They put down the Bellinis long enough to stand for a photo.
The 2023 Oscar nominees congregated at the Beverly Hilton for the yearly Oscars luncheon. Deadline reported that 182 nominees showed up and that even C-suite types were lining up for a selfie with Tom Cruise. (Best Actress nominee Andrea Riseborough, the focus of the controversial awards season campaign for “To Leslie” that sparked outrage and consternation from pundits, film fans, and even academy members, was not present.)
But the afternoon’s main event was the Oscar nominees’ class photo, where every nominated star, filmmaker, and artisan in attendance is brought up to the stage in an orderly fashion captured for posterity by academy videographers.
Jamie Lee Curtis, nominated for Best Supporting Actress in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” was the first one called, which is a bit of an honor, but it meant she had to stand around the longest. Though “C” is early in the alphabet, this wasn’t a strictly alphabetical decision. After Ryan Coogler (Best Song for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), Brendan Fraser (Best Actor for “The Whale”), and Sarah Polley (Best Adapted Screenplay for “Women Talking”) got called up, they went back to the letter “B” for Jerry Bruckheimer, who is, in fact, nominated as one of the producers of “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Anyhow, if you want to take 30 minutes out of your day to watch the whole video, you can try to gauge which actors got the biggest pop of acknowledgment from the crowd. Brian Tyree Henry, nominated for Best Supporting Actor in “Causeway,” was certainly up there. Another one to get some loud howls of appreciation was photographer/activist Nan Goldin, repping the Best Documentary nominee “All The Beauty and the Bloodshed.”
There are a hundred other little things to notice, too—like how Shaunak Sen, the Indian director of Best Documentary nominee, “All That Breathes” (a terrific movie) wore a sharp blazer over a T-shirt with Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean on it.
But the big moment came 21 minutes into the video when Syracuse’s favorite son Thomas Mapother IV (also known as Tom Cruise) made his way to the by-then ultra-crowded stage. Because Tom loves movies (he loves movies!) he spun around and applauded all the people applauding him.
Feel free to spend half the day analyzing this video instead of doing your work.
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