Oscar nominees trade stories at pre-awards lunch
More than 100 Oscar nominees, old hands and new faces, came together in Beverly Hills for a lunch honouring contenders at the 77th Academy Awards.
All said breaking bread together brought a spirit of camaraderie, rather than competition.
Four-time nominee Kate Winslet, a best-actress contender this year for the offbeat romance Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, said the group met as friends, not Oscar rivals.
“It doesn’t feel competitive. It really doesn’t,” Winslet said. “It’s like you’re all going through this thing together and it’s just so kind of exciting and mysterious and strange and glorious. And you’re all sort of in the bubble together.”
Dual nominee Jamie Foxx, the best-actor front-runner for the title role in the Ray Charles tale, Ray, said although he had been busy making acceptance speeches for the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards and other film honours, he had not run out of steam.
“There are so many things that I want to say, I could never run out of things,” said Foxx, also nominated as supporting actor for the hitman thriller Collateral. ”Like I’ve always said to my friends, even when we dreamt of what we want to be, we never dreamt this.”
One of the big questions for February 27 is whether Martin Scorsese will finally come away with the best-director prize after four previous losses. The man who made such modern classics as Raging Bull and GoodFellas said maybe it was better to lose earlier in his career.
“It would be wonderful to win, I think,” said Scorsese, nominated for the Howard Hughes epic The Aviator, which leads the field with 11 nominations and is in a two-horse race for best picture with the boxing drama Million Dollar Baby. “It probably is better I didn’t win in the 70s or mid 80s or something.”
Winning then, Scorsese said, was something “maybe I was not able to handle at the time”.
Scorsese is going against director Clint Eastwood, whose Million Dollar Baby star Hilary Swank also finds herself in a two-woman contest for best actress against Annette Bening, nominated for the theatre farce Being Julia.
Sophie Okonedo’s supporting actress nomination for the genocide drama Hotel Rwanda has been an abrupt shift into Hollywood’s limelight for the 15-year British stage veteran who’s relatively new to film.
“My life is unrecognisable to what it was before. I’m not well known at all here,” Okonedo said. “I haven’t had quite time to adjust. I’m not used to having so much attention, so that’s quite shocking.”
Virginia Madsen, nominated for supporting actress for the road-trip romance Sideways, said she now had opportunities to work on big movies with major actors and filmmakers. Before her Oscar nomination, Madsen would periodically call her agent and meekly ask: “You got anything for me?”
