At the 2024 Academy Awards, the biggest reaction of the night went to someone who couldn’t understand he’d won it. Messi, the Border Collie who played the family dog Snoop in the Oscar-nominated “Anatomy of a Fall,” turned up in the audience in a tidy black bowtie and promptly upstaged a room full of movie stars.
His appearance was a genuine surprise. It had been reported ahead of time that he would sit the ceremony out, so when the cameras found him in the crowd, the internet lit up. In his opening monologue, host Jimmy Kimmel, who had reportedly run through some bits with the dog beforehand, teed up the joke everyone was already thinking: that a dog may have delivered one of the year’s best performances. The camera cut to Messi, unbothered, looking every bit the professional he is.
The clapping moment, explained
Messi’s signature beat came a little later. After Robert Downey Jr. won his award, the broadcast cut to Messi in his seat, appearing to applaud along with the rest of the room, front paws tapping together like a tiny critic approving the choice. It was surreal enough that viewers immediately asked the obvious question: how is a dog clapping?
He wasn’t, of course. The paws doing the clapping were prosthetic, a detail his trainer, Laura Martin Contini, shared afterward. That reveal is arguably more impressive than a real clap would have been, because pulling it off meant a calm, well-trained dog sitting still in a loud, chaotic, high-stakes room while a gag played out around him. Composure like that is the whole job.
Messi came by that composure honestly. His on-screen role was genuinely demanding, including a scene where his character has to appear gravely ill, a hard thing to fake convincingly. Contini has described coaxing the performance out of him by working with him when he was tired and guiding him into specific positions, the kind of patient, reward-based shaping that separates a trained animal actor from a pet who knows a few tricks.
No stranger to a red carpet
The Oscars were not Messi’s first brush with fame. He’d already taken home the Palm Dog, the tongue-in-cheek prize for the best canine performance at the Cannes Film Festival, the year before. He also turned up at the pre-ceremony Oscars luncheon, where he was charming enough to cause a minor stir, with some in the industry reportedly grumbling that a scene-stealing dog in the room might sway voters. When your presence at lunch is treated as a competitive threat, you have arrived.
The film itself had a strong night without going all the way, losing Best Picture to “Oppenheimer” while winning Best Original Screenplay. Messi, for his part, was never in the running for an acting award, thanks to the stubbornly human-centric rules of the Academy. He didn’t seem to mind. He got the bowtie, the monologue shout-out, the viral clip, and the affection of a very famous audience, which is a better night than most nominees had.
There’s a real point buried in the delight. The animal performers who make movies work are invisible by design, and the people who train them even more so. For one evening, an unflappable Border Collie in formalwear made both impossible to ignore.
