Oscar Race Hits Palm Springs Film Festival Gala – Deadline

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit.

The awards season has begun!

That is always a statement I find amusing at this time of year as it is used by various publications and groups to announce that the Oscar race is on. For many of us, it began several months ago, first at CinemaCon in April, where studios trotted out hopefuls such as Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon, The Color Purple, Barbie, Oppenheimer, just to name five we are still talking about in one way or another. Or how about Cannes for a soft start with a strong lineup that also put additional films in the race like Neon’s Anatomy of a Fall and A24’s The Zone of Interest, both nominated not just for foreign language film at the Golden Globes this weekend but also Best Motion Picture Drama (and don’t forget the bevy of International Film contenders we first saw in May at that storied French festival).

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Actually, maybe the 2023 “Oscar race” started a year ago at Sundance, where we first saw another Globe Best Picture Drama nominee, Past Lives, which is poised to have a very good day when Academy Award nominations are finally announced on January 23.

Of course, there are many defining points in the season to announce the “start” of it, but I don’t think it every really ends. Neither, for that matter — at least for this year — did the Emmy awards season, which officially started last January with the kickoff of FYC events and, because of the strikes, finally begins coming to a close this weekend with the Creative Arts Emmy ceremonies on where on Saturday and Sunday night at the Peacock Theater, with the latter colliding with the Globes at the Beverly Hilton. And that is just two days before the strike-delayed Governors Awards (always a must-attend for contenders), followed by the SAG nominations the next day.

Oh, and then we have the grand finale of the Primetime Emmys (for which final voting took place in August!) on Monday, January 15, the night after the Critics Choice Awards broadcast on the CW and the night before nomination ballots are due for the Oscars. Whew.

Then, post haste, the next Emmy season officially can begin with FYC kickoffs, or we can all just go to Sundance two days later. Exhausting just to think about it.

Yes! The season has begun, and if you needed visible proof, you should have joined me on my whirlwind trip to the desert Thursday for the always glitzy and gaudy Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala. The ceremony celebrated its 35th year of handing out weird-looking trophies to some of the top Oscar hopefuls that the festival honchos and studio and personal publicists mutually agree should have an early opportunity for glory and the ability to try out speeches they might be called upon to give several more times on the rocky road to Oscar night March 10. This event is always held at the Palm Springs Convention Center, a cavernous building with a giant stage, live orchestra, Cinerama-style movie screen showing film clips and, of course, MC Mary Hart entering to the Entertainment Tonight theme music (she hasn’t hosted ET, which is also a sponsor of this event, in several years, but it just wouldn’t be this Gala without Mary, if you ask me).

Some of my fellow pundits stay a couple of days for various Q&As, sidebar awards events or even actual movies (Sony Pictures Classics’ delicious Toronto Film Fest pickup Wicked Little Letters, with Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, opens the film part of the fest tonight). For me, it was three hours in traffic in the afternoon, 3½ hours at the gala and two hours in no traffic back home. During that time, the bejeweled and dressed-to-the-nines PS society crowd, and a few studio-bought tables for the honorees and their entourages, were treated to, as Hart noted, perhaps the best set of acceptance speeches this gala has seen in a long time, maybe ever. And just as good, even better in some ways, were the presenter speeches. In fact, Greta Gerwig and Paul Giamatti got to do both, the latter accepting the Icon Award in a fiercely passionate speech and then a little later presenting his The Holdovers co-star Da’Vine Joy Randolph with the Breakthrough Performance Award.

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Some of the presenters are in the Oscar hunt themselves, so studios get more bang for their bucks by getting them stage time too — Robert Downey Jr presenting the Actor award to his Oppenheimer co-star Cillian Murphy; Taraji P. Henson and Color Purple director Blitz Bazawule presenting Spotlight Actress to their film’s Danielle Brooks; Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe bringing on their Poor Things star Emma Stone as Desert Palm Actress; Margot Robbie and America Ferrera lauding their Barbie Director Award winner Gerwig (who returned to present the Chairman’s Award to her songwriters Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell). And, well, you get the idea.

