Hollywood may be shutting down for the Independence Day holiday next week, but leave it to those savvy operators at A24 to sneak one last star-studded premiere in under the wire. Six months after becoming the toast of the last-ever Sundance to be held in Park City, Utah, Olivia Wilde’s third directorial effort, The Invite, unspooled for a hometown audience filled with many famous faces and FOCs (Friends of Cast).
The core foursome of Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton were all in attendance alongside screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Meanwhile, Gold Derby spied Rogen’s Studio collaborator Ike Barinholtz in the crowd of well-wishers along with actress Chase Sui Wonders — another veteran of The Studio who also co-stars in Wilde’s other Sundance summer release, I Want Your Sex — and Pitt fan-favorites Patrick Ball and Gerran Hall.
A hot-ticket L.A. invite in the waning days of June is a strategic move by A24 to position The Invite as a viable 2027 Oscar contender before the crush of fall festival prestige pictures land in a mere two months time. And based on what we’re seeing and hearing, here’s why you can expect at least three — and maybe more — members of its creative team to be invited to the big show on March 14.
Wicked popular
Days before The Invite‘s L.A. premiere, the movie played its last festival engagement as the opening-night attraction at the Nantucket Film Festival, a screenwriter-friendly event held on the windswept New England island famed for its envy-inducing summer homes, exquisite sunsets, and copious seafood.
The movie played to two packed screenings at the festival’s 31st edition, both of which were attended by Jones and McCormack, who represented Team Invite and received NFF’s Special Achievement in Screenwriting Award at the annual Screenwriters Tribute, where they chatted with festivalgoers, as well as fellow honoree Paul Feig, and celebrity guests like Rose Byrne, Oscar-winning Spotlight director Tom McCarthy, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
The duo also sat for a Gold Derby grilling at a Sunday afternoon conversation held at one of the island’s oldest churches and covering their careers writing such films as Celeste and Jesse Forever and Toy Story 4 before nabbing the gig to turn Cesc Gay’s hit 2020 Spanish comedy, Sentimental, into the English-language The Invite. And you’d better believe that Jones and McCormack didn’t miss out on the chance to poke fun at the fact that they were discussing a film as spikily secular as The Invite in a house of worship.
At all of their appearances during the five-day festival, the team also offered plenty of seriously fascinating insights into their writing process — like the fact that they won The Invite gig by pitching a new variation on the original film’s ending — and spread love around to the film’s cast and director. Jones credited Cruz with pushing them to write one of the film’s standout scenes that finds the actress’s therapist character directly addressing how menopause impacts women’s sexual desires, while McCormack shouted out Wilde for devising a running visual motif involving mirrors and what they reflect about the four individuals stuck together in one apartment over the course of a long, eventful evening.
All of the festivalgoers that Gold Derby chatted with on Nantucket agreed that Jones and McCormack were excellent ambassadors for a small-scale film that’s hoping to break out of the 2026 Sundance crowd and into the 2027 awards race as Sorry, Baby and Train Dreams did last year. And at this stage in the game, the team’s script looks and sounds like a clear-cut Best Adapted Screenplay contender — a bid that can only be helped by the screenwriting prize they picked up at NFF, not to mention their deep connections in Hollywood thanks to their side hustles as actors. Also, McCormack is already an Oscar winner, having scored a Best Animated Short statuette for the wrenching 2020 film, If Anything Happens I Love You, which means he’s got some campaigning experience under his belt.
Because The Invite is the very definition of an ensemble film, the four cast members have a more challenging path towards individual Oscar recognition. In that way, the movie is an effective argument in favor of the Oscars adding a Best Ensemble prize that could accompany the still-new Best Casting category, which handed out its inaugural statuette to One Battle After Another earlier.
But if voters do decide to single out a member of the quartet, the most obvious candidate is four-time nominee and one-time winner Cruz, who all but seals her Best Supporting Actress bid not only with that menopause monologue, but also the hilarious scene where she shares a joint with noted weed advocate Rogen. Here’s hoping that they’ll blaze up in the Dolby Theatre lobby before heading into watch Conan O’Brien’s opening Oscars monologue.
Five by five
As the closing-night attraction, NFF invited audiences to a Five-Star Weekend with one of the island’s most famous residents in attendance. Debuting July 9, Peacock’s limited series is adapted from a bestseller by Elin Hilderbrand, who makes a point of writing real Nantucket locations into almost all of her beach reads, including The Perfect Couple, which became a starry Netflix show two years ago with a cast that included Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, and Dakota Fanning.
The Five-Star Weekend is pretty packed with big names as well, surrounding star Jennifer Garner with Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, D’arcy Carden, and Chloë Sevigny, who joined Hilderbrand and showrunner Bekah Brunstetter at the premiere. And unlike Netflix, which filmed The Perfect Couple on — gasp! — Cape Cod, Peacock turned Nantucket into a featured player with extensive location shoots that admittedly caused road closures and other inconveniences that Hilderbrand apologized to her fellow islanders for in her post-screening remarks. Overall, the author sounded happier with this adaptation, noting that readers had expressed some reservations with the creative choices made for the Netflix version of The Perfect Couple.
The Five-Star Weekend is the latest example of Peacock’s new strategy to turn itself into a prime destination for popular #BookTok fare. The streamer found ratings success with the thriller All Her Fault last fall, which used star Sarah Snook’s post-Succession glow to position itself as a 2026 Emmy contender, and The Good Daughter with Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy is aiming to occupy that lane for the 2027 cycle.
Weekend, on the other hand, is more geared towards attracting viewers than voters, and it’s easy to see it becoming a summertime binge for the NBCUniversal platform. And much like The Invite, it’s an ensemble-driven piece where one cast member has the clearest chance of slipping into the awards conversation should they and Peacock want to pursue that path. That would be Sevigny, whose character balances crowd-pleasing sarcasm with Emmy-friendly dramatic challenges like a cancer scare.
The actress — whose acting career has spanned three decades and counting — notably scored some of the NFF premiere’s loudest applause when she made an off-hand reference to Big Love, the much-loved HBO series that scored her a 2010 Golden Globe win for Best Supporting Actress. Sevigny didn’t earn any Emmy recognition for that show, but she is fresh off of a Best Movie/Limited Supporting Actress nod for Netflix’s 2025 ratings monster, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. We’d never bet against her turning a three-star series into a five-star awards campaign.
Order up
We’d be remiss not to mention that it’s the last call at The Bear as the eponymous FX series wraps up its five season run with a farewell course that’s earning Michelin star reviews just as Season 4 seeks to be on the 2026 Emmy menu. Signing off ahead of a major holiday is sure to be great news for Hulu’s streaming numbers as fans binge their way through the show’s eight remaining episodes featuring a ticking clock, a major farewell, and a Paul Rudd cameo.
Whether it’s great news for the show’s Emmy hopes remains to be seen. Season 5 is debuting after Phase 1 of Emmy voting wrapped up, so most voters wouldn’t have had a chance to sample the current batch of episodes while filling out their ballots for the previous year. In the past, that’s bitten The Bear in the proverbial behind as an underwhelming current season can cancel out any goodwill for the previous cycle. But if voters end up loving the final season as much as critics apparently do, maybe we’ll see a renewed groundswell of goodwill as Phase 2 gets underway.
Also debuting ahead of the holiday is Larry David’s latest HBO project, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, a fractured fairy-tale take on American history that’s earning pretty, pretty middling reviews. Still, David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm Rolodex goes deep, so the stars came out to attend the L.A. premiere, including Susie Essman, Vince Vaughn, Henry Winkler, and Kaley Cuoco. The pomp and circumstance even delighted the eternally cynical star, who told the crowd: “I have to say tonight, I am a little excited. Dare I say, enthusiastic.”
Emmy voters are historically enthusiastic about David as well; he’s got 31 nominations and two statuettes to his name across his decades-spanning career. And this particular series partners him with another Emmy champ President Barack Obama, who boasts a 3-for-3 track record in the Best Narrator category. HBO hasn’t yet clarified whether Unhappiness will compete among the Comedy Series, Limited Series or Variety Sketch contenders at the 2027 Emmys, but who doesn’t want to see the dynamic David-Obama duo on the red carpet next September?
Get grilling
Like the rest of the country, Inside Track is taking a July 4 break next week. Enjoy your cookouts and fireworks as we all — in the immortal words of President Whitmore — celebrate our Independence Day.
—Additional reporting by Jaclyn Ben-Porat and Mia McNiece
