🎧 Stephen & Evie Colbert: Local Heroes, Oscar Influencers!
'The Late Show' host and his wife tell me how their work with the Montclair Film Festival fuels their love of film and film culture. Plus: Awards insider intel
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What happens when you’ve got an unusually wide-open best picture Oscar race — and no Oppenheimer or even Everything Everywhere All at Once to throw its established blockbuster weight around? You get a whole lot of indie films with legitimate best picture ambitions — and a lot of work to do.
Some of that work happened this past weekend at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, where hopefuls like Conclave and Anora played for local crowds, with more screening in the coming days. All of this is no small part thanks to town residents Stephen Colbert and his wife, Evie McGee Colbert, with whom I spoke for this podcast, and was able to go deep on a different aspect of the festival experience — the way it can build a local community. Stephen may be the celebrity TV show host in the family, but Evie is the Montclair Film Festival mover and shaker, president of the board and ready with all the details about the year-round work they conduct all over town. “Because we run the Claridge [Theater], we will then reshow movies that are nominated, so we have a whole Oscar-nominated couple of weeks where we show as many of the films as we can,” says Evie, “and a lot of them are films we’ve shown at the festival.”
So of course, both also are caught up in the Oscar buzz. “It was such a joy to have Conclave” at the festival, says Evie. After the film ended, Stephen says he looked at the “guest grid that I keep on my phone of upcoming people on my show,” wondering, “Are any of these actors going to be on?” because he had to talk about it. He realized — “heartbroken,” he says — that he’d had Stanley Tucci on just two days earlier to talk about his new cookbook. Now Colbert really only wants to talk to him about Conclave.
On this week’s Prestige Junkie pod you also can hear excerpts from my live onstage conversation, where I was joined by Gold Derby’s Chris Rosen, Vanity Fair’s Chris Murphy, and after a minor transportation snafu, Sony Pictures Classics cofounder and co-president Tom Bernard. In front of a truly great and supportive audience, we got into so many aspects of awards season, from how much passion matters when it comes to best picture support to how best to strategize when you launch your film on the Academy’s screener app. (Yes, there’s a strategy!)
Hear it all on this week’s Live from Montclair edition of the podcast, and thanks once again to everyone at Montclair Film for hosting us. You can catch more Ankler action there this weekend, with my colleagues Sean McNulty and Ashley Cullins hosting their own panels. Bonus points if you’re spotted wearing your Ankler hat, too!