Weeks before she’d receive her first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actress at the Oscars 2024, Da’Vine Joy Randolph referred to her awards trajectory as “a very blessed experience.”
That’s a pretty understated way to describe the tear she’s been on this awards season, where Randolph’s performance in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers has earned her virtually every supporting-actress trophy to claim—the SAG, Critics Choice, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Independent Spirit, and a cluster of critics prizes, including both the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It is the rarest of precursor sweeps, one that has eluded every other acting frontrunner this year and even similarly slam-dunk winners of years past. Take, for example, Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Ke Huy Quan, who lost the BAFTA to The Banshees of Inisherin’s Barry Keoghan after capturing basically all other awards en route to the Oscars.
“It’s just really me and my best friend getting through this day by day—my publicist, Marla Farrell. We’re in it to win it,” Randolph told me at the start of our interview for the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, before stopping herself to say, “Oh, and by that I mean…”
“Win at life?” I offer.
“Win at life,” she agreed with a smile. “We’re in it. We’re focused.”
Despite her coyness, it seemed that this awards season’s worst-kept secret (even to Randolph herself) was that she’d be clutching that Oscar. But although her victory has long a foregone conclusion, how did that eventual inevitability happen?
The seeds were actually planted a year ago—mere days after the 2023 Oscars were handed out. Given Payne’s history with the Academy (he’s directed three best-picture-nominated films and won two screenplay statuettes himself) Vanity Fair first floated The Holdovers as an Oscars possibility on March 23. By that time, the awards pundits over at Gold Derby had already pinpointed Randolph as a contender, as well as eventual nominees like Oppenheimer’s Emily Blunt and The Color Purple’s Danielle Brooks—largely relying on factors such as caliber of subject material and buzz around specific performers to make their premature picks.
But buzz wouldn’t truly materialize until the fall, when many awards contenders debut on the festival circuit to prognosticators and civilians alike. The Holdovers bowed at both the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was the first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award, a strong historical indicator of best-picture potential for films like Marriage Story and Argo.
Randolph’s performance as Barton Academy kitchen manager Mary Lamb, a mother grieving the loss of her son in the Vietnam War while cooped up for the holidays with Paul Giamatti’s cranky professor and Dominic Sessa’s petulant student, was promptly regarded as the otherwise prickly film’s beating, breaking heart. “Mary could have easily been a bad stock character, a Black service worker there to sass and support these self-involved white men,” VF’s Richard Lawson wrote in his review out of TIFF. “But Payne gives Mary crucial shading, which Randolph, in a terrific turn, expresses in ways both vivid and understated. She’s a vital part of the picture, a voice of reason possessed of her own irrationality.” The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee said, “A shot of her tipsily reminiscing at a Christmas party, thinking of her son as an Artie Shaw record plays, and a brief scene where she unpacks her son’s baby belongings are both shattering, enough to secure her a best supporting actress nomination come next year.”
Elsewhere, Lee noted that the film contained “a deservedly more substantial role for Randolph, an actor who has been impressing on the outskirts” since her breakout in 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name, where she stole scenes opposite Eddie Murphy. Others in the industry seemed to take stock of Randolph’s burgeoning career, which began with her 2012 Tony nomination for Ghost: The Musical, playing the same part that won Whoopi Goldberg a best-supporting-actress Oscar of her own. (Goldberg was then only the second Black woman to win an acting Oscar—more than 50 years after Hattie McDaniel for Gone With the Wind in 1939. If Randolph wins, she becomes only the 11th Black woman to do so in acting.) Roles in film—across awards contenders like The United States vs. Billie Holiday and *Rustin—*as well as TV—critically acclaimed Only Murders in the Building, near-universally reviled *The Idol—*followed. If Giamatti was the seasoned journeyman actor and Sessa the revelatory newcomer, Rudolph could be the bridge—familiar yet fresh. As Giamatti previously told Vanity Fair, “People are finally really taking note of her in a way that they hadn’t [before].”
But it was Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone, who now faces a tight race with Poor Things’ Emma Stone in the lead-actress category, who was the early odds-on favorite to win the best-supporting-actress trophy. In late September, she opted to campaign as a lead, just as Michelle Williams did last year for The Fabelmans. With Gladstone’s sizable role—and historical narrative–out of the race, Randolph promptly rose in the rankings and had taken the lead slot by the end of September. The actors strike, which had barred performers from promoting their projects, ended in November, just as The Holdovers was freshly hitting theaters ahead of its holiday-season sweet spot.
As for Randolph’s competition, Brooks secured The Color Purple’s lone nomination, while America Ferrera failed to capture key precursor recognition from SAG and the Globes, both suggesting lack of widespread support. Randolph’s chances were also helped by the fact that Nyad’s Jodie Foster, who has been visible on the campaign trail both for this film and True Detective: Night Country, already has a pair of Oscars on her shelf. And Oppenheimer is set to dominate elsewhere, making it less of an incentive for Blunt to be recognized than Randolph, who may get The Holdovers’ only win on Oscar night. If she does, she’ll be the first actor to ever win for one of Payne’s movies, despite previously directing seven performers to nominations.
Barring any Russell Crowe or Eddie Murphy-sized voting-period blunders, the trophy was Randolph’s to lose. And with each acceptance speech came a de facto audition for the Oscars main stage. “The right move can propel you, and you have to be conscious of what you do and say,” Randolph told VF. “It’s a job, so I treat it as such in the best way possible.” She writes her speeches out beforehand while in hair and makeup—keeping things from the heart, but not off the cuff. Take her BAFTA win, where she lightly flirted with presenter Chiwetel Ejiofor before getting choked up: “There have been countless Marys throughout history who have never got the chance to wear a beautiful gown and stand on a stage here in London,” Randolph said, contextualizing the role’s larger impact. “Telling her story is a responsibility that I do not take lightly, and this award is a beautiful reminder of how her story has rippled through the world.”
It was striking that balance on the campaign trail—strategic but sincere—what made Randolph’s early buzz endure. As she told VF, “Don’t chase the gold. Chase the connection, the interaction, the healing, the self-evolvement. After these Oscars, it’s a whole new season, literally the very next day.” Perhaps next year’s victor will be unearthed on said date—a name suggested in a batch of way-too-early Oscar predictions that stays for the long haul.
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