For your consideration: Rachel McAdams, Best Supporting Actress for 'Game Night'

McAdams’ character Annie isn’t actually dumb. She’s just completely blinded by her hyper-competitiveness — which she shares with her husband, Max (Jason Bateman) — to the very real danger into which she’s been thrust on their weekly games-with-friends gathering. They’ve been led to believe by Max’s brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) that they’re competing in the sorting out of a staged kidnapping drama. But their game-master’s sketchy past has come back to haunt him at the worst possible moment. Brooks has been kidnapped, and he is going to be murdered if they don’t intervene.

We’ve seen characters ignorantly wade into life-or-death predicaments before, but it’s never been done more skillfully than the sequence in which Annie and Max face down a trio of legit killers in a dive bar while trying to rescue Brooks. And while Bateman is a terrifically oblivious foil, the scene and its aftermath belong to McAdams. Upon catching a glimpse of Brooks bound to a chair, Annie leaps into action with a very loaded pistol she believes to be a prop gun. She gets the drop on the thugs and gleefully launches into a “we-all-know-this-is-a-game” mimic of Amanda Plummer’s profane stick-up exhortation from the opening scene of “Pulp Fiction.” She’s having the time of her life, and she’s not done yet. When her hostages don’t understand her command to assume “child’s pose,” she walks them through a demonstration of the yoga position. A few minutes later, she’s using the gun as a makeshift microphone into which she insouciantly sings Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.”

Annie’s blithe mishandling of a real gun to play-menace a group of killers who know it’s real appears to pay off as expected: It goes off, and Max gets winged by a stray bullet. But circumstances force the non-medically trained Annie to extract the bullet from Max’s arm, which results in a back-alley surgical procedure that involves her consulting an alt-right militia website on her smartphone — which she has to occasionally wake up with her nose because it keeps going to sleep. It’s a cleverly conceived scene, but McAdams’ preternatural calm as she sanitizes the wound with convenience store wine and accidentally digs through to the bone in Max’s forearm is pure, Lombard-esque nonchalance. And then the topper: Annie lifts up Max’s arm to discover the exit wound. McAdams’ “Oh, it came out” epiphany will be studied and imitated by actors for decades to come (ditto her late-third-act utterance of “Oh no, he died!”).

If “Game Night” had just a little more stand-up-and-cheer oomph, and McAdams a scene as triumphal as Tomei nailing her cross-examination in “My Cousin Vinny,” a Best Supporting Actress snub would be unconscionable. But “Game Night” isn’t trying to be anything more than an innocuous, tightly constructed 100-minute comedy — and that’s a good thing! This is a lot harder to pull off than a bloated, cloddishly directed biopic of Stephen Hawking, and it will be remembered and enjoyed long after most Oscar contenders have ceased to serve their prestige purpose. And every second of McAdams’ portrayal will be savored alongside all of the great comedic performances that endure despite Academy voters’ self-serious whims.
But now's as good a time as any to start treating great comedic performances with the reverence they deserve — and, as we've learned time and again, ultimately earn.