Everyone’s Favorite Actor of the Year Made It to the Oscars After All!

The 96th Academy Awards was full of surprises ranging from the ravishingly wholesome individual acting nominee tributes to the unfortunate Best Picture snafu committed by Al Pacino.

But out of every surprise that Hollywood’s biggest night threw at us, the best of them all was, without a shadow of a doubt, the appearance of Messi the border collie—the breakout star of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall—at the ceremony, complete with an astonishingly handsome bowtie and his own seat at the event.

It was previously reported that the four-legged thespian wouldn’t be attending the ceremony, which, in hindsight, was possibly a tactical misdirect to highlight his eventual appearance that much more, as if he wouldn’t have already been everyone’s favorite attendee in the first place. Either that or the powers that be responded appropriately to the backlash the news of his planned absence elicited.

In Anatomy of a Fall, Messi plays Snoop, a guide dog and companion to Sandra’s blind son Daniel. He keeps up with his less-furry co-stars through most of the film, but it’s in and around the final third of the runtime that the border collie decided to prove just how limitless of a performer he really is.

The scene in question sees Messi play dead as his character Snoop slurps up a handful of aspirin and subsequently falls into a non-fatal but paralyzing sickness. Throughout the entire sequence, in which Daniel is checking for Snoop’s heartbeat, pouring water into his mouth, and otherwise handling him rather frantically, Messi doesn’t even allow a single whisker to break the illusion of Snoop’s poisoning; the sheer restraint to hold as still as the border collie did in that scene would have been impressive for a human, let alone an animal who doesn’t even know what the Oscars are (as far as we know, of course).

The denizens of the internet, of course, were elated that Messi rolled up to the Oscars.

Anatomy of a Fall was nominated for five awards that evening, including Best Picture, and ultimately walked away with a Best Original Screenplay win for Triet and her co-writer and partner Arthur Harari. But, if there’s any justice in this world, Anatomy‘s second-largest victory will one day come by being remembered as the film that paved the way for Best Animal Actor, and it all began when Messi made it to the room.

(featured image: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)