Amy Madigan seemed stunned to take the Oscars stage — understandably so.
She gave an all-out performance in “Weapons,” but that’s the kind of movie that generally doesn’t win Oscars even in an era more open to genre. What “Weapons” has to say about contemporary life is stated in a more minor key; its larger objective is terrifying the audience, and Madigan’s Aunt Gladys, alternating between grandiosity and quiet menace to become a horror-movie villain for the ages, was the chief delivery system for that terror.
So when she won best supporting actress, Madigan was understandably flummoxed, giving a charmingly off-the-cuff speech that rebuffed the notion that one isn’t supposed to read a list of names — after all, those names belong to the people that brought you there. Her humility seemed well-earned. Throughout the promotion cycle for “Weapons,” both in its theatrical run and its awards campaign, Madigan made the point that she’d felt counted out by Hollywood for years, and had grown accustomed to the phone not ringing.
There’s a pain in that, but also an opportunity to prove one’s mettle. This performer, whose only previous Oscar nomination (for 1985’s “Twice in a Lifetime”) came before any of her four fellow nominees had been born, took the role of Aunt Gladys and imbued it with a richness and life that Cregger could only have hoped would have sprung up from a character whose origins and motivations aren’t there on the page.
Why Aunt Gladys is siphoning the life from those she enchants is both obvious (she needs their juice to keep on going!) and beyond what can be understood by us non-witchy mortals. Madigan makes it all coherent, even as she toggles between Aunt Gladys’ performance for the public as a somewhat batty woman who aims for lovability and her life behind closed doors as a malign force.
This isn’t the type of performance that usually wins: One might point to Ruth Gordon playing a similarly garish and threatening witch in “Rosemary’s Baby,” but that was nearly 60 years ago, and “Rosemary’s Baby” had enough prestige to land another nomination, for its screenplay. Madigan was so undeniable that she triumphed over four performers whose films were widely-celebrated across the Oscar nominations this year, while she was the only representative from “Weapons.” That’s how undeniable her work was.
And it came after Madigan herself had been denied for some time. (At 75, she is the second-oldest winner in the category ever.) Her work in “Weapons” already spoke for itself, but the fact of her striding onstage and being battily herself — and making us wonder both where she’d been all this time and what might still lie ahead for her — ought to serve an inspiration, of sorts. That it could inspire performers to know their best shot is a meeting away is obvious. It also should spark, in directors as imaginative as Cregger, a desire to find the next Madigan, someone whose name we only just recall and whose talent we deserve to rediscover.
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From Variety US