Gold Derby’s top news stories for Feb. 28, 2025
Karla Sofía Gascón makes first post-scandal awards show appearance at César Awards
After weeks of staying out of the spotlight following the revelation of a series of offensive social media posts from several years ago, disgraced Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón made her first post-scandal awards show appearance Friday at the César Awards in Paris, where the Spanish-language crime musical is nominated for a dozen awards – including Gascón for Best Actress. (The Césars are France’s equivalent of the Oscars.)
Gascón, who lives in Spain, traveled to France to attend. She reportedly declined to walk the red carpet and instead went directly into the auditorium where the awards ware being held, flanked by two men who appeared to be security. Emilia Pérez isn’t handled by Netflix in France but by the French film company Pathé.
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The embattled actress, the first openly trans performer to be nominated for an acting Oscar, will also be attending the Academy Awards on Sunday after all. She previously skipped the Critics Choice Awards, the BAFTA Awards, and the SAG Awards despite being nominated at all three ceremonies. Several inflammatory social media posts by Gascón resurfaced online in January. They included offensive language about Muslims, the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd, diversity at the Oscars, and even allegedly Gascón’s Emilia Pérez co-star Selena Gomez. In response to the outrage over the posts, Gascón released several apologies, each of which arguably dug a deeper hole for herself.
UPDATE: Emilia Pérez won the César for Best Film and director Jacques Audiard triumphed for Best Director, but nominees Gascón and Zoe Saldaña lost the Best Actress race to Hafsia Herzi for the French feature Borgo. And Jonathan Glazer’s 2024 Oscar winner The Zone of Interest won for Best Foreign Film.
Wicked and Agatha All Along win at the ICG Publicists Awards
It was a magical afternoon for Wicked and Agatha All Along at the 62nd International Cinematographers Guild (ICG) Publicists Awards luncheon. Held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the annual kudos praise the work of individual publicists and unit still photographers who work in the industry. Ngoc Nguyen received the Bob Yeager Award for community service for “leading with a purpose.” Here’s the complete winners list for the 2025 ICG Publicists Awards:
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Maxwell Weinberg Award for Motion Picture Publicity Campaign: Wicked
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Les Mason Award for Career Achievement in Publicity: Bill Mona, Disney
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Publicist of the Year Award: Rachael Roth
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Maxwell Weinberg Award for Television Publicity Campaign: Agatha All Along
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Excellence in Unit Still Photography Award — Motion Pictures: Chiabella James
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Excellence in Unit Still Photography Award — Television: Michele K. Short
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Press Award: Perri Nemiroff, Collider
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International Media Award: John Nugent, Empire Magazine UK
Crazy Rich Asians TV series being readied at Max
A series adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians is being developed at Max. Adele Lim, the screenwriter who co-wrote the his 2018 feature that starred Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Gemma Chan, Lisa Lu, Awkwafina, and Ken Jeong, is on board as showrunner and executive producer. And director Jon M. Chu of Wicked and Wicked: For Good fame is returning as an executive producer.
The TV project is, like the film, based on Kevin Kwan’s book series of the same name. “Crazy Rich Asians” was published in 2013, followed by “China Rich Girlfriend” in 2015 and “Rich People Problems” in 2017. Kwan, an exec producer on the film, will have the same role on the Max series. Casting for the show remains unknown.
Golden Globes to end $75,000 annual salaries for voting members
Golden Globes president Helen Hoehne told 50 voting members in a Zoom meeting on Friday that they would no longer be paid $75,000 annual salaries. The onetime members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – which was dissolved in June 2023 – had signed five-year contracts with the new corporate owners of the Globes that same month entitling them to a $75K base salary. Hoehne said in the meeting that each would be offered a $102,500 severance buyout.
Those same Globes voters were reportedly offered an opportunity to stay on as Golden Globes voters for the next ceremony in January 2026 but would not be paid for future shows. No other major Hollywood awards show pays its voters for the privilege of participating.
Note: Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture of Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge Industries, owns the Golden Globes. Penske Media is also the owner of Gold Derby.
Tatiana Maslany set to star in comedy thriller series for Apple TV+
Tatiana Maslany, who won an Emmy in 2016 for her multiple roles on BBC America’s Orphan Black, is on tap to star in a comedic thriller series titled Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed from creator David J. Rosen. who is set as showrunner, with David Gordon Green as director and executive producer. The show is described as a darkly comic thriller abo9ut a newly divorced mother (Maslany) who falls down a dangerous rabbit hole of blackmail, murder, and youth soccer. It’s planned to be 10 episodes.
