Kathryn Bigelow looked around the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton on Monday afternoon, and laughed. “Welcome to my room,” said the “Hurt Locker” director with a grin.
Bigelow was joking, but the ballroom had been good to her over the past couple of days: on Saturday night she was there to watch her film win the Art Directors Guild Award for a contemporary film, and on Sunday she was back to see the American Cinema Editors give the film its top award as well.
Monday, though, was a non-competitive event, the annual Academy Awards Nominees Luncheon. “This is very civilized, isn’t it?” said Best Actress nominee Carey Mulligan (“An Education”) as she gazed around the room, which was curtained-down to accommodate fewer than 500 guests, about 120 of them nominees. “The red carpet is nice and short, and the room feels much smaller than it did when the Golden Globes were here.”
Mulligan was one of the 14 acting nominees who attended the collegial event, dubbed “Oscar’s ultimate nominees’ mixer” by Academy president Tom Sherak in his opening remarks.
It was a mixer in more ways than one: nominees were spread out around the room so that no one sat with anybody from their film or their category. The seating arrangement, joked Best Original Song nominee Maury Yeston (“Nine”), was probably a good thing. “I come from the theater,” he said, “where the people you worked with are probably the last people you’d want to sit with.”
All five of the Best Actor nominees attended (left), plus four of the five Best Actress contenders (minus only Helen Mirren).
Vera Farmiga, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Anna Kendrick represented the Best Supporting Actress category, while Supporting Actor nominees Woody Harrelson and Christoph Waltz attended.
After stopping by the press room (Brent Lang has that report here), nominees mingled before lunch, some in the thick of it (Sandra Bullock, surrounded by other Disney nominees) and some taking it all in from the outskirts of the room.
“There are so many of events,” said a weary Best Actress nominee Gabourey Sidibe, who’d been in the room the night before for the editors’ awards. “But I can make it though. I’m holding up.”
One advantage of all the networking of awards season, said the “Precious” star, is that she’s getting the business side of her Hollywood career in order. “I have an agency now,” she said. “I didn’t have that when I made this movie. I didn’t have head shots.”
She laughed. “I still don’t have a [demo] reel, but they tell me that I don’t need one.” (Her next project, she said, is a series for Showtime.)
For other nominees, the experience was even more surreal. “This does not feel real to me,” said Juanita Wilson, an Irish filmmaker whose Russian-language short film, “The Door,” was nominated for Best Live-Action Short. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up and be back home.”
Lunch brought the traditional class photo, in which all the nominees gathered on a riser to pose for a group shot.
