The Only Day Every Oscar Nominee Wins
My Nominees Luncheon dispatches, and exclusive photos and video, from inside the Beverly Hilton
As this busy week comes to a close, please check in on your local Oscar nominee and maybe offer them a hot cup of tea or a quiet room for a five-minute power nap. Between Tuesday’s Oscar Nominees Luncheon, the ongoing Santa Barbara International Film Festival happening up the coast and the Film Independent Spirit Awards coming up on Sunday, anyone with a sliver of awards hope is busy pounding the pavement — and this all before final Oscar voting even starts. (The ballots open on Thursday, Feb. 26, at 9 a.m. PT, not that you’re keeping track!)
To be fair, I may be projecting a bit: Having spent Tuesday talking to dozens of nominees at the luncheon and then hopping around town to various events, a hot tea sounds just great. But before I embark on some self-care, I have to share some of the big takeaways from the Oscar Nominees Luncheon — starting with my conversation with best actress nominee Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You).
“It feels like an orientation before college or something,” Byrne told me when she joined us in the studio before the luncheon. “I can be a little shy too, but I’m trying to be more upfront about the people I admire, particularly directors. I would love to be sat next to Ryan Coogler and be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m such a Sinners fan.’”
Byrne wasn’t the only star to swing by our expert setup at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. (Shoutout to the indefatigable Jennifer Laski, Ankler Media’s executive producer of brand experiences, and the indispensable Kara Warner, forever friend of The Ankler — both part of an entirely female crew that had Amy Madigan rightly singing our praises.)
In the days ahead, The Ankler’s social media pages (@theankler on Instagram; @the.ankler on TikTok) will feature more conversations and clips, as will a special bonus episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast coming this Saturday. I could tell you about all the highlights — from KPop Demon Hunters star Ken Jeong shouting out Oscar-winning original song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” to what two-time Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter (Sinners) talks about when she meets up with the other costume nominees — but you’ll really just have to watch for yourself.
For now, though, I’m sharing some takeaways about what I witnessed both in our interview studio and inside the luncheon itself, where Oscar nominees schmoozed, reunited and sometimes, as Byrne anticipated, even allowed themselves to be starstruck. It was my first time at the event, and even as someone highly susceptible to Oscar magic, I was still surprised by how much it exceeded my expectations.
1. Follow the Flashbulbs
As in any room with celebrities, you can sense where the most famous people are simply by how crowded it gets in their section. But when that room is packed with famous people — either meeting for the first time or catching up after some time apart — it’s the house photographers and their bright flashes who will tip off where the real action is happening. And luckily for everyone watching from home, most of those photos eventually make it online.
I watched the cameras go crazy when Frankenstein nominee Jacob Elordi and Sirāt director Oliver Laxe chatted near the entrance, quite possibly about both being tall and gorgeous (but maybe other things, too). Once KPop Demon Hunters songwriter EJAE made her way through the scrum around Emma Stone’s table near the front, the photographers were there to capture a moment that EJAE told me later was thrilling: “For her to even know a song we wrote is totally surreal.”
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And even though Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Spielberg were hanging out in the exterior hallway and far from the crowds, New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan’s camera captured them with a giant Oscar statue — a pretty handy, if on-the-nose, visual metaphor for the trophy Anderson is expected to finally win next month. (That Kyle was responsible for one of the day’s viral clips should be no surprise to Prestige Junkie After Party paid subscribers, since I talked to him about this very type of thing last week! Subscribe here to get ahead of the game.)
2. Even Oscar Nominees Get Starstruck
As several of the nominees who stopped by our studio admitted, they’d gotten to know some of their fellow contenders over the course of awards season and were looking forward to reunions. “You assume that there would be competition and a sense of clawing or something nasty,” Hamnet’s costume designer, Malgosia Turzanska, told me before the luncheon. “But we love each other so much. I’ve made so many beautiful friends, and I know this isn’t going to end here.” Inside the luncheon, I saw her catching up with fellow costume designers Miyako Bellizzi (Marty Supreme) and Ruth E. Carter (Sinners), looking exactly as friendly as she had promised.
For some nominees, though, it was their first chance to seize their moments with some of their idols, and they didn’t waste it. Members of the KPop Demon Hunters songwriting team were grabbing photo ops with Michael B. Jordan and Timothée Chalamet, and Steven Spielberg was stopped for chats and selfies from nearly everyone. Anderson, meanwhile, picked a quieter spot during the mingling hour, making it harder to bump into him in a crowd, but I saw multiple Oscar nominees — recognizable by their red name tags — hovering nearby, looking for an opportunity to say hello.
3. The Room’s Most Popular Person
Actors are obviously more recognizable in a room like this than nearly anyone else, and of course, nobody would pass up the opportunity to say hello to Jessie Buckley or Leonardo DiCaprio. But looking at the event photos, and even watching the group assemble onstage for the annual nominees class photo, it seemed like The Secret Agent star Wagner Moura was chatting with more people than anyone else. Sinners casting director Francine Maisler and Weapons star Amy Madigan, who were standing near him on the risers, both told me afterward that they had gotten to know Moura over the course of the season. Over on The Secret Agent director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Instagram, you can also see Moura deep in conversation with fellow nominees Delroy Lindo and Ryan Coogler. By the time I saw this video of One Battle after Another star Chase Infiniti excitedly greeting the best actor nominee at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, I started to wonder if the one thing all of this year’s nominees can agree on is that they’re thrilled any time they see Wagner Moura coming. (What does this mean for the best actor race, where Chalamet remains an overwhelming favorite? Much to consider!)
4. Oscar Montages: Found Alive & Well
This one’s for the real Oscar diehards, but let me tell you: The best Oscar montages are the ones they’re only showing at the nominees luncheon. Any time they needed to get the room’s attention, whether before the introductory speech from new Academy president Lynette Howell-Taylor or before announcer Lou Diamond Phillips could start calling everyone to the stage for the class photo, the screens on either side of the ballroom started showing beautifully produced montages of the year’s nominees or, even more memorably, some of the best Oscar speeches of all time. The same thing happened at the Governors Awards back in November, where the montage introducing honorary award winner Tom Cruise brought a genuine tear to my eye. Maybe in the YouTube future of the Oscars, we’ll be able to share these with everyone?
5. Applause May Not Be Everything, But…
I was delighted by the sustained applause that lasted through the announcement of all 230 Oscar nominees, starting with Delroy Lindo walking up to the top row of the bleachers and ending with Teyana Taylor right up front. Every nominee took the stage with the room cheering around them, plus a loud whistle from someone especially enthused for every Brazilian nominee.
The applause for Lindo, Benicio del Toro and Stellan Skarsgård all felt notably loud to me, and the room really lit up for every nominee in the first-ever best casting category. But undeniably, the loudest cheers came near the very end for Ryan and Zinzi Coogler, and not just from the dozens of people who share the 16 nominations for Sinners. Every Oscar nomination is a success story, but Sinners is the success story to beat them all, and in that room, the Cooglers were greeted as heroes.
Does that mean a Sinners best picture surge is really happening, as Christopher Rosen and I keep debating on the podcast? It’s impossible to draw a conclusion that big from a relatively small sample size — even a room with such a ridiculous number of Oscar voters per capita. But if Sinners does wind up catching One Battle After Another in either the best director or best picture race, I won’t be the only one who looks back at that moment as when it all started falling into place.
Most epic day!❤️