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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Oscar Night Reactions: Part 1

Multiple writers were ecstatic over the MOULIN ROUGE! reunion at the end of the telecast.

Dear readers. We polled Team Experience about the big night and of course we need your responses too in the comments. Best Jokes, Best Presenting Moments, Best Acceptance Speeches, and the moment we knew it was over for Sinners (in terms of a Best Picture win. This is part one of two posts. Here are the first four questions which we hope you'll answer in the comments, too.

Ready? Let's go...

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Split Decision: "Weapons"

In the Split Decision series, our writers pair up and face off on an Oscar-nominated movie one loves and the other doesn't or has mixed feelings about. Tonight, JUAN CARLOS and NATHANIEL  discuss  Weapons.

WEAPONS © Warner Bros

JUAN CARLOS: Hi, Nathaniel! The last time we did a Split Decision together was for Killers of the Flower Moon. Also about the horrors of American society, but we're now faced with a different kind of horror.

Where do we start? People thought Weapons was just part of the boom that the genre is experiencing right now (never out of style, by the way). There was considerable fanfare since the director's previous work was the cult hit Barbarian back in 2021. And lo and behold, a surprise hit on all accounts. Personally, it took me a while to convince myself to watch the film. Not the biggest fan of watching horror in cinemas (weird, but I do love the experience of watching horror films with my mom at home). But the advanced praise on Amy Madigan was enough for me to go to the cinemas. I thought she was phenomenal and am personally rooting for her to win the Oscar (in a solid lineup for Supporting Actress) and the film itself... hmmm.

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They've Got Character!

by Nathaniel R

Hedda, Ronaldo, Rumi, and Remmick were some of the most memorable characters this year

In my mad rush to complete the annual Film Bitch Awards before Oscar night, I have completed the "character" pages. Each year I eagerly await meeting new divas, heroes, sexpots, and villains in the movie theaters and then celebrating them this way.  Supersized or heightened characters tend to make more of a difference in genre pictures, but you'll sometimes find indelible characters that fit these rather broad labels in comedies and dramas, too...

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Oscar Volley: "Best Supporting Actress" is a fun, fantastically chaotic Free-For-All!

The Oscar Volleys continue. NICK TAYLOR and ERIC BLUME discuss the ever volatile race for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Amy Madigan in WEAPONS | © Warner Bros.

NICK:  Hello Eric! I’m writing you the day after the Actor Awards announced their winners. Amy Madigan took their Supporting Actress prize for her pristine turn in Weapons, while Wunmi Mosaku can add Sinners’ Best Ensemble award to her shelf. It’s a three-way race between them and Teyana Taylor’s commanding turn in One Battle After Another, and I for one couldn’t be happier. Hell, Inga Ibsdottir Lilleass and Elle Fanning are better also-rans than most of the past decade’s undisputed champions.

After several years in a row of middling lineups, this is the best Supporting Actress field since 2020, maybe even 2016. There aren’t even any leads (or categorically ambiguous) to dampen our fun. In a year with plenty of outside contenders and tantalizing non-starters, all five women earned their nominations fair and square, without feeling preordained. I’m still debating if Taylor or Madigan will go all the way, and while I ponder the fate of all things, let me ask you: How do you feel about this category, Eric? Where do you think the winds are blowing?

ERIC:  Nick, I agree wholeheartedly that this is the best field we've had in many years, not a lame performance in the bunch!  Which is why I'm personally a bit dismayed that the two performances I feel are the strongest (Sentimental Value's Inga and Elle) are the two that seem out of the running for a win...

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