LOS ANGELES — At the Governors Ball after the Oscars on Sunday evening, the line for the prime rib was often longer than the one to get Oscar trophies engraved. That was fine by the winners from “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” who swarmed the second queue and were jubilant after picking up seven Academy Awards at the ceremony earlier in the evening.
Celebrating along with the “Everything Everywhere” crowd was Ke Huy Quan, the film’s supporting-actor winner, and his brother David. In his acceptance speech, the performer mentioned that David had texted his support every day. What did he text on Sunday? His brother jumped in, “I said you better mention my name!”
Elsewhere at the Governors Ball, held upstairs from the Dolby Theater, Brendan Gleeson, a supporting actor nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin,” chowed down on some pizza while Paul Mescal (best actor nominee, “Aftersun”) popped cheese bites into his mouth before joining his mother and some friends.
When the costume designer Ruth Carter won her second Oscar, for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she didn’t realize she had become the first Black woman to win two Academy Awards. “That’s crazy,” she said at the party. “That’s a hard act to follow. But that just means that we need more representation.”
Darren Aronofsky was in a celebratory mood because his drama “The Whale” landed two Oscars, for lead actor Brendan Fraser and for hair and makeup. “I’ve been working with that team for 25 years so that’s the bigger win for me,” Aronofsky said. Then with a wink, he added laughing, “I mean Brendan, I’ll never see that guy again.”
Cheryl Boone Isaacs, a former academy president, was up dancing with her crew and it was no wonder why: the evening went off without a hitch. Michael De Luca, a chairperson and chief executive of Warner Bros. Film Group, put it succinctly, “Nobody got hit. It was a good night.”
It was the sentiment echoed by the academy chief executive Bill Kramer. “We thought it was a fantastic show,” he said, adding, in reference to the host Jimmy Kimmel: “Jimmy was amazing. The speeches were great, there were incredible surprises, and great diversity in the winners. We had a blast.”
Kramer, who took over the reins of the academy this past year, said he had been particularly heartened by the audience in the Dolby Theater: “It surprised me that the crowd was so engaged the entire time.”
Even the CNN executive Amy Entelis, who’s been through a challenging year of her own as she watched her successful documentary division cut down as a result of the merger between Warner Media and Discovery, was in a party mood after her timely documentary “Navalny” took home the Oscar.
“It shows what the power of film can do for something that we’re all living through,” she said on her way through the ballroom to meet her filmmakers. “It’s wonderful that it’s been recognized by this film community as being as important as we thought it was. Now we have that validation.”
