Oscar Seasoning: Weapons Up for Amy Madigan (and the Eternal “Why Don’t Horror Performances Get Nominated” Discourse)

As awards season moves forward, we’re seeing the frontrunners form. One Battle After Another has dominated critics’ choices, and there’s also been a lot of love for Sinners, The Secret Agent, and Sentimental Value. Critical favourites don’t always translate to Academy choices, of course, but it’s always helpful to see which way the wind is blowing in 2025. Most of the acting categories are bulging with competition, so few things feel guaranteed at this moment in time (except, perhaps, for another Leo nom.) One such contender has emerged as a surprise favourite, one critics singled out as yet another example of a great genre performance that the Academy would probably be too snobby to celebrate. But what if it actually happens this season? It looks like it might for Amy Madigan.

In Weapons, Zach Cregger’s horror-comedy with more surprises than a soap opera, a strange mystery engulfs a small town. One night, 17 children from the same classroom ran out of their homes at the exact same time and disappeared. Only one student remained. Their teacher is singled out as the prime suspect while the locals desperately try to find their offspring. Warner Bros. did a great job marketing Weapons and keeping its secrets hidden. It made the reveal of Aunt Gladys all the scarier.

(Image via Warner Bros.)

Amy Madigan turns up in Weapons as a ludicrous nightmare. Gladys has nubs for teeth, a shocking red hairstyle, and make-up that was applied via Homer Simpson’s shotgun. She’s camp and elicits immense discomfort in those she encounters, but still seems like a perfectly innocent, if eccentric, old lady, right up until she isn’t. Gladys is a Brothers Grimm fairytale villain crossed with a John Waters character and a serial predator. Immediately, she became a horror icon, and a mandatory option for any drag performer’s Halloween schedule.

A character like that would be easy to play for the cheap seats. She’s a caricature, proudly so, but aesthetics alone aren’t what make her scary. It’s Madigan steering the ship and she’s doing a stellar job as this tempest of malice. It’s like she’s playing a simulacrum of a human, like an alien trying to blend in with a crowd,

but one who’s having too much fun unsettling those around them. You can see the giddiness in Madigan’s eyes as Gladys grosses out those who underestimate her, then the switch when she turns to calculating silence to destroy them. Weapons is partly about how cloistered communities dream up ludicrous boogeymen to blame all of their problems on rather than confront the true and more mundane evils of their world, but it adds that twist: okay, but what if there actually was a boogeyman, and she was even worse than our nightmares?

Amy Madigan is a stalwart character actress who you’ve probably seen in dozens of things. She started out life as a singer before studying at the Lee Strasberg Institute and working with the likes of Louis Malle, Walter Hill, and George A. Romero. She was a scene stealer in Field of Dreams and Uncle Buck but also did tons of TV movies and stage work. She was Oscar-nominated in 1986 for Twice in a Lifetime (she lost to Anjelica Huston in Prizzi’s Honor) and frequently collaborated with her husband, Ed Harris. I’ve been a fan of her for decades because of her work in Carnivàle, one of my all-time favourite TV shows. Also, she’s a total boss who refused to applaud Elia “I snitched during the McCarthy witch hunts” Kazan when he got his honourary Oscar.

Weapons smartly kept Madigan’s involvement with the film to a minimum during promotion. She was kept out of the press tour and didn’t give any interviews until audiences had already been introduced to Gladys. She told The New York Times that her inspirations for the character included the work of photographer Diane Arbus, Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and drag. She also noted that Zach Cregger presented her two back stories for the character: in one, she’s a human using witchcraft, and in another, she’s a different creature entirely. Madigan decided not to let him or anyone know what option she chose, which was smart. The strange ambiguity of the character shines in her performance, which swings from chilling to bananas with deceptive ease.

Madigan has been nominated for a Golden Globe and a Critic’s Choice Award, and she won Best Supporting Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, which I can assure you is a very big deal. The momentum is in her corner, and there’s a real passion behind this pick. It’s a great performance by a reliable actress whom everyone loves and has worked with. And it’s a horror role, an undeniably gross and weird and scary performance. It’s not “post horror” or any of that crap. This is dyed-in-the-guts scream queen sh*t.

As Madigan herself said to The New York Times, there’s a “preciousness of the academy, which I’m a member of. It excludes [horror] sometimes, and you know how that goes. I know this conversation also has people talking about “Sinners” and all the wonderful, wonderful actors and actresses in that, so if you’re talking about the cultural moment of what’s going on, do you feel that the award system is more open to that?”

We have this conversation every year: why won’t the Academy fully embrace horror, especially with performances? There are exceptions, of course: Kathy Bates in Misery, Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby, but even those films were embraced by voters as thrillers and dramas more than horrors. Many of the most egregious snubs of the past decade have been horror related: Toni Collette in Hereditary, Lupita Nyong’o in Us, Essie Davis in The Babadook, John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane… You can’t claim these actors didn’t put the work in or that it paled in comparison to some of the more baitier roles that got awarded. But that block still exists for some reason, even when progress is made. The Substance had its breakout moment, but the voters still shied away from giving Demi Moore the Oscar she deserved.

Trite ideas of prestige still permeate awards season, and not just at the Oscars. Comedy suffers as much as horror in terms of nominations, and it all too often feels like the homework is celebrated more often than the results (yes, I know you watched lots of videos of the singer you’re playing to copy their every move, and I’m still not impressed.) But the voter base is getting younger and more diverse, and those steps forward into the modern day have demonstrated a willingness to be a bit weirder with their votes. Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture, after all. Sinners is a frontrunner for a reason, and there’s no way even the sniffiest AMPAS member can try to spin that movie as not being horror. The same goes for Amy Madigan. To embrace her is to embrace horror, no matter what. How cool would it be if she’s able to break that door down where so many before her couldn’t, and with such an out-there and gnarly performance?! Besides, would you want to be the one to tell Aunt Gladys you’re not voting for her?