Renée Zellweger appreciates this Judy Oscar win in a whole new way, compared to her 2004 award for Cold Mountain, she told press backstage at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
Asked how much she’d changed since she won that first Oscar back in 2004, Zellweger exclaimed, “Oh my goodness. How much time do you have?” She then went on to explain, “I’m a little more private now. I think that the time away and the time in between has helped me to appreciate it in a different way. What it represents is a little bit different, and obviously this is about wanting to tell that story and to celebrate Judy Garland, and to shine a light perhaps on the circumstances of her life which people dismissed as tragic.”
While no one was surprised to see Zellweger take home this statuette, given that she’d swept Globes, SAG and BAFTA with her performance of Judy Garland’s final act, one resounding point Zellweger has repeatedly made in her acceptances speeches this season is the length of time she’s been away from the awards conversation—she was Oscar-nominated three times previously in the early 2000s, but not at all since then.
Reflecting on the time she won for Cold Mountain, Zellweger said she was, “so busy that I wasn’t actually in the moment. I think I had just flown home from something. Bridget Jones 2.”
As for what this particular win means for her, Zellweger said, “It’s really nice when something that really matters to you resonates with someone else. That’s always a huge, wonderful, unexpected reaction… it makes me happy for everybody that I worked with and it always goes back to the collaboration and what you intended and what you hoped for it.”
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