How do movies as wildly different as Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, Dallas Buyers Club, and The Lone Ranger wind up duking it out against each other at the Oscars? The best makeup and hairstyling category of the Academy Awards has always been diverse, but it’s hard to imagine a more motley crew than this year’s bunch, in which a drama about the AIDS crisis, a big-budget summer blockbuster folly, and the spinoff of a long-running prank show force Academy members to figure out which of them had the best makeup.

To find out the answers for ourselves, we spoke to the makeup artists nominated from these films. Our conversation with Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa’s Stephen Prouty ran on Friday; today we talk to Robin Mathews, a first-time Oscar nominee for her work on an astonishingly low budget on Dallas Buyers Club.

Courtesy of Robin Mathews.

Robin Mathews’s budget for the makeup on Dallas Buyers Club was $250. That’s $250 not just to transform Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto from near-death AIDS patients to relatively healthy-looking human beings, sometimes five times in a single day. That’s not $250 to recreate the skin rashes common in AIDS patients in the 1980s. That’s not even $250 just to manage the hair and makeup for a cast of extras. That’s $250 for the entire 28-day-production. “The Academy just gasped when they heard that,” Mathews says, with no lack of pride in her voice.

Mathews has worked on a huge variety of projects, from documentaries about Playboy playmates to The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, and she calls Dallas Buyers Club “the most under-budgeted movie I’ve ever been a part of shooting.” Made for such a low cost that the producer sometimes used her personal credit card to feed the crew, Dallas Buyers Club required McConaughey and Leto to each lose 40 pounds in order to portray the characters at their sickest. At a certain point in the movie, though, AIDS treatment drugs start to take effect, and the weight comes back on. But, in true indie movie tradition, Dallas Buyers Club was shot in 23 days and wildly out of sequence. McConaughey and Leto couldn’t gain and re-lose weight for each new scene. And that’s where Mathews came in.

“We had to take them back and forth from their sickest look to their healthiest look, up to five times in one day,” Mathews said. “They maintained that 40-pound weight loss throughout. So when you see them in the film, and they look like they’re 25 pounds heavier and healthier because of the medication, that’s just makeup.”