebrities can challenge media gatekeepers too – through film, like Artificial, but also in conversation, the way Jeremy is doing here. Flip through the carousel to watch all the videos.