A Ton Of Stars Just Revealed Exactly How They Heard About Their Oscar Nominations, And It’s Surprisingly Relatable

Paul Giamatti was one of the top contenders to receive a nod for his performance in The Holdovers. However, it sounds like he wasn’t at all fazed by the buzz. 

“I have to admit, I was asleep,” he told the Hollywood Reporter yesterday, revealing that it was his manager who woke him up once the nominations had been announced. “I’m a night owl. I stay up late. I think I was like, ‘I’m just going to ignore these things. Somebody will tell me what happened.’”

Paul said he was totally “flabbergasted” by the nom and it wasn’t long before his phone started blowing up with congratulatory messages. 

“I didn’t need to call anybody,” he said. “Everybody started calling me. I was like, ‘Holy cow.’”

One of the most talked about nominations from yesterday’s list was America Ferrera for her performance in Barbie. Speaking to Variety, she revealed that she was happily relaxing in bed and watching the livestream on her phone when her name was called.

After getting off the phone with her publicist, America got a call from her husband, Ryan Piers Williams, who was “screaming” while driving their kids to school. 

“I just heard my kids in the back, like so confused. ‘What are you screaming about?’” she said.

America also got a surprise group FaceTime from her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants costars, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn, and Alexis Bledel. 

“It was hilarious and funny and emotional and it’s wonderful to be celebrated and held up by my sisters,” she said.

Celine Song told Variety that she typically likes to sleep late in the mornings, but couldn’t help waking up early for the livestream, which she watched from her bed. 

“I was so excited,” she said. “I had my laptop and I was drinking coffee made by my husband.”

When Celine’s name was called in the lineup of nominees for Best Original Screenplay, her husband was thankfully on hand to capture the emotional moment. 

“He recorded my reaction,” she said, “and my hair looks crazy in it; I have really bad bed hair.”

Very relatably, Colman Domingo was so nervous about the nominations that he decided to reorganize his closet at 5 in the morning.

“I was listening to the nominations, because my husband was watching the feed. I couldn’t bear to watch, so I was literally in my closet, organizing my closet, when I needed something to do,” he recalled.

Only “a second” before his name was called on the TV, Colman got a text from his manager on the East Coast saying: “Oscar nominee.” 

“I picked up the phone and put it back down. I was stunned, almost like it didn’t happen,” he said. “And then my husband heard the news, and he laid on the floor and started crying.”

Thanks to her busy schedule, Da’Vine Joy Randolph wound up pulling an all-nighter to hear her name get called in the Best Supporting Actress category. 

“I went to Paris for Couture Fashion Week, and I just landed two hours ago in LA, at, like, 3 a.m.. So I just got home. And we decided: ‘Well, we might as well just stay up and watch it on TV,’” she told the Hollywood Reporter of the special and surreal moment.

Da’Vine said she quickly made it a priority to congratulate a few of her fellow nominees, like Colman Domingo, Danielle Brooks, and Emily Blunt. 

“It’s funny,” she said, “the people that I’m calling up, the nominees, they’re on calls with everyone, so I put out feelers to my people, and then they’re all like, ‘I will call you back as soon as I’m out of this interview.’”

Like a lot of parents on a Tuesday morning, Sterling K. Brown was in the midst of multitasking when his Oscar nomination came through.

“I’m getting breakfast ready for the kids to take them to school,” he said, before explaining that it wasn’t until he went to go and check his charging phone that he saw he had 126 unread messages. 

“I got nominated for an Oscar,” he told his Instagram followers in a sweet video. “I want to [say] thank you to the Academy. For somebody who’s been watching the Oscars their whole life — I’ve never been.”

American Fiction writer-director Cord Jefferson received two nods from the Academy, and told the Hollywood Reporter soon after that he was very grateful to have slept through all the fanfare.

“I think that I might have had a heart attack if I was watching it live — it would have been too intense an experience for me,” he said. “I’m a nervous person with a lot of anxiety. So, I stayed up as late as possible, until 2:30 in the morning, and I took half a Xanax, and felt like, ‘OK, you got to try to sleep, you can’t be up pacing and freaking out.’”

When he woke up to 228 unread messages at 7 a.m., he figured “something good happened or something really horrible.” However, it wasn’t long before he understood what was actually going on.

Lily Gladstone made history by becoming the first Native woman of American descent to receive an acting nomination from the Academy, and fortunately, she was able to share the major moment with her parents over FaceTime.

“My mom had the camera flipped around, and she was filming the TV,” she revealed to the Hollywood Reporter. “And I told her, ‘No mom, I don’t want to learn from watching it through your phone. I wanna learn on your and dad’s faces.’”

When the moment came, Lily joked that she could “barely hear” what was going on through the phone, but that her parents’ reaction said it all. 

This might not be her first Oscar nod, but Diane Warren said she was unable to fight her nerves in the leadup to the nominations announcement.

“I was up all night with my friends, counting down the hours. I was nervous,” she told Variety, joking that she’s “not cool enough” to go to sleep and have someone call her to break the news.

Marking her 15th nomination, Diane said it’s still the “coolest thing in the world” to be recognized. 

“There are only five songs chosen, and I don’t take any of this for granted,” she said. “The excitement never wears off.”

When Danielle Brooks’ Oscar nomination was announced, it was 2:30 a.m. and her husband was the only person who could wake her up.

“I’m in New Zealand,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “I thought I had put my phone off ‘do not disturb,’ but it went back on ‘do not disturb’ in the middle of the night, so I fell asleep. My husband is the only one who can get to me on ‘do not disturb,’ so he called and told me, ‘You did it, babe. You did it.’ My daughter’s four, she’s like, ‘Mommy, you did it.’”

In a sleepy haze, Danielle opened her phone to see “over like 200 text messages.” Then she called Oprah. “She’s been here before,” she said, “and this is my first time experiencing this.”

Jeffrey Wright told ExtraTV that he was “pacing” around his home in Brooklyn to avoid his TV when he received a call to tell him that he’d been nominated for Best Actor.

While his phone started blowing up, Jeffrey said he took a second to think of his late mother, who died shortly before he received the script for American Fiction. 

“The first person I acknowledged was my mom,” he recalled. “There’s a picture of her just there, so yeah… she and I had a moment.”

Over in Ireland, Cillian Murphy was hanging out in his childhood home when the news of his first Oscar nomination was announced to the world. 

“Thankfully, I live in a time zone that I don’t have to get up at 5 a.m.,” he told Variety shortly after. “It was already organized for me. We’ve had a few days off and I’ve been at home… I’m actually in my parents’ house in Cork city. I was with my parents and my wife today.”

In keeping with his chill demeanor, Cillian and his family celebrated with “a cup of tea and a slice of cake,” made especially by his mom. “It was very tasty,” he said, later joking that he plans to bring a slice to the ceremony in his wife’s bag.