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If any category this award season seemed locked, it was Best Supporting Actress. Da’Vine Joy Randolph has absolutely dominated, winning a cascade of critics’ guild honors — including the Critics Choice Award — as well as a Golden Globe and BAFTA. And tonight, she has won her first Academy Award.
Tonight’s win was well-deserved and puts Randolph in a company of only 10 other Black women who have won a competitive Oscar since the Academy of Arts and Sciences’ inception, beginning with Hattie McDaniel. She joins the ranks of Jennifer Hudson, Octavia Spencer, Lupita Nyong’o, and Viola Davis. (Notably, after a surprising upset at last year’s Oscars, Angela Bassett was awarded an honorary Oscar earlier this year at the Academy’s Governors Awards.)
Randolph is no stranger to accolades. In 2012, she earned a Tony nomination for her moving performance as Oda Mae Brown in Ghost: The Musical on Broadway. In 2020, her scene-stealing turn in the comedic biopic Dolemite Is My Name had film critics taking notice, scoring her Best Supporting Actress wins and Breakthrough Performance awards from a variety of groups. Then in 2022, she scored nominations for her guest turn as a no-nonsense detective in the hit Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. But The Holdovers launched her to a new level of stardom.
Directed by Alexander Payne, The Holdovers centers on an unlikely trio of near-strangers who are stuck together over the Christmas holiday at New England prep school. Paul Giamatti stars as a gruff, insult-slinging professor forced to chaperone a glowering student (Dominic Sessa) whose holiday plans get canceled at the last minute. Randolph plays Mary Lamb, the school’s chain-smoking head cook; Mary provides hearty meals for the men while nursing a broken heart for the son she lost in the Vietnam War.
As I wrote in our review of the film, “Far from a tearful Oscar-baiting performance, Randolph (who won much critical acclaim for her supporting role in Dolemite Is My Name) delivers a nuanced performance of muted agony and trembling joy. It’s a portrait of grief so real it gives goosebumps.”
How to watch: The Holdovers is now streaming on Peacock.
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