The couple got into a Warner Bros.-issued Suburban. “Larry, do you have my speech?” Carter called out. (It would remain unread; she lost to Kate Hawley, for “Frankenstein.”) Her first film was Spike Lee’s “School Daze,” in 1988, and five years later she got her first Oscar nomination, for Lee’s “Malcolm X.” “Denzel and I were both nominated,” she recalled in the car. “I remember sitting next to Eiko Ishioka, who won for ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ and her mother, who had a traditional Japanese costume on.” She was nominated again in 1998, for Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad.” “There wasn’t a party or anything after for us. So it felt like the loneliest Oscar nomination that I’ve ever gotten.” That year, she wore a red Richard Tyler gown with a padded silk shawl. “It was beautiful. I still have it. That was the year ‘Titanic’ sank all of our boats.”
Carter’s first win came in 2019, for “Black Panther,” her first feature collaboration with Coogler—“I was kind of shot out of a cannon,” she said—and her second arrived four years later, for “Wakanda Forever,” just days after her mother died, at a hundred and one. Her “Sinners” nomination had made her the most nominated Black woman in Oscars history. “I feel like I’m a veteran,” she said. “Sinners” had felt intimate and communal, she said, almost like an indie film compared to the “Black Panther” movies. Awards season had ballooned since the early nineties. “There wasn’t all of this fanfare,” she continued. “We didn’t have panels and talks. I don’t think people asked me much about putting the costumes together for ‘Malcolm X.’ I’m asked more about ‘Malcolm X’ now than I was then.”
The car lurched toward the red carpet, and Carter passed around gum. “No gum on the carpet,” her publicist warned from the back seat. “It’s in writing.” Rounding a corner, we saw an annual staple: religious street protesters with signs that read “TRUST JESUS” and “GOD HATES SIN.” (His position on “Sinners” was yet to be determined.) Bomb-sniffing dogs checked out the car—standard procedure, but this year the Academy had beefed up security after the F.B.I. alerted state officials to unverified bomb threats, purportedly from Iran. “I feel cool, calm, and collected, which is new to this year,” Carter told me. The car door opened, and she emerged. A voice on the loudspeaker announced, “Ruth E. Carter has arrived.”
I split with Carter and her crew on the red carpet and walked through a corridor swathed in gold curtains and lined with fake Japanese maples. A peek behind the regalia, and you could see a Sephora and a Ben & Jerry’s, because, oh, right, the Oscars take place at a mall. Near the Glambot—a robotic camera that looks like it escaped from “The Matrix”—I met Michella Rivera-Gravage and Karim Ahmad, married executive producers of the nominated Tunisian-French film “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” One of its actors, Motaz Malhees, a citizen of Palestine, couldn’t get a visa to attend because of President Trump’s travel restrictions. Where was he watching from? “That’s a good question,” Ahmad said. “I think he’s in the West Bank.”
The collision of the real world and the fantasyland of the Oscars continued when I met Tracii Wesley, the operations and security manager at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, and the subject of the nominated documentary short “The Devil Is Busy.” “It’s kind of a day in the life of what happened after Roe v. Wade was overturned,” Wesley said, describing how her workplace is besieged by protesters. “There are a lot of patients that we don’t get to see.” She’d noticed the “GOD HATES SIN” demonstrators on her way in, an eerily familiar presence. “You have to wonder where they’re coming from,” Wesley said. “There’s a judgment that comes with that, and that’s what I deal with when I’m at work. I always say, ‘God loves everybody, right?’ ”
I spun around: there was Jessie Buckley, the soon-to-be Best Actress for her role in “Hamnet,” telling someone how she just wanted to take the moment in; Spike Lee, in a purple fedora; Conan O’Brien, towering above it all. It was eighty-four degrees, and the stars were shvitzy. The Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, sweating in his brown-velvet suit, had just done the Glambot. “I just know that I am damp,” he said. Not far behind us was David Sedaris, who was there as a guest of The New Yorker, which had two nominated shorts in the running, “Retirement Plan” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” (“Saliva” won in a tie, with “The Singers.”) Sedaris, an Oscars first-timer, had a tiny notebook in which he was writing down names of all the famous people he saw, like a birder: Rose Byrne, Sissy Spacek, Joel Edgerton. “I’ve been keeping a list since 1988,” he said. (Seeing them onstage doesn’t count, he clarified.) “I only saw two ICE pins. I thought everyone would have one, but I think the war kind of got in the way of that,” he observed. I told him that Kieran Culkin was right behind him, and he mouthed, “Thank you!” and wrote down “Kieran Culkin.”
