Proposing the Five-Minute Oscar

Aka the Lucinda Jenney Prize

Oscar nominations are tomorrow, and I guess I should care more, but hey. Look, the Oscars are going to do their Oscar thing, and in all likelihood it’s going to be pretty boring and not much fun to argue about, and that’s fine. The Oscars are the Biden administration of awards shows, a normal thing for normal people, and I love that for us.

But I am here to propose something new, and it’s an acting award for very short performances, one or two scenes at most. That may sound like a cameo performance, but at least in my mind, “cameo” implies a name actor, and my Five-Minute Oscar isn’t only for the famous, but for anyone who makes an indelible impression in screen time too brief to count as a true supporting role.

I’ve actually been thinking about this since 1991, because that’s when I saw Lucinda Jenney as Lena, the roadhouse waitress in Thelma & Louise.

Remember her? She says a few perfunctory words in the roadhouse scene above, then has one incredible scene with Harvey Keitel at the scene of Harlan-the-rapist’s murder. I can’t find a clip, but you can see it at the 26:08 minute on YouTube. She’s flinty, she’s unopenly unbothered by the death, she’s a little flirty in a fun, palsy way, and she’s 100% sure Thelma and Louise had nothing to do with it. “The little one, with the tidy hairdo? She left me a huge tip,” she tells Keitel, and though of course a good tipper could still be a murderer, we also get what she means, that T&L are decent women who do the right thing. (“Neither one of those gals is the murdering type,” she says later, and she’s not wrong. They’re not the type.)

When Lena leaves the movie, I want to go with her for a little while, watch her go about the rest of her night. Jenney (and a stellar script) take a stock sassy barmaid and turn her into a person. It’s great acting. It deserved an Oscar¹.

A few other candidates, For Your Consideration:

• Katy Mixson as the diner waitress in Hell or High Water.

• Honestly, also this diner waitress played by Margaret Bowman in Hell or High Water, a brilliant movie that also needed the levity she provides here.

• Drew Barrymore in Scream. She’s in the movie for what, ten or twelve minutes, we know almost nothing about her, and yet when she dies it’s not just horrifying but sad. GIVE HER AN OSCAR.

• Steve Park as Fern’s high-school classmate Mike Yanagita in the key scene in Fargo. (I bet I could come up with ten nominees from Coen Bros. films alone².)

How about you? Who are your Five-Minute Oscar winners?

1. You know who else deserved an Oscar nomination for this movie? Fucking Christopher McDonald as Thelma’s husband Darryl, that’s who. What an amazing supporting performance. Darryl Dickinson walked so that Danny MacBride could run.

2. He probably gets too much screen time to qualify for a Five-Minute Oscar, but the late Trey Wilson as Raising Arizona’s Nathan Arizona is also just incredible, spending the whole film ranting about Unpainted Huffhines and Yoda pajamas before turning startlingly compassionate at the end.