But the starriest presenter, Meryl Streep, stole the show, got a huge ovation and made extraordinary remarks about Maestro star Carey Mulligan, who received International Star of the Year (she’s British, y’know). Mulligan explained that she took a shot by asking her Suffragette co-star if she might present and was gobsmacked when Streep said, ‘Sure.’ And boy, if you had any doubts what an astute and eloquent observer of acting Streep is, check out her speech below, nailing exactly what made Mulligan’s portrayal of Leonard Bernstein’s wife Felicia so affecting and memorable.

As Palm Springs is also an area with a long history with Native Americans, it was appropriate to end the show with the presentation of the Vanguard Award to Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese and his cast including Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone and the many Osage roles played by the real deals including their presenter, Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear. Earlier today, Gladstone and many Osage cast members did a special event and cultural exchange with Agua Caliente on the site of their sacred ancestral homeland in downtown Palm Springs.

Among highlights for me was meeting the legendary Leslie Uggams, so great as the aging mother in American Fiction. She joined writer-director Cord Jefferson and star Jeffrey Wright, who received the Career Achievement Award presented by Uggams, to whom he gave a moving and deserving tribute at the start of his speech. I also loved seeing Brooks sing part of her acceptance speech — Randolph acknowledging her operatic background before landing acting roles — Stone’s wry observance of life for women in the industry and Eilish talking candidly about experiencing truly dark and disturbing moments in her life just before the opportunity came to put it all together musically with “What I Was Made For” for Barbie.

I was also honored to be seated at the table with Colman Domingo, who is having a remarkable year with The Color Purple and especially Rustin, for which he received the Spotlight Award Actor for his sensational performance. It was presented by Lenny Kravitz, a Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards nominee for his Rustin original song “Road to Freedom” that he says was deeply inspired by watching Domingo’s performance as the 1960s Civil Rights activist. The actor delivered a moving speech about the importance of playing a person that many did not know but certainly do now. However, it was the personal connection to Palm Springs itself that made his speech so winning.

“On April 26, 2021, at 4:40 p.m. at L’Horizon right here in Palm Springs as me and my husband [Raul] were on a sunset walk around the property, I received a call from producer Bruce Cohen. ‘Hello, Bruce.’ ‘Hello, Colman’, he said with a smile in his voice. ‘On behalf of Netflix, President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Higher Ground and George C. Wolfe, we would be honored if you would be our Bayard.’ ‘It would be the honor of my lifetime,’ I said. I don’t know if there were many more words. I just sat there with tremendous joy and profound gratitude as I smiled to the heavens. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” Domingo recalled to the audience in his acceptance.

He then showed a photo of the moment he got the role. “This photo was taken of me at 4:43 p.m. I came to Palm Springs, as we all do, to replenish and restore. I have always felt a spiritual connection to this desert land, knowing that beautiful things can bear fruit in places that were once thought to be barren.”

Quite a night. And if this was truly the “start” of the Oscar race, it was mission accomplished.

BARBIE‘S SHOCKING TWIST ON THE OSCAR BALLOT

While Greta Gerwig was about to head to the desert for the first of what I imagine could be several awards in the next few weeks, the Academy’s Writers branch was busy throwing a wrench into the Barbie Oscar scenario by classifying the film not as an original screenplay — for which it was being campaigned and for which it is classified by WGA, Critics Choice, BAFTA, and others — but instead as an adapted screenplay, apparently due to the fact Gerwig’s and Noah Baumbach’s brilliant script is based on existing characters in a toy line. This isn’t the first time the Writers branch has disagreed with WGA and others. Moonlight, as I first revealed at the time, was another original they deemed actually was from, or at least inspired by, other source material. There were similar questions about The King’s Speech at one time, yet both those films went on to win despite category confusion. It can always be a slippery slope, but I wish the Academy and other groups would let the writers themselves determine how their work should be classified. The Actors branch, for instance, traditionally never has told actor members who should be lead and who should be supporting. Why set it in stone for the writers who know their work and how it was crafted better than anyone?