Maslany currently stars in the horror feature The Monkey.
Sing Sing star Clarence Maclin to lead new feature In Starland
Clarence Maclin, whose breakout performance in Sing Sing landed him supporting actor nominations at BAFTA, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Independent Spirit Awards, has been cast to star in In Starland, the feature directorial debut of British actor-filmmaker Ray Panthaki. Co-written by Panthaki and Jason Kavan, the movie is described as a coming-of-age drama that follows a man struggling to break free from the challenges put in his path by smalltown life.
The film mark’s Maclin’s first leading role.
Academy teases Miley Cyrus and Miles Teller as ‘The Final Presenters…or are they?’
The Motion Picture Academy is doing its best to tease the element of surprise in advance of Sunday’s Academy Awards, releasing a post over Instagram on Friday that teased, “The Final Presenters: Miley Cyrus, Miles Teller…or are they?” It was followed by: “Miley Cyrus and Miles Teller round out our presenters…or do they?” and then “Expect the unexpected.”
There are “expected” to be plenty of surprise guests involved on Sunday, including cast reunions and more. The Oscars air live on ABC at 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.
Bill Murray recalls Gene Hackman as ‘brilliant’ but ‘a tough nut’
Speaking to the Associated Press in the wake of the Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman’s death, Bill Murray – who starred with Hackman in their 2001 feature The Royal Tenenbaums – recalled that Hackman was “really tough” on the film’s writer-director Wes Anderson. “He was a tough nut,” Murray said, “but he was really good. And he was really difficult, we can say it now, but he was a tough guy. Older, great actors do not give young directors much of a chance. They’re really rough on them, and Gene, while he was brilliant, was really rough on Wes. I used to kind of step in there and just try to defend my friend.”
Hackman played the family patriarch in the film that helped Anderson make his bones as a filmmaker. Anderson was just 32 at the time. Murray played neurologist Raleigh St. Clair in the movie. Hackman, who won Oscars for The French Connection and Unforgiven, was found deaf on Wednesday in his Santa Fe, New Mexico home along with his wife Betsy Arakawa. Their deaths have been ruled “suspicious” and are currently being investigated by police.
Cop-turned-screenwriter Joseph Wambaugh of The Onion Field fame dies at 88
Joseph Wambaugh, a Los Angeles Police Department cop for 14 years who used that experience write the novels “The Onion Field,” “The New Centurions,” “The Blue Knight,” and “The Glitter Dome” – all of which he adapted for the big screen – died Friday at 88. He succumbed to esophageal cancer at his home in Rancho Mirage.
Wambaugh also co-created the long-running Police Story series for NBC in the 1970s. He found perhaps his greatest film success with the film adaptation of The Onion Field in 1979, which helped make stars of James Woods and John Savage and also featured a young Ted Danson.
Disney/ABC/Hulu sells out Oscar advertising inventory in advance of Sunday’s show
Disney, the parent company for ABC and Hulu, announced on Friday that it has sold our all commercial inventory tied to Sunday’s 97th Academy Awards – TV, streaming, social, and more. The company had been charging $1.7 million to $2.3 million for 30 seconds of commercial time on the TV broadcast, long seen as something of the Super Bowl of annual entertainment events, according to Variety.
Top sponsors of the Oscars include Rolex, Prudential, and T-Mobile, but also include some less traditional advertisers including Audible, L’Oreal Paris, Planet Oat, Skinny Pop Popcorn, Wingstop, and Hiscox Insurance. “We are seeing people and brands really want to attach themselves to cultural currency and cultural conversations,” John Campbell, senior VP of entertainment and streaming solutions for Disney Advertising, told Variety. Disney saw “this flurry of demand coming out of our upfront last year. We had the vast majority of our units sold weeks in advance of the show.”
Juliette Binoche, Pedro Almodóvar, Mohammad Rasoulof join support of persecuted Iranian filmmakers
Juliette Binoche, Pedro Almodóvar, and Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof have joined a petition campaign in support of persecuted Iranian filmmakers Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, the husband-and-wife directors who have run afoul of Iran’s authoritarian Islamic Republic since 2023 over their feature My Favourite Cake, which had its world premiere a year ago at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival.
Binoche, Almodóvar, and Rasoulof, who fled Iran last year to escape a prison sentence tied to his work, are among 3,500 people working in film who have signed the petition calling on Islamic Republic authorities to immediately and unconditionally clear all charges targeting Mogadam and Sanaeeha. The petition can be accessed here. My Favourite Cake tells a story of love and loss surrounding a 70-year-old widow who reconnects with life’s small pleasures following her husband’s death.
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