Glenn Close might not have taken home Best Supporting Actress at Sunday’s Oscars, but she did just win the night.
After a solid but generally straightforward ceremony, the show took a break to allow Lil Rel Howery to play a trivia game in which he asked attendees to listen to a song (played by DJ Questlove) and guess whether it was an Oscar winner, nominee or neither. Andra Day went first with “Purple Rain.”
“It’s a brilliant song,” the United States vs. Billie Holiday star said. “But it probably wasn’t—” ... A long bleep followed, but the gist would be “get nominated.”
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When Howery told Day that although the soundtrack won an Oscar, none of its songs did? “That sounds about right,” she said, handing him back the microphone with a comically timed, “Here!”
That’s when things got really interesting: Howery approached his old Get Out co-star and Best Supporting Actor winner Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) to see if he could correctly guess whether Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” had taken home an Oscar. (It did.) Kaluuya guessed wrong—just as Glenn Close, seated at his table, had predicted he would, given that he was “too young.” So Close found herself in the hot seat next.
Howery teased that Close might struggle with the song, but the moment it began playing she started dancing in her seat. Then came the line that would make Oscars night: “Wait a second,” she said. “I know—that’s ‘Da Butt!’”
At that point, the Hillbilly Elegy actress went straight into shout-out mode. “It was a classic song by the great Washington, D.C., go-go band EU,” she said. “Shout outs to Sugar Bear and the Backyard Band, and the whole DMV!”
“I remember this,” Close continued. “So, Spike Lee had it written for his brilliant movie, School Daze, and my friends at the Oscars missed it, and it wasn’t nominated, so it couldn’t have won.” (Get them, Glenn!)
The censors cut off what Close said next, but some amateur lip reading would indicate that she seemingly called the omission a “fucking tragedy.” With that, Howery declared this year’s ceremony “the Blackest Oscars of all time.”
