Jewish stars gave us a lot of hilarious and adorable moments at the 97th Academy Awards last night. Adam Sandler pretended to leave the building after host Conan O’Brien made fun of his outfit, which included his signature basketball shorts and a hoodie, but not before hugging Timothée Chalamet. Ben Stiller reminded us all that he is a physical comedy scion, son of late Jewish greats Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, when he introduced the set design awards from a stage that refused to lift (some joked that he reported from the “severed floor,” a reference to the lauded show “Severance” he is currently directing).
But no moment was as heartwarming as the genuine tear-wrenching sweetness that happened when Jewish actor Andrew Garfield took the stage with two-time Oscar-winner Goldie Hawn to present the award for best animated film. Garfield has been outspoken about how the loss of his mother, Lynn, to pancreatic cancer in 2021 has shaped him. In interviews, he called grief for the woman who raised him an expression of “all the unexpressed love” he had for her, saying that no matter how long a loved person lives, there’s always unexpressed love that they leave behind.
And this past Sunday night, he decided, in front of Hollywood’s biggest stars, to express some of that love and honor his mother’s memory, all while paying tribute to the entertainment giant beside him. Some would argue that he filled us all of us with love in that moment.
As the “Hackshaw Ridge” and “Tick, Tick… Boom!” star took the stage in a maroon suit, he turned to Goldie Hawn and held her hand, asking if he could tell the radiant star something. When Goldie replied with an enthusiastic yes, Garfield gave one of the most genuinely moving speeches of the evening.
“There’s someone, there’s a person who gave my mother, during her life, the most joy, the most comfort, and tonight, I feel very lucky because I get to thank that person from the bottom of my heart. That person is Goldie Hawn,” Garfield said, as Hawn, just like all of us viewers, started tearing up the moment Garfield mentioned his late mother.
“Thank you, sweetie, you’re really touching me,” she said through tears, while wiping her face with the card that held the winner of that night’s best animated feature award, a card I hope someone was lucky enough to keep.
@people We’re not crying over this moment with #AndrewGarfield and #GoldieHawn at the Oscars. 🥹 #Oscars2025 #AcademyAwards #WeLiveinTime
“I can feel her smiling at us at this moment,” Garfield told the “First Wives Club” star, to which she replied, endearingly, “I know, I’m smiling, too.”
When Hawn, ever the professional, tried to move on to presenting the award, Garfield told her he wasn’t done, and made sure to share a few more compliments with the veteran star: “You’ve given us movies full of joy, you lifted our spirit and you’ve made us feel that all was right with the world over and over again.” To which I think many of us who have enjoyed Hawn’s films throughout her many decades in Hollywood would say: amen!
Hawn thanked Garfield again, saying how lucky she felt to be making movies in Hollywood and to make people laugh — even if the jokes didn’t always land, she told the chuckling crowd. The 79-year-old then asked Garfield to go on with the evening’s announcements because, she joked, she was completely blind. “I have cataracts!” she told the crowd, only to later be able to perfectly read the Best Animated Short category from the teleprompter. Garfield went on to celebrate the animated films nominated as full of “the magic of storytelling,” just like the woman standing next to him. The two then announced the winner was “Flow,” the first Latvian movie to win an Academy Award, and then award best animated short to “Under the Cypress,” a film about PTSD, whose Iranian filmmaking team only managed to land in Los Angeles three hours prior after a visa kerfuffle.
It was, all in all, a wonderfully moving moment, one that reminds us of how personally art can connect and touch us. It was also a reminder of the many wonderful Goldie Hawn films over the years, including the one that earned Hawn the best actress Oscar, her role as badass Jewish private Judy Benjamin in the army comedy “Private Benjamin.”
“Andrew Garfield is not only a consummate actor but an even more wonderful human being. Thank you, sweetheart!” Hawn shared on her Instagram today.
Hawn herself is deeply connected to her children, Oliver Hudson, Kate Hudson and Wyatt Russel, and her grandchildren (back in November of 2024, she shot a really adorable Skims ad with her entire family), which I’m sure made Garfield’s tribute even more emotional.
Back in 2017, when she was promoting the movie “Snatched,” in which she plays Amy Schumer’s mother, she talked about a particularly spiritual moment when her eldest son, Oliver, was a day old and struggling in the hospital, when she prayed over him and watched his heartrate go up.
“Oh my God, was he beautiful. Eleven pounds of a hunk of love,” Hawn told People. “I stood up and I just connected to the universe. I put my hand on him, and I asked God, I said, ‘Come through me, use me to heal my son.’”
“I don’t think there’s any question that prayer can work. I’m a very spiritual person,” said Hawn. “I’m not a religious person, although I was raised Jewish and I like my tribe, but that was a beautiful thing. It was phenomenal. I just emptied myself. I don’t know how to explain it.”
In May of last year, Hawn shared a picture of her daughter, Kate Hudson, and her late mother, Laura Hawn, who passed away in 1997, and who shared her Jewish faith with her daughter and granddaughter (“Gram was the best, so Judaism was everything that I ever knew,” Hudson shared in 2022). In the post, Goldie reminded us all of the circle of life and love that exists between mothers, children and grandchildren that Garfield shared onstage last night.
“Darling daughter,” she wrote, “here you are with your grandmother who loved you with all of her heart!” Her mother, Hawn recalled, was likely wondering “what her little grandchild would become and how her daughter would become a good mother to her little present.”
“You are now a mother and an amazing loving caring mom and have brought us three healthy funny happy healthy grandchildren,” Hawn continued. She called Kate a “wonder” and a “mother supreme.”
“Nothing is more important and you know that. Blessed are we all. Gram is looking down,” she concluded, and shared she was sure that her mother “is so proud of you.”
