Who is Mikey Madison, the Oscar winner for best actress?

BarcelonaNothing is more popular in Hollywood than fairy tales with a happy ending. Even more than stories of redemption and second chances. This was demonstrated at this year's Oscars, where a virtually unknown Mikey Madison (Los Angeles, 1999) snatched the statuette from the Oscar winner. Demi Moore, who everyone thought would win because of her risky performance in The substance. Anora, Sean Baker's extraordinary film for which Madison has won the Oscar at just 25 years old, begins as a fairy tale to transform into a crazy comedy and closes with a devastating ending that has nothing happy about it, but that has undoubtedly been fundamental to the young actress's triumph at Sunday's ceremony.

It is common to read that Madison was "discovered" by Quentin Tarantino in Once upon a time in Hollywood (has also participated in Scream, the latest sequel to the horror saga created by Wes Craven), where she played one of the members of the Manson family. However, the role that precedes in a more direct way that of the lively and outspoken sex worker who plays Anora It's Max, the cheeky teenage daughter of Pamela Adlon in the fabulous television series Better thingsAdlon is the creator and star of this autobiographical dramedy in which a mature divorced mother must deal with the tensions that arise between her personal desires and the demands of her three daughters. Better things, more a succession of sporadic moments than a linear and unitary story, allows for a combination of narrative tones, between absurd humor and drama, which brings the series closer to the fickle, changing rhythms of life itself.

In the first episode of Better things, Max (Madison), a 16-year-old teenager, suddenly proposes to her mother (Adlon), with a brazenness that would disarm any parent, that she buy her marijuana: "You're my mother!" she says, "I want you to know if I want to have sex or get high!" The conviction with which Madison launches such an extravagant idea, which she underlines with very measured gestures (at one point, she puts on sunglasses to isolate herself from her mother's shocked reaction), makes the scene brutally comical and presents Max as a disconcerting character, at times frivolous, at other times fragile and almost always exhibiting angry gestures, perpetually angry with the world.

Unpredictability and emotional volatility, as well as this permanent angry gesture, this stubborn, adolescent resistance to accepting things as they are, constitute some of the central characteristics of Madison's performance in Better things that Baker exploits thoroughly in Anora. If the award-winning film Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Oscar for best film achieves a perfect balance, always on the tightrope, between romantic comedy, physical humor, political commentary on the exploitative logic of the capitalist system and the most hurtful drama is, in large part, thanks to Madison's ability to move, with extreme conviction, through various emotional states that Anora, her character and nerve center of an eminently choral film, requires.

We spoke at the beginning of the extraordinary closing scene of Baker's film, and watching it it is difficult not to remember one of the most moving moments of the first season of Better things. In the middle of a relaxed and cheerful dinner with her mother and friends, Max impulsively confessed that she felt like a loser and that she thought she would no longer do anything important with her life. It was Madison's disfigured face, her lost gaze and her fragile voice that suddenly caused a tonal change that turned what was, until that moment, a comedy into a drama that generated an empathetic silence around the young woman. The episode in which this prodigious scene appeared was called Fever of the future; a title that can now be read as a harbinger of the brilliant future that undoubtedly awaits Mikey Madison.