Next up: the Oscars.
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter and the guy with a sudden craving for a bowl of split pea soup. It has been a busy week for news, so let’s get to it.
SAG and DGA reveal their favorites
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Every actor who prevailed at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last year went on to win an Oscar, as did SAG’s ensemble winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The year before, SAG Awards voters were ahead of the curve, crowning “CODA” as its ensemble winner a month before its unlikely best picture victory at the Oscars.
As the actors branch is the motion picture academy’s largest faction, the SAG Awards nominations generally offer a reliable indication of how the Oscar acting races will take shape. Of course, since it’s actors doing the voting, there’s a tendency to reward showy (OK, hammy) performances, particularly for work centered on the profession they view as the most important in the world: acting! (What other possible explanation can there be for last year’s nomination of the noisy, empty “Babylon”?)
Who’s up and who’s down on the film side after Wednesday morning’s nominations? I took a look just a few hours before the Directors Guild revealed its nominees. (The Producers Guild will announce its slate today at 10 a.m. PT.) With Oscars voting underway, we already have a strong idea of what the field will look like when AMPAS unveils its nominees on Jan. 23.
For Martin Scorsese, it’s all about forgiveness
Martin Scorsese, co-writer and director of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Forget the ghosts of Christmas past. Martin Scorsese has been thinking lately about dearly departed friends from another holiday celebration, a Los Angeles Thanksgiving at the small home off Mulholland Drive he was sharing with musician Robbie Robertson. It was an “extraordinarily joyous” occasion, Scorsese remembers 45 years after the fact. He had just been released from the hospital — a surprising turn of events, seeing as he very much believed he was going to die from a bout with internal bleeding.
So, to celebrate, he hired someone to cook a Thanksgiving dinner — he barely knew how to boil water — and invited a bunch of friends over, including an Italian producer working on Michelangelo Antonioni’s next movie. “Is it OK if I bring Mr. Antonioni to your house?” the producer asked. Of course. The more, the merrier. But as the evening wore on, Scorsese recalls that Antonioni, a filmmaker adept at conveying estrangement and emotional alienation, could not understand why Scorsese and Robertson kept laughing so much.
“Really, we could just not stop ourselves,” Scorsese says. “I was alive, for one thing. And I had started working on ‘Raging Bull.’ I was back on track after a long period of trying to find a way to continue, a reason to be excited about the prospect of going to a movie set. For a long time, I doubted if I still had enough to care about to make a movie. Now I did.”
Scorsese and I spent a rainy morning together not that long ago, talking about the old days in L.A., bursts of creativity that a late-night drive down the 101 could provide and what he plans to do next, now that the dust is settling from releasing and promoting his latest masterpiece, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Our conversation is here.
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Moving tributes at an emotional Governors Awards
Governors Award recipients Carol Littleton, left, Angela Bassett and Michelle Satter on the red carpet at the awards ceremony.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
The motion picture academy’s Governors Awards, delayed for weeks because of the actors’ and writers’ strikes, took place Tuesday on the eve of Oscar nominations voting, with Mel Brooks, Angela Bassett and film editor Carol Littleton receiving honorary Academy Awards and the Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter delivering an emotional speech accepting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Filmmakers Ryan Coogler and Chloé Zhao, two of the dozens of directors whom Satter has nurtured as founding director of the Sundance Institute’s artist programs, presented the award to the woman they both considered a mother figure. Coogler broke down briefly a couple of times during his remarks, passionate about the impact Satter has had on his life and distraught at the loss she recently suffered when her son, Michael Latt, a marketing consultant and social-justice advocate with strong ties to Hollywood, was killed in November. Latt worked on Coogler’s 2013 directorial debut, “Fruitvale Station.”
“You changed our lives,” Coogler told Satter, “and I do believe Michael was your greatest gift to the world. And every time I talk with you, every time I’m in your presence, it feels like he’s still here with us.”
Satter said she shared the honor with Michael and, noting his devoted support of people and organizations that elevate artists of color, urged those in attendance to “come together as an inclusive community.”
It was one of several emotionally charged moments during the Governors Awards ceremony, an evening that presents the honorary Oscars that once were part of the televised Academy Awards. It also serves as something of a campaign stop for contenders trying to capture voters’ attention. I attended the event, where I had an animated discussion with musician Jon Batiste (“American Symphony”) about his beloved New Orleans Saints running up the score in the season’s last game. Later, I found myself thoroughly agreeing with Paul Giamatti that whatever we were eating wasn’t nearly as good as the burger he enjoyed at the Westwood In-N-Out on Sunday after winning the Golden Globe.
The Emmys are Monday. Really.
(Agnés Ricart / For The Times)
The Emmys are here!
The Emmys are here?
Yes! The Emmys are here! And this year, television’s biggest night is arriving a little late, honoring its best and brightest shows … long after they aired.
Do you remember who won “Succession”? Kendall? Roman? Tom? Shiv? The Ghost of Logan Roy?
Can you recall if you cried during the “Ted Lasso” finale? Or were you too preoccupied still trying to make Nate’s character arc make a lick of sense?
Do you know that “The Bear” is nominated not for its second season, which aired last summer, but for its first season that ran in the summer of 2022 — 18 months ago? Carmy was still in diapers, dreaming of his first tattoo and perfecting a killer recipe for a prune puree with just a hint of garlic aioli. Sounds terrible? Try it! You’ll be surprised!
If your memories of the past television season have been lost to the mists of time, don’t worry. Ahead of the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards, I swept out the cobwebs and took a run through the 15 primary categories that will be handed out when the show airs on Fox on Monday. You can read my predictions here.