The Oscar nominations may have begun to be announced at 5 a.m. on the West Coast and 8 a.m. on the East, but that didn’t stop Maggie Gyllenhaal from popping the champagne.
The first-time feature writer and director was nominated for best adapted screenplay on Tuesday morning for The Lost Daughter, while her stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley were recognized in the lead and supporting actress categories, respectively.
Gyllenhaal, who was previously nominated as an actress for her performance in 2010’s Crazy Heart, said she has never watched the nominations announcement live before, and usually tries to trick herself into not knowing when they’re being released.
But this year, “I sort of thought, fuck it,” Gyllenhaal told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m just gonna watch, like good luck pretending that that’s not happening this morning.” After shuffling her kids off to school, Gyllenhaal and her husband Peter Sarsgaard, who also costars in the Netflix film, popped a bottle after she decided, “I was going to drink champagne either way. So we had like champagne ready and then [the announcers] start talking and doing their banter and I started crying even before anything happened.”
“And then the very, very first thing that happened was Jessie Buckley, she was the first name out of anybody’s mouth,” the writer-director continued. “I was really hoping. It was not at all a done deal or I don’t think it was what anyone was expecting, really, but I just think Jessie is so brilliant in general and in the film, and I guess just somewhere I was hoping that she might get nominated. When she did I just burst into tears, and so did Peter who was with me, who acted with her and knows her so well. We just started crying then we started drinking champagne, so then everything else is like a tiny bit tipsy.”
Gyllenhaal said the morning also included congratulatory FaceTimes to Buckley and Coleman, who were both walking around London at the time. Watching Colman’s nom come in, “I was so thrilled because that was one of the last ones, we were kind of holding our breath,” she said. “I think Olivia Coleman is such a brilliant actress. It was such a pleasure creating this partnership with her and understanding her language and her heart and her really spectacular mind.”
And with her own screenplay nod, Gyllenhaal becomes just the third woman to be recognized in both acting and screenplay categories, joining Emma Thompson and Ruth Gordon: “That’s fucking amazing, I would be in any club that those women were in,” she says, with adding that “it was a real risk to me to move into this whole other way of thinking about storytelling, writing and directing. And so to be acknowledged by other writers means means a huge amount to me.”
She is joined in the category by Sian Heder (CODA), Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth (Dune) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe (Drive My Car), and plans to be joined at the show by her two nominated stars.
“That the three of us together are going to get to go to the Oscars — Jessie and Olivia and I who kind of as a group created this, and of course, all my other actors and my incredible DP and editor and we all did it,” says Gyllenhaal, “but there’s something about the three of us as women getting to go together.”
Source: HollyWood
