Francis Ford Coppola to accept AFI honors despite everyone being mean about Megalopolis
As a mea culpa for everyone in show business being pretty rude about his latest movie, the AFI is giving Francis Ford Coppola its highest honor.
Photo by Ernesto Ruscio (Getty Images)
Francis Ford Coppola will accept the AFI Life Achievement Award, the American Film Institute’s highest honor, next year, despite everyone being super rude about Megalopolis being kind of silly or whatever. Coppola, who spent decades working on his passion project only for much of the industry to poo-poo it on the grounds of its Euro-style wackiness, will collect his award at a gala on April 26, 2025.
Calling Coppola a “peerless artist” who has “created seminal works in the canon of American film,” Star Wars head and AFI chair Kathleen Kennedy ignored the showbiz’s dismissal of Megalopolis, choosing to focus on Coppola’s much more popular Godfather films, even though a little bit of Cesar Catalina’s megalon could do wonders for the Star Wars series. She continued, “AFI is honored to present him with the 50th AFI Life Achievement Award,” an award that should be given on the merits of how many Wow Platinums one creates in their career. Unfortunately, it’s not, so other recent honorees, including Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington, and Julie Andrews, have yet to produce a single Wow Platinum. We must ask, what are we even doing here?
Having recently declared, “Hollywood doesn’t want me anymore,” Coppola has already begun work on his next movie without the help of Tinsel Town. Currently prepping the film, a loose adaptation of Edith Warton’s Glimpses At The Moon, Coppola says he’s turned Wardith’s work into a “very odd confection” with “strong dance and musical elements.” Instead of selling his winery to pay for the project, he hopes to fund Glimpses “the conventional way, with the help of national subsidies” and shoot in the U.K. and Europe. “I’m all borrowed out.” And that goes double for any studio bullying Megalopolis.