HOLLYWOOD FAVOURITE
Surprise as Olivia Colman pips frontrunner Glenn Close to Best Actress Oscar for role in The Favourite
Olivia Colman, winner for Best Actress in a Leading Role, attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party the at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. She was a surprise winner for her role in The Favourite, with Glenn Close hotly tipped.
HOLLYWOOD LOVES its surprise endings, and this was one that nobody – least of all its new leading lady – had been expecting.
As her name was pulled from the envelope, Olivia Colman clasped her hands to her face and sobbed, her emotions only partly concealed by the phalanx of faces that planted kisses on hers.
Meanwhile, the expressions worn by the four other best actress nominees were almost Oscar-worthy in themselves.
The favourite, Glenn Close, smiled and nodded sagely. Lady Gaga could be seen to say, “Oh my God”.
“It’s genuinely quite stressful,” were Ms Colman’s first words after she was helped from her seat and escorted to the stage.
Only a week earlier, her star was so distant in the California firmament that she had been the butt of jokes.
“I can say whatever I like because you don’t have a clue who I am,” giggled an actress impersonating her on the TV show Saturday Night Live.
Backstage and beginning to recover her composure, the real Ms Colman said: “Next year I’ll be able to put it into words but I don’t know what to do with myself at the moment.”
Asked where she would put her statuette, she said: “In bed, between me and my husband.”
Both she and Ms Close had been named best actress at the Golden Globes last month, for a comedy and drama respectively.
But Oscar day had dawned with viewers to the CBS network being assured by film critic David Edelstein that Ms Close was “a lock” for her performance in the feminist drama, The Wife.
Hers was the “subtlest, smartest, most poignant performance I’ve seen in a movie that dumb,” he added. It was Ms Close’s seventh nomination but she has never won.
“You’ve been my idol for so long and this is not how I wanted it to be,” Ms Colman told her from the stage.
Her winning performance was as Queen Anne in the dark comedy, The Favourite. She is no stranger to satire, having enjoyed a TV career that has taken in Green Wing and Twenty Twelve, and she found early fame as David Mitchell’s girlfriend in the comedy, Peep Show. Later, she played Margaret Thatcher’s daughter, Carol, opposite Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.
Her comedy training did not desert her when, upon being signalled to wind up her acceptance speech yesterday, she blew a raspberry.
Her win was not the only surprise of the evening. Green Book, a drama about racism in the 1960s, was named best picture, a category widely expected to go to Roma, which is not in cinemas but on Netflix.
The film also won the best supporting actor Oscar for Mahershala Ali, and best original screenplay.
Rami Malek, named best actor for his role as the rock star Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, was photographed falling from the stage after collecting his statuette, and had to be seen by paramedics.
Regina King was named best supporting actress for If Beale Street Could Talk, completing the most diverse group of winning actors in the Oscars’ 90-year history.
Consolation for Lady Gaga came in the shape of the best original song statuette, for Shallow from A Star Is Born.
“This is not about winning, what it’s about is not giving up,” she said.
You’ve been my idol for so long and this is not how I wanted it to be. Olivia Colman, addressing fellow nominee Glenn Close.
THE SUCCESS of the British actress Olivia Colman at the Oscars appears to have surprised no one more than herself. She, like most of Hollywood, had apparently expected Glenn Close to be named best leading lady.
The fact that her role as Queen Anne was in not a blockbuster but an art-house film called
The Favourite meant that many of those at the film industry’s biggest night had little idea who she was. Indeed, her less-than-starry status had been parodied last week on American TV.
Here in Britain, where Ms Colman has grown familiar in often downbeat TV dramas, her elevation to theatrical royalty is less of a surprise. It puts her in such august company as Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Andrews and Helen Mirren, and makes her forthcoming appearance as our present Queen in the Netflix series, The Crown, all the more tantalising.
If her success tells us anything, it is that the world still appreciates British art and culture, even if we sometimes do not.