Intro for November 18, 2025

Dear Gossips,   

Chloe Zhao was out for the second night in a row on Monday. She was at the Governors Awards on Sunday along with almost every other Oscar contender this season and last night attended the ELLE Women in Hollywood event. Chloe won Best Director in 2021, she is expected to be nominated again this year for directing Hamnet, one of the most highly acclaimed films of the year. But she isn’t the only filmmaker of East Asian descent on the awards circuit this season. 

I posted about Maggie Kang and Kpop Demon Hunters at the Governors Awards yesterday in this space. If KPDH is nominated for Best Animated Feature, that’s a nomination for Maggie. And there’s also Jon M Chu and Wicked: For Good, expected to be one of the Best Picture nominees. Jon is also in the Best Director race – still a bit of a longshot right now but if the movie does big business, his chances definitely improve, especially since he did not get nominated last year. 

And Celine Song was also at the Governors Awards on Sunday, and making the awards circuit rounds, wearing a lot of Thom Browne, as usual, since she’s long been one of his favourites. Materialists has been submitted for Best Original Screenplay and even though the short-term memory of the online public these days isn’t creating a lot of space for Materialists in the conversation right now, since it came out months ago, the fact of the matter is Materialists was a box office hit, surpassing the $100 million worldwide mark on a $20 million budget. Compare that to, say, The Running Man this weekend with its $100 million-plus budget. Or even One Battle After Another which has crossed $200 million at the box office but has still not broken even because its budget was almost as much.

From Materialists to Hamnet to Wicked to KPop Demon Hunters, Park Chan-wook, whose film No Other Choice, is a strong contender for a Best International Film nomination, Jiaozi with Ne Zha 2, and Haruo Sotozaki with the success of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, there’s been such a wonderful showcase of range this year by East Asian directors. Not a story that’s making western headlines. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey