The rooftop area on the Academy Museum of Movement Footage was awash in pinks and lotions on Tuesday, from the plush floral preparations to the outfits on Hollywood royalty like Kate Hudson and Riley Keough in attendance on the annual Academy Ladies’s Luncheon, offered by Chanel, to have a good time girls filmmakers.
The tranquil setting belied the very actual present of frustration and anger felt by many ladies in Hollywood proper now, highlighted by keynote speaker Kristen Stewart’s uncooked, humorous and rousing speech decrying the dearth of tales by and for ladies after a quick post-#MeToo surge.
“I am in a severe state of PMS today,” the actor and “Chronology of Water” director mentioned, making it clear that her handle wasn’t going to go the everyday ladies-who-lunch route. “I relish being able to say that my nerves are close to the surface of my skin and it’s a great day for that…. It’s awkward to talk about inequality for some people and it’s more awkward when the nature of inequality is somewhat ephemeral. We can discuss wage gaps and taxes on tampons and measure in lots of quantifiable ways, but the violence of silencing, it’s like we’re not even supposed to be angry. I can eat this podium with a fork and f— knife, I’m so angry.”
Tessa Thompson on the 2025 Academy Ladies’s Luncheon.
(Myles Hendrik)
Stewart’s remarks throughout her 10-minute speech had been met with a number of rounds of applause, in addition to hoots and hollers from an viewers that included stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tessa Thompson, Zoey Deutch, Kaitlyn Dever and Felicity Jones, in addition to trade heavyweights like Warner Bros. CEO Pam Abdy.
“May I leave my contortionist skills at the door and speak from the heart?” requested the Oscar-nominated performer. “May I not conceal or reframe my anger but share it lively so as to move through it to something more fun and more beautiful and less boring and more original. The backsliding from our brief moment of progress is statistically devastating. It is devastating. Such a pitiful number of films [from] the past year have been made by women. We obviously need many more women’s luncheons in our lives. We need to become ladies who lunch all the f— time.”
Later she mentioned: “Our business is in a state of emergency, man. And you know the last thing that I wanna do here is lose the celebration under a pile of pissed-off rubble. We are allowed to be proud of ourselves and maybe to allow each other to reclaim the gratitude… I’m thankful to you. I am not grateful to the boys’ club business model that pretends to want to hang out with us while siphoning our resources and belittling our true perspectives.”
Barbie Ferreira and Zoey Deutch on the 2025 Academy Ladies’s Luncheon.
(Myles Hendrik)
Previous to Stewart’s speech, the occasion featured opening remarks by Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor, adopted by “Sinners” costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who offered this 12 months’s Academy Gold Fellowships for Ladies to recipients Alina Simone and Marlén Viñayo. The fellowship is awarded in partnership with Chanel, signifying the model’s dedication to nurturing the following era of ladies filmmakers.
Attendees agreed that assist for ladies artists is important. “It’s a very tough business on women, and it takes so much time and experience to learn how to navigate these waters,” says “Nouvelle Vague” star Zoey Deutch. “So to have people that can either one, advise you or two, say ‘Yes I hear you, I see you, that also happened to me’, I think, is immeasurably important.”
Says Embeth Davidtz, director of “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight”: “It’s still really hard. I’m a female filmmaker. It took a lot to get my film made and any help that we can get, we need to get it. Men have been getting it for a really long time.”
