Jack Palance began the 1993 Academy Awards by announcing the winner of the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category. Marisa Tomei, whose name he read from a card, collected the honor for her work in My Cousin Vinny.
Marisa Tomei knocked out four other highly regarded actresses who had been nominated for their dramatic performances when she won the Oscar for best-supporting actress.
The following year, speculation arose that Tomei had accidentally won her Oscar. It has been said that the Academy gave the wrong actress the award in order to spare Palance the public embarrassment of having to correct him on live television.
Proponents of the theory point to Palance’s prolonged pause before announcing the name as evidence for their position. Any suggestion of a mistake has been strongly refuted by the Academy.
Since My Cousin Vinny
Marisa Tomei gained critical acclaim for her hilarious performance in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny, which propelled her to international fame after a string of supporting roles.
Vincent Canby, a critic, argued, “Whether she is towering over Mr. Pesci and trying to make him look little, or arguing about a leaky faucet in words that reveal her understanding of plumbing, Ms. Tomei gives every indication of becoming a brilliant comedian.
Mona Lisa’s skills as a master auto mechanic come in helpful as she helps to unravel the tangled plot.” Tomei beat out Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave, and Judy Davis to win the 1993 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work.
An accountant from Price Waterhouse said, “we have an arrangement with the Academy that one of us would walk on stage, introduce themselves, and claim the presenter misspoke” if something like this ever happened.
The events of the 2017 Academy Awards, in which La La Land was incorrectly proclaimed as the Best Picture winner due to a mixup in the handling of the award cards, and the true winner, Moonlight, was ultimately announced, corroborate this.
Tomei, fresh off her Oscar win, co-starred alongside her then-boyfriend Robert Downey Jr. as silent film icon Mabel Normand in the film Chaplin. In the following year, she co-starred with Christian Slater in the romantic drama Untamed Heart, for which they won the MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss.
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Marisa Tomei’s Best-Known Scene
Her most recognizable moment is when she stomps her high-heeled foot on a wooden porch and tells Vinny, “My niece, the daughter of my sister, is being married” to emphasize the urgency with which she must marry him.
It’s a fantastic scene and the ideal length for an Oscars montage, but the show instead featured the dramatic climax, in which Lisa testifies as an expert witness in Vinny’s trial as a result of their relationship blowout.
About as close as any ’90s comedy got to updating vintage screwball was when she went from silent treatment fury to gleeful participation, reveling in her own confident expertise and picking up on Vinny’s signals about the discovery he’d made and falling back in love with him, all within the span of a minute or so.
It’s encouraging to think back on the fact that Academy voters decided to give Tomei an award. Her subsequent nominations for more traditional theatrical works also benefit from this.
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Closing Remarks
At the 1993 Academy Awards, Marisa Tomei faced acting greats. Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright, Judy Davis, and Vanessa Redgrave are examples. Marisa won the trophy. Conspiracy theories followed her victory. Marisa addressed this claim in the press as it stormed Hollywood’s champagne-soaked streets. She was hurt by believing her name wasn’t supposed to be called.