The Lone Acting Nominee vs Best Picture Stars

by Cláudio Alves

In the battle of Aunt Gladys against Best Picture stars, the witch won!

I don’t know about you, but I love Oscar trivia, the more meaningless, niche, and utterly useless for prediction purposes, the better. Indeed, matters of stats and precedent feel better invoked in post-Oscar talk than in the middle of the season, when folks sometimes hold on to these analyses as if they were unshakable rules. Every year, Academy Award history gains new records, new precursor combos that failed or succeeded, and age-old assumptions that were never examined until they were proven wrong. So, let’s roll with it and enjoy the silliness of our collective Oscar obsession. Tonight, I’d like to return to the matter of Amy Madigan’s Best Supporting Actress win.

Hers is a remarkable achievement for a number of reasons, spanning from genre bias to the sheer quality of the performance at hand. Still, even odder is the fact that the Weapons witch was a lone acting nominee facing off against a lineup of women starring in Best Picture nominees. And though we live in an era when the Academy tends to privilege the movies listed in their top race in almost every other category, Madigan came out victorious. This particular scenario has only happened three times before…

 

Katharine Hepburn, MORNING GLORY (1933)

And yes, one of those times comes from the very early Oscars, when Supporting Acting categories were still but a dream and the Academy nominated only three thespians per year. For the season spanning the second half of 1932 and the entirety of 1933 – still, the longest period an individual Oscar edition ever covered – an up-and-coming Katharine Hepburn won against May Robson in Capra’s Lady for a Day, and Diana Wynyard in the Best Picture-winning farrago we know as Cavalcade. In many ways, this victory represented an industry investment in someone they believed would be the next big thing. For once, that was a good hunch on their part.

That being said, Hepburn’s win for playing a promising young actress in Morning Glory hasn’t aged well. I think it’s stronger work than what earned her the second and fourth spots in her record run at the Academy Awards, but most folks disagree. Additionally, that season, Hepburn starred as Jo March in George Cukor’s Little Women, a Best Picture nominee. Some might argue this invalidates her presence on this list. Madigan didn’t benefit from a similar edge, unless I’ve forgotten a late-season surge of AMPAS love for Rebuilding. Still, this was a first for the Oscars.

Mary Astor, THE GREAT LIE (1941)

It didn’t take long for history to repeat itself. But, this time, it was in Supporting Actress, the category where all such events would occur henceforth. Not that Mary Astor is playing a supporting role in The Great Lie, her victory being a good example of how category fraud has always played a part in the Oscars, even if it sometimes seems like it’s a recent crisis. At least, in this case, it led to a pretty smashing turn getting rewarded and an oft-undervalued Golden Age name being forever enshrined in the pantheon of Academy Award winners. Sure, it may not mean much, but it does confer some longevity. Astor should be remembered for this characterization of an independent pianist dealing with the melodrama of single-motherhood in the 1940s, and for many other films, like Dodsworth and Meet Me in St. Louis.

Like The Maltese Falcon, if we’re being honest about it. Because, yes, Astor, like Hepburn, may have won her Oscar for a film the Academy otherwise ignored. But, like Hepburn, she also starred in a much more popular flick, up for the Best Picture trophy in the same ceremony. How many votes did she receive for folks who wanted to honor her for both the insouciant refusal to compromise of her The Great Lie performance and the femme fatale stylings of The Maltese Falcon? It’s impossible to know for sure, yet it’s something to consider when reflecting upon this particular quartet of Oscar winners. Whatever reason voters had, Astor came out victorious against Patricia Collinge and Teresa Wright from The Little Foxes, Sarah Allgood from How Green Was My Valley, and Margaret Wycherly in Sergeant York.

