Oscar winners: they're just like regular people. (If regular people competed for Oscars, that is.) Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger "wanted to hear how they got ready, how they decided what to say, how they celebrated, and how they feel about their life-changing moment now, years later." For 50 Oscar Nights: Iconic Stars & Filmmakers on Their Career-Defining Wins, Karger's disarming and demystifying first book, he interviewed 52 Academy Award recipients and had them recount their big, sometimes blooper-capped nights.
The wins featured in the book span 1962, when Best Supporting Actress Rita Moreno gave the shortest speech in Oscar history, through 2019, when Best Actress Olivia Colman blew the crowd a mid-speech raspberry. There are shared experiences among Karger's subjects: two (Marlee Matlin and Sally Field) report that their successes weren't celebrated by their famous-actor boyfriends, and two (Colman and Allison Janney) calmed their Oscar-day nerves with beta blockers. Not all of Karger's subjects are household names, but all have distinguished themselves. Who knew that designer Catherine Martin is the most Oscar-winning Australian ever?
Karger has bundled each subject's words under headers like "The Backstory," "The Look," "The Pinch-Me Moment," and, intriguingly, "Where Oscar Lives Now"; for Best Supporting Actor Louis Gossett Jr., the answer is "in storage." 50 Oscar Nights is suitable for devouring like a juicy novel in a couple of sittings, but it wouldn't be out of place in a bathroom, which, for the record, is where two-time winner Emma Thompson keeps her statuettes. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer