Amy Madigan's Oscar win echoes Heath Ledger's Joker

On Sunday night, Weapons star Amy Madigan won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress at the 2026 Academy Awards. The 75-year-old actor — long celebrated for films like Love Child, Alamo Bay, Field of Dreams and Gone Baby Gone, and for the HBO series Carnivàle — took home her first statuette for the magic-wielding, makeup-abusing villainess Aunt Gladys.

Madigan’s victory highlights a disparity between the supporting acting categories: men have often been rewarded for villainous turns, while women have rarely been. Heath Ledger’s 2008 win for the Joker in The Dark Knight became a benchmark; Javier Bardem, Christoph Waltz and Robert Downey Jr.

also won Oscars for pronounced villainous performances in the years surrounding Ledger’s win. The Supporting Actress prize has tended to honor dimensional co-leads who anchor emotional drama — recent winners include Anne Hathaway, Viola Davis, Alison Janney, Regina King and Da'Vine Joy Randolph — making Madigan’s Aunt Gladys an uncommon conqueror.

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