Ryan Coogler thanks Sly -- eventually -- in accepting AARP award for intergenerational movie

When Ryan Coogler accepted the AARP Movies for Grownups award for best intergenerational film Monday night, he went out of his way to thank a few people from previous generations for helping make him who he is today.

Among them? Producer Irwin Winkler, who was onstage with him, and his parents, who weren’t. There was another guy on the list, but — wait. It’ll come to us.

“So I’m one of those weird millennials,” said the 29-year-old director, referencing host Kathy Griffin’s comment early in the older-skewing show about it being a room where she could really talk trash about that generation. Coogler, however, treated his elders with nothing but respect.

“What really makes us, what really makes our character, isn’t the things that grow old and eventually fail us ... it’s what’s inside.” His parents, he said, were his character builders.

“Creed’s” Adonis Johnson character, played by Michael B. Jordan, was important to Coogler because “he represented so many African American men who don’t have their fathers in their lives,” the director said. “Adonis’ father was a hero, portrayed by Carl Weathers, but he [Johnson] was still struggling with an absentee dad.”

Weathers’ character, Apollo Creed, was introduced in “Rocky,” then died during a fight in “Rocky IV.” Weathers introduced Coogler on Monday night.

“So me and my friends who I grew up with,” Coogler continued, “whose fathers lost their lives at a young age — whether it was through violence, whether through the results of mass incarceration, whether it was through other things — knowing that my bond with somebody from a generation in front of me, which would be my father and mother, helped to shape me to be the person I am today.”

That intergenerational respect, and the thanks that followed it, brought a big round of applause. Then Coogler did a double-take.

“Forgot to thank Sly,” he said, getting a big laugh as he riffed off Sylvestor Stallone’s “oops” moment at the Golden Globes, when the actor tagged thanks to his director onto the very end of his acceptance speech, as the music played him offstage.

(See, we knew it would come to us.)

“Sly was awesome, really had our backs ...,” Coogler explained. “I asked him, ‘Man, why did you let us do this?’ He said, ‘Because 40-some-odd years ago, I was you. I was the young guy who hadn’t really done much, that walked into somebody’s office and had to convince them, and they took a chance on me.’

“‘So it was only right to return the favor.’”

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