Tom Cruise Got a Long-Overdue Oscar at Awards Season’s Most Fun Ceremony
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It may be hard to believe, but we are at the onset of yet another awards season, the longest five months on the Hollywood calendar. From now through the Oscars in March, we’re going to be locked in endless debates about contenders, snubs, and which movies are underrated (or overhyped.) For the last sixteen years, the unofficial starting gun for this marathon is the Governors Awards—essentially the Lifetime Achievement Awards portion that used to make up a large part of each Oscar telecast, now broken off as its own event. This year, I had the honor of attending that event for the first time.
You could argue that it’s criminal to relegate the honoring of living legends to a ceremony that isn’t actually televised. But this year’s host Will Arnett put it perfectly: The fact that the Governors Awards don’t exist in this Dolby Theater ballroom means the show can play by its own rules. There’s a formlessness to the night that felt exhilarating. I went to the actual Oscars this year too, and while being in that room felt appropriately seismic it also felt too unwieldy to really enjoy—it’s so large that there was still a palpable sense of separation between civilians such as myself and the real Movie Stars. The Governors Awards has no such barrier; we blew past the 6PM start time, and for a good 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after, the wine flowed and stars of triple-A wattage (even Leo!) milled around with everyone else in one big, democratic ballroom.
The first person I saw that I was actually personally familiar with was Josh Safdie, who is of course about to fuck the streets up with Marty Supreme. As we talked about the latest run of early Marty screenings in LA recently, Josh admitted the New York Film Festival surprise showing still takes the cake because “the paint was still wet.” Josh described the process of watching his films in a way I’ve never quite heard from a filmmaker before, saying that each time he watches something he’s directed, especially when peeking in on an audience (and even in the times he’s rewatched Uncut Gems over the years), he “learns something new”—about why he made this thing and what he was trying to express.
He compared making movies to trying to translate and understand a dream, and each viewing offers a new interpretation of some abstract thought. (He also told me that he absolutely hated having to wear a tux, and that the one he was wearing tonight was actually the same tux Gucci sent him seven years ago when he was on the campaign trail for Gems; he’d just never returned it. Marty co-writer and de facto third Safdie Ronald Bronstein came over to us and shared that his tux was also a Gems-era loaner from Safdie’s closet.)
