Vito and Joker, meet Anita. With Ariana DeBose’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar win Sunday night for “West Side Story,” Anita became the third character to produce Oscar wins for two different performers.
The first was Vito Corleone, for which Marlon Brando won Best Actor for “The Godfather” (1972). Two years later, Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for the same role in the sequel/prequel “The Godfather Part II” (1974). Forty-five years later, Joaquin Phoenix took home Best Actor for his turn in title role in 2019’s “Joker,” 11 years after Heath Ledger posthumously won Best Supporting Actor for the iconic Batman villain in 2008’s The Dark Knight.”
SEE Full list of Oscar winners
The character of Anita, of course, won Best Supporting Actress for Rita Moreno in the 1961 version of “West Side Story.” Besides being the first female character in this group, Anita is the first of the three whose two portrayers won in the same category and who comes from the same story as the two “West Side Story” films are adaptations of the 1957 Broadway hit. And then there’s the fact that Moreno appears in the new version as well, playing the new character of Valentina, the widow of Doc.
DeBose, who swept the season and beat Jessie Buckley (“The Lost Daughter”), Judi Dench (“Belfast”), Kirsten Dunst (“The Power of the Dog”) and Aunjanue Ellis (“King Richard), joins Moreno as the only Latinas to win acting Oscars. She is also the first Afro-Latina and openly queer woman to win an Oscar, and the third performer to win for a Steven Spielberg film — all within the last decade after Daniel Day-Lewis (2012’s “Lincoln”) and Mark Rylance (2015’s “Bridge of Spies”).
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