UTA and Gold House Celebrate AAPI Awards Season Nominees

Just in time for Lunar New Year, UTA and Gold House came together on Wednesday to toast the agency’s AAPI awards season nominees.

The Celebration of Asian Excellence in Entertainment, for which The Hollywood Reporter served as media sponsor, took over 88 Club in Beverly Hills as stars across film, TV and music shared food and stories over an intimate dinner.

KPop Demon Hunters creator Maggie Kang, No Other Choice‘s Lee Byung-hun, Twinless director James Sweeney, Anderson .Paak, Daniel Dae Kim, Randall Park and former Academy president Janet Yang were all in attendance, alongside UTA partner David Park, who kicked off the evening.

“This night has been so amazing already because when I first started in Hollywood at my agency, there was no one else that looked like anybody in this room, especially including myself, in the business really,” Park, who is now in his 30th year at UTA, told the group. “To think that there could be a night like tonight where we’re really celebrating this unbelievable group of Asian excellence — and we could build this room three times over based on people that just live in L.A. versus anywhere else — it’s mind-boggling to me.”

Park, who is also Kang’s agent, continued that the evening was “a dream come true” and told the guests, “Please enjoy each other’s company. Please enjoy each other’s community — especially over the past couple of months and everything else, community is so important to us. If we’re not here for each other, who are we here for?”

Bing Chen, co-founder and CEO of Gold House, then took the mic, noting, “This room is deliberately intimate because as we all know, it’s one thing to be lauded by your peers, it’s another to be lauded by your people, but it’s yet another be lauded by those who are both at once — and after you get your statues, you have to come home at some point, and so this room hopefully feels like home and family dinner.”

After shouting out several of the nominees in the room, he acknowledged that “a lot of us have been very depressed and burnt out” by the current state of the world, including the fact that “there are media companies that are consolidating with daddy’s money” and “there’s technology that’s advancing at a rate that feels like it’s reckless and leaving so many of us behind.”

Chen argued, though, that many of these similar issues had been faced in 2008, and “we emerged somehow and the message on emergence, especially for those of us who might be independent or artists, whatever have you, was to build deeply where we couldn’t build quietly.” He pointed to that period giving rise to the Marvel franchise, to Ryan Coogler’s career and South Korean content going more worldwide, and concluded, “The best way to build is with each other, whether it’s our community, our industry, our neighborhoods and so forth.”

Before sitting down to a four-course meal, guests took turns posing with a custom-designed red cowboy hat courtesy of Stetson, with the color inspired by the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse. UTA’s Keya Khayatian, Paul Yoo, Caroline Yim and Michelle Kim, rapper Jonathan “Dumbfoundead” Park, filmmakers Alex Ullom and Alex Woo, Academy Museum president Amy Homma and Hybe America’s Nisha Ganatra and James Shin also made appearances at the event.