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Locks have been few and far between this awards season. The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, and Conclave have all vied for the frontrunner position at different points in time, Mikey Madison and Demi Moore have tangoed in the Best Actress pool over these last few months, and Timothée Chalamet’s SAG Award win the other night has shaken up the Best Actor race significantly.
But among the exciting ebb and flow, we’ve been able to count on one man for pure, unadulterated consistency, and that’s Kieran Culkin. He got the Golden Globe, he got the BAFTA, he got the SAG Award, he got the Critics’ Choice Award, and now — as the wolves foretold — A Real Pain has landed Culkin a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
The award marks Culkin’s first-ever Academy Award nomination and now win. The Home Alone alumnus is no stranger to this part of showbiz, as he was famously one of the leading men in Jesse Armstrong’s Emmy juggernaut Succession, but the last time he was nominated by a major awards body for his work in a feature film was in 2003’s Igby Goes Down.
The latest Best Supporting Actor winner was up against Yura Borisov (Anora), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), and Culkin’s former Succession co-star Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice).
Also representing A Real Pain at this Oscars ceremony is Jesse Eisenberg, who’s nominated for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). That script is up against Sean Baker’s Anora, Brady Corbet’s and Mona Fastvold’s The Brutalist, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and September 5‘s writing team of Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, and Alex David.
The film stars Eisenberg and Culkin as David and Benji Kaplan, two cousins who reunite on a heritage tour through Poland in honor of their late grandmother. The pair are quite the odd couple — David being painfully anxious, Benji being explosively charismatic — but their conflicting personalities are just one part of an equation consisting of family drama, a gutting tragedy, and the history of one of the most horrific evils staring them in the face. Together, the pair reckon with pain of all shapes, sizes, and relevancies, and in their pain, a much-needed cousinly love rears its head, too.
To call Culkin’s work as Benji “masterful” is equal parts redundant and understated — a sweeping of the major awards shows is one thing, but it’s quite another to watch Culkin bring his singular, lovably smarmy thunder to Benji in the film itself. It’s a manic performance full of the energy we’re used to seeing from the actor, but there’s a vulnerability that takes precedence here that subsequently splits off into sweetness and a devastating sorrow.
Indeed, it’s a gut punch of a turn that only Culkin could have crafted, and to see it honored in this way is sure to be one of the finest justices of the whole night, to say nothing of the always-guaranteed, delightfully unhinged speeches that Culkin has become famous for over this last little while.