Saturday night in Los Angeles was rainy and cold – not exactly prime conditions to get people to leave the house for a screening only a week before Christmas, particularly when they've already been sent the screener DVD.
But "True Grit" and "Biutiful" turned the trick to different degrees that night, the former at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater and the latter at a far smaller but more star-studded private gathering.
The Coen Brothers' Western (or, as they call it, their "young adult adventure story") had its official AMPAS members screening in Beverly Hills, and drew an estimated 400 people to the 1,000-seat theater. While that's not a full house, it's impressive given the date, the weather and the fact that a good number of high-profile AMPAS screenings have been sparsely attended this season.
"The film played very well," reported one member at the screening. "The audience was there all the way through – it laughed and jumped at the right time." Applause at the end was reportedly solid, "but not over the top," with one audience member speculating that the film's relatively downbeat ending muted the crowd's enthusiasm somewhat.
As the film was screening in Beverly Hills, "Biutiful" was showing in a far smaller room in West Hollywood – but while the audience at the Soho House for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film was a tenth of the size of the one at the Academy, it almost certainly had more star power.
Guests at the screening and reception, which was thrown by a glowing and very pregnant Penelope Cruz and her agent in honor of the film's star (and Cruz's husband) Javier Bardem, included Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Orlando Bloom, Ridley Scott, Tracy Morgan, Virginia Madsen, Juliette Lewis and Ethan Suplee, among others who raised the star power as they filled a room that held fewer than 50 viewers.
"I can’t believe all these people came out in the rain," said a beaming Bardem at the reception following the screening, as he accepted high-profile plaudits for a performance that had been inexplicably ignored by Globe and SAG voters earlier in the week. "We didn't know if anybody was going to show up, so this means a lot."
