On Saturday night, Hollywood‘s best and brightest had the chance to dress up, practice their schmoozing, and thank the Academy. The main Oscar ceremony is still four and a half months away, but at the annual Governor’s Awards, which hands out honorary statues to industry luminaries, a wide swath of the year’s Oscar contenders took the opportunity to not only pay their respects to honorees like Donald Sutherland and Agnès Varda but also to work their charm on a room full of Oscar voters.

Vanity Fair’s Hollywood correspondent Rebecca Keegan was there to witness the spectacle, which included plenty of light moments (like The Florida Project breakout Brooklynn Prince snapping selfies) as well as constant conversation about the sexual misconduct scandal that continues to rock Hollywood. But unlike last year, when the presidential election dominated both table chatter and awards speeches throughout the season, the serious stuff never made it to the stage. “This year, the topic is right here in our own backyards,“ Keegan says on this week’s episode of the Little Gold Men podcast, “and people, at least at this first event, were seemingly very reserved about talking about it on mic.“

In addition to Rebecca’s insights from the Governor’s Awards, where she estimates it’s “75 percent work and 25 percent fun,” this week’s episode of Little Gold Men includes a discussion between Mike Hogan, Richard Lawson, Katey Rich, and Joanna Robinson about Justice League, and the surprisingly intense fervor surrounding both the film itself and, of all things, its Rotten Tomatoes score.

And at the end of the episode, Darkest Hour director Joe Wright joins for a conversation with Richard about his new film, starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill. Wright got candid about what drew him to the story. “I had made a film that had not been well received and had lost the studio a lot of money, and i was down in the dumps,“ he said, referring to, without naming, his 2015 Peter Pan riff Pan. “I doubted myself and my abilities. I kind of felt like maybe I had run my course as a director. I wondered whether the film industry and the audience had changed to the point where I was no longer suited to the task.”

Several things helped pull Wright out of that self-described “crisis of confidence,” including a conversation with Alfonso Cuaron and a job directing an episode of the anthology series Black Mirror titled “Nosedive.“. But when he received the script for Darkest Hour he found a surprising kinship with the Winston Churchill the movie depicts. “People always imagine that Churchill never wavered in his conviction,” Wright said. “But what we find in the records is that there was a point very early on in his premiership when the British troops were stranded on the beach at Dunkirk, and it looked very much like they were going to get wiped out. Churchill was being pushed to negotiate some kind of peace deal with Germany. In that moment he considered that option, and he came very close to pursuing that option. There's a moment within the film—it's really about, I guess, this moment when he doubts himself. He doubts his conviction, and he, I guess, suffers a crisis of confidence, which then he pulls himself out of.“

Listen to this week’s Little Gold Men above, and find the podcast and subscribe on Apple Podcasts.