The entire room was holding its collective breath when Olivia Colman beat odds-favorite Glenn Close to the Best Actress Oscar in 2019. Close had long been expected to win the season’s biggest prize for her performance in The Wife — a movie in which she plays the wife of all wives — having already taken home the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama and other precursor awards. Colman also won a Golden Globe that year, for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, for her part as the gouty, manipulated Queen Anne in The Favourite, and her tipsy speech (in which she thanked her “bitches” and extolled private jets) fortified what prognosticators already thought: Colman was funny, but Close was the serious winner. Until she wasn’t. In the face of such upset, what would Colman say?
Looking out onto a crowd she didn’t expect to face, Colman reached for the…
