Hugh Grant called an Honorary Oscar winner an a–hole, studios spent big money to show off all their awards contenders and a posthumous tribute to Quincy Jones left everybody buzzing at the Academy’s 15th annual Governors Awards on Sunday night in Hollywood, turning a fraught time in the movie business into a satisfying celebration – and, of course, a prime campaign opportunity for everyone hoping to attract the attention of Oscar voters.
While the Governors Awards, the annual event at which honorary Academy Awards are given out, has become a reliably grand combination of cinematic cclebration and campaign event, two factors conspired to cast a shadow over Sunday’s ceremony, which took place at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland.
The first was the fact that Jones was announced as a winner of the Honorary Oscar back in June, but died on Nov. 3, two weeks before he was to receive the award. Academy rules prohibit the Board of Governors from voting for posthumous honorary awards, but Jones was alive when he was announced as a recipient, so the presentation went ahead with his family accepting on his behalf.
The second factor was the election of Donald Trump two days after Jones died. It’s safe to say that most of the people in the ballroom were left-leaning politically, and the uncertainty of a second Trump term had the potential to cast a pall over any kind of celebration.
Academy President Janet Yang admitted as much in her opening remarks, saying, “We live in a transformative time” and then calling the stories crafted by the night’s honorees “narratives that do not have to succumb to temporal polemics.” And Colman Domingo, who kicked off the main program, was more direct. “Tonight, we will remind each other to keep going,” he said, later adding, “The dreamer in me hopes that film can show us we’re more alike than unalike.”
Those were, perhaps, grand ambitions for a night in which schmoozing and table-hopping was on the agenda alongside saluting Jones, producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, casting director Juliet Taylor and writer and humanitarian Richard Curtis. But then, the Governors Awards have always occupied a curious position in awards season: They’re a collegial event to celebrate artistry, and one that fosters a real camaraderie between competitors two months before the nominations will make the competition more pointed – but studios don’t pay $10,000 a seat and $120,000 a table without expecting some real value in exposure as awards season heats up.
Or do they? “I’m curious if this actually moves the needle,” said one indie studio head as the ballroom began to fill up. “I’m not sure what we get out of this, but maybe people will notice if you don’t show up.”
But there weren’t too many absences to notice. Ralph Fiennes from “Conclave” wasn’t there, and neither were Cynthia Erivo from “Wicked” and Timothee Chalmet from “A Complete Unknown,” but for the most part the room was filled to the brim with people who hope to be back in this ballroom for the Governors Ball after the Oscar show next March.
“Every so often I come to one of these and I think, I’m part of that?” said “Nosferatu” star Willem Dafoe with a laugh as he looked around the packed room. “This is so far from waking up at 5 a.m. and going to your little trailer. But every so often it’s good to get a taste of this.”
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Dafoe was sitting at a table with some costars from “Nosferatu” and a group from “Conclave,” with impromptu mutual-admiration societies popping up all around him. Over here, British pop star and “Better Man” subject Robbie Williams and director Michael Gracey talked to “A Real Pain” actor-director Jesse Eisenberg; over there, “Emilia Perez” star Karla Sofia Gascon spotted trans writer Harper Steele, subject of the documentary “Will & Harper,” and made a beeline for her.
Every big film was well-represented: Guests included Paul Mescal and Connie Nielsen from “Gladiator II,” Mikey Madison from “Anora,” Danielle Deadwyler from “The Piano Lesson,” Saoirse Ronan from “Blitz” and “The Outrun,” June Squibb from “Thelma,” Amy Adams from “Nightbitch,” Andrew Garfield from “We Live in Time,” Kieran Culkin from “A Real Pain,” Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong from “The Apprentice,” Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore from “The Room Next Door,” Gascon, Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez from “Emilia Perez,” Angelina Jolie from “Maria,” Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley from “The Substance,” Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones from “The Brutalist,” Marianne Jean-Baptiste from “Hard Truths,” Peter Sarsgaard and Leonie Benesch from “September 5” …
Once the preshow mingling broke up, awards themselves began with Nicole Kidman giving an Honorary Oscar to casting director Juliet Taylor, who was responsible for films including “Annie Hall,” “Broadcast News,” “Taxi Driver,” “Big” and “Midnight in Paris.” The award came as part of a very good year for the Academy’s relatively new Casting Branch, which also saw the creation of a new Oscar for Best Casting that will be presented for the first time in 2026. Kidman described Taylor as “the first casting director to be honored by the Academy,” but that overlooked the Honorary Oscar to Lynn Stalmaster in 2016.
In her acceptance speech, Taylor lavished praise on her mentor, the late and legendary casting director Marion Dougherty, described the job of a casting director as one that requires you “to appreciate actors when they’re not that lovable and to be able to work with directors when they’re not easy.”
Daniel Craig was next up to present the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to James Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, and warned them, “If you’ve come here tonight to look for the next James Bond, don’t look at me. But he might be in this room.” (Unmentioned but perhaps in the air was the vague and uneasy feeling that one of the world’s richest men seems hell-bent on turning himself into a real-life Bond villain.)
The award made Broccoli the second woman to win the award after Kathleen Kennedy in 2018; with Wilson and Broccoli’s father, Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, winning in 1981, it was also the second Thalberg to go to the children or child of a previous winner. (The first came when Richard D. Zanuck won in 1990, 40 years after the last of his father Darryl’s three Thalbergs.) Another milestone: This was the first Thalberg to come in the form of a standard Oscar statue as opposed to a bust of Irving Thalberg.
The show got a jolt that nobody knew it needed with the next presentation, in which Hugh Grant gave the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for writer-director Richard Curtis, who has raised more than $2 billion for humanitarian aid over the last 40 years. But Grant, who starred in the Curtis films “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’ Diary” and “Love Actually,” wasn’t one for hagiography: Instead, he was delightfully acidic as he thought back to a time in 1993 when his career was faltering and he was flabbergasted when his agent, “a poisonous little man,” actually sent him a good script, which was Curtis’ for “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
Grant auditioned for the past and was, he said, very good – and the director, the producer and the studio all wanted him for the part. “The only person who didn’t want me, and in fact did everything in his power to stop me from getting the part, was the writer,” he said. “And it is this a—hole who we’re honoring tonight.”
(For the record, he used the full word, not just the letter a.)
But Curtis, who almost certainly became the first Honorary Oscar recipient to be called an a—hole onstage during the show, gave as good as he got. He said he’d been wondering how Grant was going to be able to tone down his unpleasant nature to give out the award. “But he didn’t even try,” he said. “That’s good, because he was never much of an actor, and it would have been beyond him.”
The segment would have been the highlight of many Governors Awards, but on Sunday it was simply a delightful prelude to the inevitable emotional high point, which was the posthumous presentation to Quincy Jones. After a rambling intro from Jamie Foxx that included some spot-on impressions of Jones, and a tribute film that included Jones saying, “You only have 26,000 days (to live), and I tell you, I’m going to squeeze them all out,” a dozen singers led by Jennifer Hudson ripped into a gospel number as members of Jones’ family came to the stage.
Rashida Jones read the acceptance speech her father had partially written before he died. “He had a lot of friends in this room,” she said. “Well, in every room, if I’m being honest.”
Afterward, many guests hung around longer than usual, and Academy CEO Bill Kramer was beaming. “I loved tonight,” he said. “Loved it.”
Outside the ballroom, an executive shook her head. “We needed this,” she said. “Things have been so dark and everybody has been so down, we needed it.”