One genre leads the way in bringing climate change to the screen

This year the impact of climate change on the Oscar race has been impossible to avoid. The wildfires that swept through Los Angeles destroyed the homes of Academy members, and caused the announcement of the nominations to be delayed twice. There have even been calls for the Oscar ceremony itself to be either toned down or cancelled.

However, it seems unlikely the industry will forgo an event that serves not just as a warm group hug of self celebration, but also a much needed publicity campaign for the movies as a whole. Come March the red carpet will be rolled out and host Conan O’Brien will have to find a way to confront the tragedy.

But despite big stars such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldaña and Natalie Portman voicing support for environmental causes, and a growing movement in the entertainment industry to tell better climate stories, the films hitting our screens still rarely address the issue, even in the most oblique manner. We now have a test that has been devised to track this – it’s called the Climate Reality Check.

A yardstick for climate stories on screen

You might have heard of the Bechdel test to monitor how women are represented in films. It’s based on three questions: do two or more women have names? Do they talk to each other? Do they talk about something that isn’t a man?

For the Climate Reality Check, there are only two questions: 1. Does climate change exist in the world of the film? 2. Does a character in the film know about climate change?

Films can pass the first part of the test with storylines that relate to climate change, or simple glimpses of news reports or graffiti that reference it. The second part comes through characters’ actions, dialogue or even reading or watching a news report on the issue.

This year’s Oscar hopefuls have a low bar to meet if they want to improve on the performance last year’s batch in the Climate Reality Check. A year ago, only three of the thirteen films analyzed (Barbie, Nyad and Mission Impossible 7) passed the test, according to Good Energy, the organization that came up with it. That’s 23%. None of those three was really about climate, but they all at least mentioned it.

So how about 2025? Good Energy is yet to publish its analysis of how this year’s nominated films performed, but here’s how things looked from where I was sitting.

Oscar-tipped movies center social – not environmental – themes

First of all, we have to hone in on the films set in the real world and the present day or recent past. That means putting aside Dune: Part 2 (which is a shame, considering its environmentalist roots), and Wicked. Four of the movies – Nickel Boys, I’m Still Here, A Complete Unknown and The Brutalist – are period films set in a time when man-made climate change was definitely a thing, but not yet widely known. It doesn’t seem fair to include them.

The Best Picture nominees set in the here and now-ish are The Substance, Conclave, Emilia Pérez and Anora.

And… none has a particular focus on anything to do with climate. Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Conclave, but as for the remaining three, I don’t recall any scenes or dialogue that would meet the bar for the Climate Reality Check. They are all dealing in social issues – drug wars, trans rights, body fascism, exploitation, feminism, corruption and sex work – but unless I missed something, none of them acknowledges the climate crisis or has characters who show awareness.

Why does this matter? Stories are part of the larger cultural conversation. We’re more likely to attach importance to an issue when we see it played out before us as a human drama. But climate change is also increasingly a part of daily life for all of us. It’s not that a film needs to be about climate change the way Don’t Look Up or An Inconvenient Truth were, but as more and more people feel anxiety about the climate and extreme weather events increasingly impact our day-to-day existence, it should automatically bleed into the stories we tell, if only in the background. Like in 2022’s Glass Onion, a quirky whodunnit set on the private island of a tech billionaire who claims to have invented a revolutionary clean fuel source. Climate change itself isn’t a major plot point or anybody’s main motivation, but it sets the context – the reality – for everything that unfolds. Like using mobile phones or wearing the latest fashions, climate change should just be a marker of where we are in time and what’s going on.

One genre leads the way

This year’s good news can be found with two films that unabashedly deal with the environment – and fittingly they are both films that will appeal to younger audiences as well as adults: the Latvian animation Flow, which was nominated for both Best Animation and Best International Film, and The Wild Robot, which was also nominated in the animation category.

The Wild Robot, based on a series of books by Peter Brown, features several extreme weather events, and encourages values of empathy and living with other animals, as a shipwrecked robot learns to care for a hatchling. Whether this is deemed enough to pass the Climate Reality Check is yet to be seen, but we hope so, because the film is far more likely to get audiences interested in the environment than almost anything else on the Oscars list. It builds on a tradition of eco storytelling in both animated movies and sci fi, all the way from Bambi and Planet of the Apes to the Avatar series and Pixar’s Wall-E.

Flow also tells a non-human story. This time of a cat which must survive floods that are engulfing both the countryside and the city. It is an extraordinary film, and extraordinarily moving. Totally free of dialogue, it is as far from an explicit message movie that you can get, yet its sense of impending and actual catastrophe and the need for cooperation as a survival tactic are immediately understandable. In terms of whether it’s depicting real-world climate change, Flow is a bit of a conundrum, but there’s no doubt it’s a film of universal sympathy that speaks to our time in particular.

Zoom out for the bigger picture

Overall the Oscar hopefuls offers a sobering snapshot of the underrepresentation of climate on screen. But the picture brightens up a little when we consider things more broadly. The nostalgia for a moment of political engagement captured in A Complete Unknown, with Bob Dylan voicing the concerns of the young movement around him, will be inspiring to the youth today. Likewise, The Brutalist presents a criticism of exploitation easily transferable to the present day and the exploitation of the environment. Similar arguments can be made for other nominees that have raised issues of social conscience, even if not specifically related to climate.

The fires still burning in L.A. are just the latest example of how the impacts of climate change are hitting home all over the world. Just four months ago it was Cannes – home to the world’s most prestigious film festival – that saw cars swept through its streets by record floods. It’s impossible to ignore, and public attitudes are aligning with the view that man-made climate change is an existential threat.

Audiences no longer need movies to tell them that it is real. They demand movies that mirror their own reality and concerns.

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