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…

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Who’s our next three-peat champion?

by Cláudio Alves

And just like that, Sean Penn became the eighth actor to win three Oscars.

With One Battle After Another, Sean Penn became the eighth person in Academy Award history to win a third acting Oscar. He follows Supporting Actor king Walter Brennan, most honored thespian ever Katharine Hepburn, Swedish superstar Ingrid Bergman, New Hollywood enfant terrible Jack Nicholson, nomination queen Meryl Streep, method actor extraordinaire Daniel Day-Lewis, and too-cool-for-school Oscar favorite Frances McDormand. This honor comes after a period when Penn was fairly removed from the awards conversation, regularly panned at Cannes for his directorial work while winning the favor of a few critics for underseen performances like those in Daddio and Asphalt City. Indeed, he seems so uninterested in playing the game that he barely campaigned and didn’t even show up to collect his prize.

Disregarding whether he deserves it or not, Penn’s victory leads me to wonder who’s next? Who is closest to joining this exclusive club? There are currently 19 two-time acting Oscar winners alive, each a different case, with some landing in the “just a matter of time” field, while others are surely “not happening.” Join me as I go over these possibilities…

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Drag Race RuCap: “A Toast to Alyssa Edwards”

Who needs Oscar gold when Alyssa Edwards is serving golden goddess on TV?

NICK TAYLOR: Yes, the Academy Awards were fun, lots of gorgeous expressions of gratitude and admiration between fellow artists and fellow human beings. It was wonderful, it was funny, but did anyone give a speech as good as the queen’s best roasts? Certainly, no one matched the deranged peaks or flailing lows brought out for the "Toast of Alyssa Edwards." The diva herself looked quite good, proving all that glitters really is gold. I do need white pageant girls to stop wearing blonde units only a few shades removed from their pale, pale skin. Still, the glamour was there, and the episode was very entertaining. Were you dazzled, diva?

CLÁUDIO ALVES: I think Amy Madigan would have fun at a roast, but I’m not sure she’d be a good roaster. Maybe Jessie Buckley could thrive in that environment, as she feels like a cool lady and her speech and vague air of Olivia Colman-esque humor. We should be asking ourselves who, from the Oscar set, we want on Drag Race, and my answer is Malgosia Turzanska, who showed up to the Academy Awards covered in safety pins and would’ve surely fought for a Discord top-two placement last week. Oh, but you asked about the actual roast Drag Race episode, not imaginary AMPAS crossovers. Well…

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Oscar Night Reactions: Part 2

If you missed part one, click HERE.

Some of the Team Experience writers were almost as happy for Amy Madigan's win as Ed Harris.

For the second half of our Team Reaction blurbs from the 98th Academy Awards, we asked Team Experience about the moments that perplexed them, broke their hearts, and brought them joy... and if there's any last thing about awards season anyone would like to get off your chest.

It's all after the jump...

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Don’t worry, Chalamaniacs, Timmy will be fine!

by Cláudio Alves

First look at Timothée Chalamet in DUNE: PART THREE | © Warner Bros.

The period between the Oscar nominations announcement and the actual 98th Academy Awards ceremony hasn’t been easy for Timothée Chalamet’s most ardent fans. From presumed Best Actor frontrunner, he became an also-ran. Honestly, considering what we saw of the final results, he may not have been the second-placer either. Anyway, more than losing the prize, he was the butt of half a dozen jokes throughout the ceremony, with the winning team from Two Strangers Exchanging Saliva going as far as alluding to the opera and ballet comments that set social media and the world of performing arts aflame in the week after Oscar voting closed. However, the situation can and has been a tad overblown.

So, as the title suggests, I’m here to ask Chalamaniacs not to worry, not to panic, calm down. Timmy will be just fine…

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