Still, and I am a WGA voter, I believe Barbie is a highly original work that could have come only from the minds of the pair who wrote it. They managed to put a human face on these dolls and give the film gravitas as well as humor. However, an award-winning writer of both film and TV this week made the case to me from their POV as a veteran in the business why they think the Academy got it right. “Barbie is based on pre-existing characters. All of the world, every set, costume, car and prop used in the story existed in Barbie’s world. Mattel has Barbie books, videos, bedtime stories, coloring books, records telling stories about Barbie’s world,” the writer noted. “It’s rich and layered with mythology and iconography, and Greta and Noah [Baumbach] did a brilliant job utilizing all of it and creating a new story that took the world to a new level. They are geniuses. … Barbie and her world is known by everyone who seriously played with her. The bottom line is everyone loves the screenplay. It couldn’t have more support, love and admiration from its peers. I think it will win. The WGA took at face value what the writers or studio said their script was — adapted or original.”

Well, if Barbie does win, it will have to do it in the uber-competitive Adapted category, where scripts including Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, American Fiction and Origin will duke it out. The latter Ava DuVernay screenplay I would call an Original based on a book. That sounds odd, but the movie she made is not the book, Caste, but rather about its author’s journey in a story and structure DuVernay created and believes qualifies as original. Ironically, the brilliant script by David Hemingson for The Holdovers is, as far as I know, classified as an Original by the Academy even though its director Alexander Payne says he got the inspiration for the movie after seeing the 1935 Marcel Pagnol film Merlusse. I found The Holdovers also to be a total original, even if its shell is shared with Merlusse. It would be unfair to compare the two. In fact, Barbie’s exit from the Original Screenplay category makes The Holdovers a more solid bet there.

ROSAMUND PIKE‘S GLOBES TROT

The 81st Golden Globes takes place Sunday on a new network — CBS and streaming on Paramount+ — but at the same old venue it has been in for years, the Beverly Hilton. It is the comfort zone for this show, which is proving it has good survival skills after internal scandals nearly killed it. But now reinvented, the new Golden Globes are ready for their closeup, and the stars who once — with their publicists — threatened never to walk their fabled red carpet again are back. One who is delighted to be returning is Rosamund Pike, and as I recently sat down with her for a little chat at the Hotel One bar in West Hollywood, she had just received her fourth Globe nomination, this time as the shallow, quirky, but eminently watchable Elspeth Catton in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. It’s a witty dark comedy of love, obsession, identity and a wack-a-doodle eccentric family living in a 1300s-ish manor in England and interrupted by the visit of a young man who is about to change their lives.

This is Pike’s first nomination as Supporting Actress and one she said was lovely to receive. But she is no stranger to the Globes — or Oscar buzz, for that matter — having been nominated in both Drama (Gone Girl, A Private War) and Comedy/Musical (I Care a Lot) categories, winning a Globe for the latter film in 2020. She also has been Oscar nominated for 2014’s Gone Girl as well as just about every other awards contest that year.

This role that is bringing Pike back to the Hilton, however, is one she is especially excited about, and she truly stands out in a cast that is stellar by any definition. In fact, I brought the gorgeous coffee table book Amazon put together for the movie, which included the entire script, and Pike instantly was fascinated by it. I told her I am sure it would be no problem getting one from Amazon — and probably with free shipping thrown in (Fennell had the same reaction when I interviewed her for my Behind the Lens piece that runs next Friday).

During the making of the movie, Pike gave it her all, even warming to the suggestion by Fennell that she actually move into the massive house for the duration of the three-week shoot. “Well, I, of course, now wonder whether it was a kind of crazy,” she told me. “Emerald, she’s a puppet master in some ways, in a wonderful way. She insisted that nobody had star trailers on this shoot and all come together, and you’re not going to a trailer to change. You’ll change on set. Everyone was in the shitty green room. It was not actually a shitty green room because it’s a room in this amazing house … and of course, that’s where all the stuff that normally might not happen — you know, the little jokes, the games that we play when you’re idle, things that bring us all together happens,. I just know the producer said ‘Well, how about this?’ and I didn’t really think about it. I just said, ‘Well, that sounds fun.’ Then when I got there, I thought I had made a huge mistake, because you know, you open the curtains and there are the catering tents. So there was no getting away from it, and after three weeks, I hadn’t set foot outside the grounds.”

That kind of dedication is well worth a Golden Globe, dontcha think?