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:

Bilge’s writing on Vulture

Bilge’s dad’s film notebooks

Review of Train Dreams

Review of Jay Kelly

Review of Hamnet

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:

Subscribe to TNF newsletter

Kevin’s essay on Train Dreams

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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