Amy Madigan’s Outrageous ‘Weapons’ Performance Demands and Deserves 2026 Oscar Buzz

Amy Madigan has been in the movie business for more than 40 years. You may recognize her from any number of roles, including Kevin Costner’s strong-willed wife in 1989’s Field of Dreams (she tells off the would-be book-banners at a town hall meeting), John Candy’s girlfriend in the same year’s Uncle Buck (she owns a tire shop), or character parts in movies like Gone Baby Gone or Pollock, directed by her husband Ed Harris. You may not recognize her, though, if you catch her in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, where she has a scene-stealing role as Aunt Gladys, a strange woman with a disturbingly elaborate secret. It’s her best part in years – and exactly the kind of showy comeback role that can result in awards buzz. But can a prominent role in a horror movie make it all the way to the 2026 Oscars next spring?

Now, awards buzz in the summer is not quite the same as awards buzz in December, after most of the year’s big releases have been seen. Plenty of talked-about (and very worthy) movies and performances are elbowed aside by various fall-festival releases. Also, while it’s a critically acclaimed hit, Weapons may well be overshadowed by its fellow Warner Bros.-produced original horror smash Sinners, which boasts period production design, killer music, a supporting turn from oft-overlooked Delroy Lindo, and a more obvious social-relevance hook. It’s also possible that both movies will walk away empty-handed, because it’s not that usual for horror movies, even beloved ones, to clean up at the Oscars. At the same time, it’s less rare than it used to be.

Just a few years into Oscar history, the 1931 horror adaptation Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde received multiple nominations and took home a Best Actor trophy for Frederic March’s shapeshifting performance. Amazingly, this was also the year of the original Dracula and Frankenstein films. But the Universal Monster renaissance of the 1930s and early 1940s mostly just resulted in a handful of technical nominations, the movies seen more as popular entertainments than the highest level of artistic achievement. (Consult, say, the many 1935 movies honored over Bride of Frankenstein as to whether any of them are more memorable.) Horror remained pretty marginalized for several decades, starting to make a few in-roads in the 1960s when proto-slasher Psycho received nominations for Best Director and Best Supporting Actress (though not Best Picture), and Rosemary’s Baby was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Ruth Gordon. Gordon won, too, for playing one of the Satanists who helps impregnate Mia Farrow’s Rosemary with the son of the devil.

That’s the best sign for Madigan: Women seem to have better luck than men in terms of getting nominations for horror, and supporting categories have been friendly to more villainous performances like Gordon’s, Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist, or Piper Laurie’s in Carrie. Sissy Spacek and Ellen Burstyn were also recognized for Carrie and Exorcist, respectively, in the leading category. Several leading performances have even won Best Actress: Kathy Bates for Misery, Natalie Portman for Black Swan (more psychological horror; still counts!), and Jodie Foster for The Silence of the Lambs. Just this year, Demi Moore won enough Oscar precursors for her to be considered a frontrunner for The Substance, off her first-ever nomination. Ultimately, she lost out to Mikey Madison in Anora, perhaps reflecting the latter’s more substantial screentime. (True to the plot and themes of the film, Moore had to split her appearance with Margaret Qualley as her youthful alter ego.)

But The Substance was also nominated for Best Picture, a truly wild result for a movie with its sheer volume of blood, guts, and effluvia. Get Out also received a nomination for the biggest prize, and won Best Original Screenplay. Like many types of movies often excluded from serious Best Picture consideration for much of Oscar history – foreign-language films, animation, blockbusters – genre movies have found some inroads with the expanded slate of nominees. (Only five movies per year could be nominated from 1944 until 2009.)

All of this bodes well… for Sinners, probably moreso than Weapons. Weapons evokes a lot of different real-life horrors and social ills, but it’s not as clearly about one thing as either The Substance or Get Out – not to reduce those movies to their simplest interpretations, of course, but there’s an easy sum-up for both of them. One is about the horrors of beauty standards; the other is about the horrors of racism, specifically how white people colonize the culture and bodies of Black people. Sinners may not be quite so clear cut, but Weapons is intentionally zig-zaggy as it avoids a clear central metaphor. It’s also instructive to look at recent horror performances that didn’t make the cut. Mia Goth’s work in X – as two characters, both the final girl and the scene-stealing slasher under a bunch of makeup – didn’t seem to garner serious consideration, and even her more traditional anguish in the prequel Pearl didn’t gain much traction with Oscar voters despite its tour-de-force emoting. Then again, Madigan is in that Supporting Actress category, in a movie that’s likely already been seen by more people who watched X and Pearl combined.

And Madigan’s work does recall The Substance in that it features a sort of performance within a performance: Aunt Gladys does a hilariously off-putting job of playing the kindly old lady, abruptly pivoting strategies just long enough to nudge her victims into place. Her combination of charge-ahead confidence and corner-cutting expedience is, like a lot of moments in Weapons, both funny and chilling; she makes an ideal representative of the movie’s tonal trickiness. Her machinations amount to witchcraft, but her human methods are borderline incompetent; in a weird way, her inability to pass as a normal human is her most humanizing element. Whether Oscar voters will follow that reasoning, or just love the intensely memorable ways that Madigan disguises herself, remains to be seen. But consider the perils of others who have underestimated the power of Gladys.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.