Margaret Rutherford, THE V.I.P.s (1963)

One thing you’ll notice is that, in the three instances when this scenario played out in Best Supporting Actress, the eventual winner was facing off against multiple women from the same movie. For Astor, they were Collinge and Wright. Madigan faced off with Sentimental Value’s Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. As for Margaret Rutherford, she beat the record holders for the most women nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category from the same film. They were Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman, from that year’s Best Picture winner, Tom Jones. Honestly, there’s a universe out there where Tony Richardson’s Georgian romp filled all slots in the category, seeing as Susannah York and Joan Greenwood decidedly got some votes thrown their way. 

The final nominee was Lilia Skala, who actually won the Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1963 for her turn as a strict nun whose heart melts under the influence of Sidney Poitier’s Homer in Lilies of the Field. It’s also important to mention that, unlike Hepburn and Astor, Rutherford wasn’t part of any other Best Picture contender, though The V.I.P.s’ stars – Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – did appear in the much-maligned Cleopatra, whose fame owes more to off-screen polemic than whatever is on screen. Also, for what it’s worth, Rutherford may be mostly forgotten nowadays, but she was a veritable vidette at that time, her stardom having shot up in the States thanks to her many big-screen appearances as Miss Marple. In any case, if any member of the vast V.I.P.s ensemble deserved Oscar gold, it was a young Maggie Smith rather than the fun and endearing, yet ultimately insubstantial, Rutherford.

Amy Madigan, WEAPONS (2025) 

Which brings us to Amy Madigan, 62 years after Rutherford, victorious in a new millennium when only five lone acting nominees had won before her. For the curious, they were Charlize Theron in Monster, Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Christopher Plummer in Beginners, and Julianne Moore in Still Alice. I’m still planning on writing something about horror cinema at the 98th Academy Awards, but that must be mentioned here, too, as that genre has produced very few acting winners in the annals of Oscar history. Ruth Gordon stands out as the best predecessor to Madigan, her Minnie Castevet emerging fully-formed, from the same tradition of Grande Dame Guignol that so influences the grotesquerie of Aunt Gladys.

Even then, Gordon was more grounded than what Madigan’s up to in the wildest passages of the Weapons narrative when, crowned with her clown red wig, the villainous biddy seems like she’s performing eccentricity to convey an idea of harmlessness, using society’s penchant for setting aside such people as a key part of her plan. In some ways, rather than hide her strangeness, Madigan has Gladys exalt it through self-aware artifice, a theatricalization that leaves others in shock. This is not a matter of beckoning attachment or winning people’s hearts. Instead, it’s an act whose ultimate effect is to inspire a modicum of confusion, mayhap revulsion, a fear of the other that simultaneously dismisses it as inconsequential.

In private, when showing her real self to little Alex, Gladys is much more easily recognizable as a calculated killer, a witch whose craft is performed in ways that beckon notions of domesticity, as twisted as they might be. These contrasts are the central tenet of Amy Madigan’s turn, and they’re also what make her such an unusual Oscar winner. She makes the monstrousness familiar, while the pretense of something is where oddness lies. Basically, the inverse of Gordon, whose Minnie weaponized how commonplace her nosy neighbor schtick was, both for the audience and Rosemary Woodhouse. It’s the inverse of Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes, and Fredric March’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Silence of the Lambs duo is in another league of their own, as Demme rarely indulges in the horror genre’s more stylized delights.

And still she won. Hell, Wunmi Mosaku might have been the runner-up, playing another woman some might call a witch in another Oscar-winning horror movie, for which Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor. Isn’t that amazing? While Madigan wouldn’t have been my pick from this year’s five, Teyana Taylor gets my vote for One Battle After Another – she’s a victor for the ages, and I’m just now realizing how special a win this is within the context of awards history, voting patterns, industry trends, and so on.

Nevertheless, if I were to rank the four lone acting nominees that faced off against Best Picture stars and came out victorious, Madigan would come behind Astor. Hepburn gets bronze, and Rutherford is left out of the podium.

What say you, dear reader? How would you rank these four Oscar-winning turns? Did they all deserve to win? Also, if you're interested in the history of Lone Acting Nominees, check the podcast of the same name. I've been a guest twice already!