LOS ANGELES
Hollywood's biggest fundraiser night of the fall belonged to three careers that could hardly be more different. The sixth annual Academy Museum Gala was held Saturday night, October 17, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, where Charlize Theron received the Icon Award, John Carpenter the Luminary Award and Colman Domingo the Vantage Award — and where Taylor Swift closed the evening with a special performance, in a room that Page Six's red-carpet gallery showed to be as star-packed as any this year.
The three honorees
The museum's three awards are designed to cover three different kinds of contribution, and this year's recipients mapped onto them cleanly. The Icon Award, presented to Theron, celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global impact. The Luminary Award, presented to Carpenter — the director and composer behind Halloween and The Thing — is given to an artist whose singular contributions have expanded the creative possibilities of filmmaking. The Vantage Award, presented to Domingo, honors a film artist who is helping to challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Museum director and president Amy Homma, announcing this year's gala, said the three "exemplify the creativity, innovation and excellence that continues to move the industry forward," and called Swift "an extraordinary talent whose work resonates around the world" ahead of her closing performance.
The gala was co-chaired by Robert Rodriguez, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, and presented by Rolex. It is the Academy Museum's flagship fundraiser: proceeds from the evening support the museum's exhibitions, educational programs, public screenings and accessibility for visitors. Last year's edition raised more than $12 million, according to the Associated Press, and the museum uses the night — deliberately scheduled just after the September-to-October fashion weeks — as both a benefit and a statement about where film culture sits in Los Angeles.
The room
If the measure of the night is the carpet, it was not close. Page Six's gallery from the evening lists, among many others: Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Sabrina Carpenter, Demi Moore, Kendall Jenner, Jacob Elordi, Hailey Bieber, Teyana Taylor, Eva Longoria, Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Elle and Dakota Fanning, Emily Ratajkowski, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kerry Washington, Jessica Alba, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Camila Cabello, Kristen Wiig, Eiza Gonzalez, Cara Delevingne, Janelle Monae, Sarah Paulson, Sofia Vergara, Pamela Anderson, Ana de Armas, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Gabrielle Union-Wade and Dwyane Wade, Joey King, A$AP Rocky, Alexander Skarsgard, Colman Domingo and Rami Malek. Just Jared's full guest-list coverage added the host-committee names and the night's designer credits — Jessica Biel in Tamara Ralph, Sarah Pidgeon in Chanel, Cailee Spaeny in Valentino, Naomi Ackie in Balenciaga with Boucheron jewelry, Mia Goth in Dior — the usual October ritual of couture houses staking their claims the morning after fashion month ends.
Why this gala, why now
Six editions in, the Academy Museum Gala has settled into a specific job in the industry's calendar. It is not an awards show — nobody leaves with a competitive prize — and it is not a premiere. It is the film business publicly funding its own memory: the museum, which preserves and exhibits cinema history, raises the money that keeps its galleries, screenings and education programs running from the people whose work fills them. That is why the honoree structure matters more than the carpet. Theron represents the global movie star as producer and advocate; Carpenter, a self-taught genre auteur who scored his own films and changed horror and science fiction from outside the studio mainstream; Domingo, a stage-and-screen actor whose recent work has been about whose stories get centered. Honoring all three in one night is the museum's argument about what cinema history actually consists of — not just the canon, but the people who bent it.
It is also, unmistakably, a Los Angeles night. The gala lands in the middle of awards season's opening stretch, with the Rome Film Festival running the same weekend — Jenna Ortega was in Rome on Saturday for a Klara and the Sun photocall with director Taika Waititi — and the industry split between European festivals and home-base obligations. The museum's bet is that one room, one foundation and three honorees can still pull the town together at home. On Saturday's evidence — a carpet that ran from Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell to Sabrina Carpenter — the bet keeps paying. Previously previewed this year's gala in our earlier coverage of Taylor Swift and the October 17 Academy Museum Gala; for more from the weekend, see the news file.
