Olivia Colman won the Best Actress Oscar for her role as Queen Anne in The Favourite, bringing home the one - yes, one - Oscar for the 10-time nominated film, and charming absolutely everyone in the process.
Flabbergasted by her win, she was kissed on either cheek by co-star Emma Stone (who was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress) and her husband Ed Sinclair, while The Favourite’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, got on his knees to shuffle over to Olivia for a hug. Emma gave Olivia a standing ovation until long after her former colleague got to the stage, because, well, that’s how great Olivia Colman is.
Achieving what Richard E Grant has been trying to do all awards season by being genuinely baffled by her placement within Hollywood’s highest echelons, Olivia promised to ‘give a massive snog’ to anyone she forgot to mention in her speech.
The entire thing is intensely quotable, but in short, acting with ‘Rachel [Weisz] and Emily [that’s Emma’s real name FYI] the two loveliest women in the world to fall in love with and to go to work with everyday, well I mean you can imagine, it wasn’t a hardship.’
She also, graciously, congratulated the other ‘extraordinary women’ in the best actress category, giving an honourable mention to Glenn Close, who, with Olivia’s win, is now the most-Oscar-nominated actress of all time to have never received one, and is the only living person with so many Academy Award snubs under her belt. That’s seven times she’s missed out, which makes Olivia’s line of ’Glenn Close, you’ve been my idol for so long and this is not how I wanted it to be and I think you’re amazing, I love you very much’, that much more sweeter.
Welled up when she thanked her mum and her dad, all Olivia could say on that front was, ‘well, you know’, and she said to her kids, who might or might not have been watching, ‘I sort of hope you are, this is not gonna happen again!’
Olivia, who first won Brits over way back when she was Sophie in Peep Show, was about to talk about how she once worked as a cleaner, but was prompted to wrap up, and then spent that time, brilliantly, thanking her husband, goading him into crying, then thanking anyone within cake-vomiting distance. That included the presenters of her award - Sam Rockwell and previous best actress winner Frances McDormand, before blowing a kiss to Lady Gaga and simply gasping ‘Lady Gaga!’
Olivia might have been a surprise winner in her category (Glenn was expected to get it), but her turn in The Favourite, a film where women take the lead, being savage and wonderful to one another in the pursuit of love and power, shows Olivia's incredible range - Queen Anne is fussy, grumpy and tragic. Olivia, meanwhile, is peppy, earnest and delightful. Olivia is now the fourth British winner of the Best Actress gong in the last 30 years - Kate Winslet picked it up in 2008, Helen Mirren in 2006, and before that, Emma Thompson in 1992 - and now joins the dizzying heights of Hollywood's elite. Even if she thinks she’s not winning the award again, who knows what sort of roles will come beckoning for her now?