It feels strange to look back on, but the 2025 Academy Awards season is completely in the rearview mirror. The 97th rendition of the show of shows went out not with a bang, but with a whimper. While other years have had highly controversial winners, with movies like Green Book for Best Picture or Will Smith for Best Actor immediately following the slap, 2025 was controversy-free in the grand scheme. It’s impossible to please everyone, though, and this year was no different. The odd dissenter here and there has railed against Mikey Madison’s victory in the Best Actress category, saying that either Demi Moore or Fernanda Torres were robbed. Fans who are calling Madison’s victory a robbery, however, must be unfamiliar with the travesty that took place in 2009.
2009 saw the release of Rachel Getting Married, a cringeworthy and anxiety-inducing drama from legendary director Jonathan Demme. The film, which primarily takes place during the titular wedding, features a cast of brilliant performers who are bound to evoke visceral emotion and awkwardness in even the least squirmy viewer. The star of the show, however, is not the titular Rachel, but her sister Kym Buchman, who is portrayed by Anne Hathaway. Hathaway scored a nomination at the 81st Academy Awards, but went home empty-handed in what has proved to be one of the biggest Academy Award blunders of all time.
✕Remove AdsWhat is Rachel Getting Married About?
Jonathan Demme’s grand return to narrative films happened in 2008 with the release of Rachel Getting Married. Demme took a four-year “break” following The Manchurian Candidate, and came back swinging. During this break, he made incredible documentary films about Neil Young and Jimmy Carter, which informed the stylistic decisions in Rachel Getting Married. The film is shot in a cinéma vérité style, with a roaming and shaky camera, authentic and seemingly improvised dialogue, and a high focus on realism.
This new documentary-informed style of cinema, combined with Jonathan Demme’s flair for humanism, proved to be a match made in heaven. Demme, when he wasn’t scaring the pants off of audiences with films like Silence of the Lambs, continuously proved that he had deep empathy and understanding of niche human issues. Films like the highly underrated Melvin and Howard, the Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington tour de force, Philadelphia, and the oft-forgotten Citizen’s Band prove this without a shadow of a doubt. Rachel Getting Married both takes from the mastery of Demme’s late career and learns from the mistakes of his early career, and the result is close to perfection.
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Legendary film producer and director, Roger Corman, has a cameo in Rachel Getting Married as a wedding guest.
Rachel Getting Married primarily follows Kym Buchman, a drug addict in recovery, who is conditionally released from rehab in order to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding. While Kym’s return is initially met with enthusiasm and excitement, old wounds quickly resurface as Kym either purposefully or accidentally draws attention to herself. The crux of the tension stems from a tragic accident that occurred years earlier, when Kym’s drug addiction inadvertently led to their younger brother’s death. Kym’s presence disrupts the stressful, but peaceful, celebration that the weekend was shaping up to be, and leads to other familial tensions bubbling up to the surface.
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What follows is a genuinely deeply emotional journey of a dysfunctional and emotionally broken-down family. Demme, screenwriter Jenny Lumet, and the entire cast absolutely nail the inseparable bond of family. Everything from the underlying “I love you, but I don’t like you” feeling to physical and violent outbursts is presented in the film’s 113 minutes. The film is perhaps the best depiction of addiction and recovery ever put to screen. Every character is explored at length, with poignant explorations of familial bonds, lingering trauma, grief, and the difficult and impossible to navigate road of self-forgiveness. Rachel Getting Married doesn’t shy away from awkwardness or complexity. In fact, it seeks to make the viewer uneasy, and in the process, perfectly mirrors the beautiful messiness of everyday life.
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Despite the superb emotional intelligence on display and the interesting new cinematic style, the film has been relatively forgotten in recent years. While it isn’t talked about today, Rachel Getting Married made serious waves upon its release in cinemas. The film was a moderate box office success, which is not a guarantee for a tense drama in this documentary style. The Anne Hathaway-led film grossed $17.5 million against a budget of $12 million, and has seen success in subsequent small theatrical re-releases. In terms of critical reception, Rachel Getting Married has been cemented as a must-watch, both for Demme’s direction and the ensemble of great performers. The film currently has a certified fresh 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and a slightly underwhelming, but understandable, 62% from fans.
Anne Hathaway Won the Wrong Oscar
2009 was an interesting year at the Academy Awards. The Best Picture category was as barren as it has ever been, but the larger acting categories were full of genuinely great contenders. The Best Actress category in particular was stacked to the brim with historic names. From Meryl Streep in Doubt, to Angelina Jolie in Changeling, all the way to Kate Winslet in The Reader and Melissa Leo in Frozen River. With a list of nominees this impressive, how is it possible that Anne Hathaway’s loss is the biggest in Academy Award history? The answer to that question is the dreaded “consolation Oscar.”
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Anne Hathaway is the recipient of both an Academy Award (Les Misérables) and a Primetime Emmy (The Simpsons).
Kate Winslet is a legendary actress who, for a long time, was suffering the same fate as her Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. Up until her 2009 win for The Reader, Winslet had been nominated five times in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories without a victory. Due to this streak of losses, the Academy decided to band together in 2009 for an unfortunate consolation victory. That isn’t to say Kate Winslet isn’t deserving. Her performance in The Reader is fantastic, but it pales in comparison to her other nominated performances.
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The cause and effect of this 2009 consolation decision continues on for years and years, and will likely never stop. If Winslet had been awarded in 1998 for Titanic, or in 2007 for Little Children (when she was most deserving), the Academy never would’ve had to rob Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married. Continuing on, if Anne Hathaway had won in 2009, she likely never would’ve picked up the incredible steam that she had in 2013 for her performance in Les Misérables. I
f Hathaway didn’t pick up steam in 2013, it would have opened the door for Amy Adams to finally win her first Academy Award for The Master. This domino effect continues so on and so forth until the end of time. The case of Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married serves as an eternal reminder to the Academy of Motion Pictures that giving the award to the most deserving nominee is always the right path. While Anne Hathaway has tons of awards-worthy performances, none of them even come close to the sheer brilliance on display in Jonathan Demme’s 2008 masterpiece.
Rachel Getting Married’s Ensemble Holds Their Own
While it is true that Anne Hathaway steals the show with a career-best performance, the rest of the film’s ensemble gave her great competition to play off of. The intensity of these performances was, of course, enhanced by the intensely personal filming style that Demme employed, but the actors and actresses still deserve all the credit in the world. Whether it’s Debra Winger, who plays the matriarch of the family, Abby Buchman, or Rosemarie DeWitt, who crushes it as the titular character. Every single performer here brings their A-game, communicating unspoken forgiveness and decades of familial bonding with naturalistic dialogue and lingering stares. The unspoken word is just as powerful as the impassioned argument in Rachel Getting Married, and it all begins with the amazing ensemble cast of hardworking names.
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Aside from Hathaway, the shining light of the film is Bill Irwin. Irwin portrays the deeply caring and incredibly neurotic father of the Buchman family, Paul. Irwin comes to play with unrelenting enthusiasm, jumping up and down uncontrollably, and balances that out with quivering lips and teary eyes. While Hathaway’s Kym Buchman is the most sympathetic and emotionally turbulent character, Irwin’s Paul is the most subtly relatable.
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All angles of grief are explored in Rachel Getting Married. From hardcore suppression of emotions, to seeking distractions, to lifelong commitments to propping up a memory, all the way to harboring guilt and blame deep within. Every single aspect of the filmmaking here is tuned to perfection, and it has to be seen to be believed.
