Bruce Springsteen gave a rare live performance of ‘Streets Of Philadelphia’ at the Academy Museum Gala – watch below.
The fifth annual event was hosted by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last night (October 18), and the Boss was on hand to receive the inaugural Legacy Award, which honours artists who have “inspired generations of storytellers and deeply influenced our culture”.
He played an acoustic set at the event, which included a performance of his Oscar-winning track ‘Streets Of Philadelphia’, which was written for Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed AIDS drama Philadelphia. Also in his set were ‘Atlantic City’ from 1982’s ‘Nebraska’ and his 2000s live favourite ‘Land Of Hope And Dreams’.
Watch fan-captured footage here:
Bruce Springsteen performing his Oscar-winning song, tonight at the @AcademyMuseum Gala. pic.twitter.com/xiPnuQEO9K
— Matt Dentler (@MattDentler) October 19, 2025
Also honoured at the Academy Museum Gala were Penélope Cruz, who won the Icon Award, director Walter Salles, who picked up the Luminary Award, and SNL comic Bowen Yang, who was presented with the Vantage Award.
‘Land Of Hope And Dreams’ had another outing at the New York Film Festival last month, after a screening of the new Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere. The movie stars The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White in the lead role and it charts the period in which he recorded his sixth album ‘Nebraska’. It is released on Friday (October 24).
NME awarded the film four stars, writing: “Those 10 tracks on ‘Nebraska’ become a lifeline for Springsteen, described as “the only thing I can still believe in” at a point where his inner world was imploding. What Deliver Me From Nowhere shows well is just how commercial success was a distant second to Springsteen – a man who had no choice but to rip those Nebraska songs from his wounded heart.”
The director Scott Cooper recently said that the movie will contain “new information to even his most ardent fans”, adding: “And he never once asked me to sand off the rough edges. But would you expect anything else from Bruce Springsteen? This man who’s the reluctant moral conscience of America?”
Springsteen recently revealed why he gave Deliver Me From Nowhere the go-ahead, despite it charting a “difficult” time in his life.
“You know, it’s really not a biopic,” he said. “It just takes a couple years out of my life when I was 31 and 32, and looks at them really at a time when I made this particular record, and when I went through some just difficult places in my life, you know. And, I’m old and I don’t give a fuck what I do now.”