Jessie Buckley
Age: 32
Film: The Lost Daughter
Role: Young Leda, a mother and academic who needs time (that she doesn’t have) to devote to her own research. Young children require constant care, but translating Auden into Italian takes time and concentration. More and more, Leda finds her focus divided and begins to feel unequal to the task of raising her children, the portion of her life that brings her more uncertainty and less satisfaction. Her husband does nothing to help her.
Nomination History:
This is Buckley’s first nomination.
Why She Should Win
Hearing Jessie Buckley’s name called in this category excited me a lot. I was happy her moment has come. For Wild Rose, she got tons of buzz that failed to turn into an Oscar nomination. Both my husband and I loved her in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and I particularly connected to her character in Judy. (The first time I watched, I related to Judy Garland. But after a year of online kindergarten with my son, I identified increasingly with Buckley’s Rosalyn Wilder. “You’re going to be late! Wake up! Yes, you do have to wear your ‘outside pants.’ ‘Outside pants’ is not a thing! They’re just pants. We need to wear them inside, too! No, you can’t have three different kinds of juice during your math meeting!”)
With everyone raving about Olivia Colman’s lead performance in The Lost Daughter, I couldn’t understand why Buckley wasn’t getting similar recognition for her equally strong portrayal of the younger version of the same character. In many ways, Jessie Buckley’s Young Leda is much easier to figure out than her puzzling present-day counterpart. Young Leda’s problem is so familiar for any working mother (or, in fact, for anyone not working because she is a mother or not a mother because she is working).
My childless-by-choice sister and I discuss this constantly. Women just can’t win when it comes to balancing family and career. The world seems quick to intimate that working mothers aren’t natural and loving, that stay-at-home moms are lazy, that childless women should have children, that women with children probably aren’t raising them right. There seems to be an omnipresent societal expectation that women both should and should not have a career while simultaneously both being and not being mothers.
Many things spoke to me in the Young Leda portions of this story. Academia is one of those things that takes up your entire life. Academic research requires hours of dedicated, focused work. It pulls you down rabbit holes, and while you’re down there, your children will no doubt be feeding crayons to the dog, running naked through the backyard, or simply crying despondently for hours on end. I know many successful professors who also do a splendid job raising kids, but I don’t know how they make it work. Even writing books on my own schedule pulls my focus away from my children to a frustrating degree. The struggle that Young Leda faces is not something easily resolved. Both academic research and young children require all your time and your total focus. (I remember when my daughter was teething and literally refused to let me put her down. I had to hold her all the time even when I was emptying the dishwasher or going to the bathroom. Shockingly, I did not resume working on my dissertation on Mary Queen of Scots and the Elizabethan Complaint Poem during this period.)
It’s nice to see both Leda performances in The Lost Daughter nominated because Colman and Buckley are playing the same character, and that means they must be conscious of one another’s mannerisms and facial expressions. Buckley is quite good at this in the scene in which she visits her girls and helps them into white dresses. She loses her temper in just the same way as Colman’s version of the character. When happy, she moves her mouth and positions her head in the same way. This sequence of the film is emotionally intense, and Buckley not only plays the scene well, she plays it like Olivia Colman. She even puts on her coat in the same way. It’s nice to see her careful work acknowledged.
Why She Might Not Win
Olivia Colman might win Best Actress. She would be deserving. So would any of the five women nominated. That category is tough to figure out this year. I have a hard time believing it won’t be Nicole Kidman, but honestly, any of them could prevail.
This category isn’t as much of a mystery. If Ariana DeBose doesn’t win, Kirsten Dunst will. Buckley’s Leda is easier to understand than Colman’s, but that’s exactly what makes Colman’s incarnation of the character more memorable. Colman’s Leda is no longer with her young children, yet she still can’t focus. She insists on being interrupted by motherhood to the point that she creates interruptions for herself. That’s the performance that requires greater skill to pull off, so if any Leda wins an Oscar this year, it will be Colman, not Buckley.
(Watch, now that I’ve said that so firmly, Jessie Buckley will win. You’re welcome, Jessie Buckley.)
Ariana DeBose
Age: 31
Film: West Side Story
Role: Anita, older, wiser sister-in-all-but-law of Maria, the younger sister of Bernardo, the leader of the street gang the Sharks. Anita has no desire to go back to Puerto Rico. She likes to be in America. (She sings a big, show-stopping, multi-location musical number all about it.) But when Maria falls in love with Tony, a prominent member of rival gang the Jets, tragic events are set in motion. Before long, Anita is singing a very different tune.
Nomination History:
This is DeBose’s first nomination.
Why She Should Win
Rita Moreno already won Best Supporting Actress for playing this role in the 1961 West Side Story, and in Steven Spielberg’s version of the story, Anita’s character is expanded and refined with an enhanced arc that makes her journey even more stirring and effective. This was already the best part in West Side Story, and now it’s an even better part, a stronger, more fully developed character with an arc so tragic that you feel the heft of it deep in the pit of your soul. DeBose wrote the part herself, I guess. She’s the only one I see nominated, so I just assume she made all the necessary changes to the script. Who else could have done it?
I apologize for that burst of sarcasm. The only thing about Oscar nominations this year that truly upsets me is the snub of Tony Kushner. Maybe it’s not exactly a snub because it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that he would be nominated. But he should have been. My daughter and I watched the 1961 West Side Story for the first time last year. Kushner has made pronounced changes. I cannot fathom why his contribution is not being acknowledged when DeBose is not only nominated but a favorite to win Best Supporting Actress. I realize Tony Kushner isn’t exactly under-appreciated when it comes to awards nominations, but I still think that the changes he made to West Side Story deserve some acknowledgement, particularly because the actress many of those changes benefit is being recognized for her work. So Kushner’s changes must have worked well enough.
The progression of that character is much clearer now, and I find Anita’s story far more tragic than Maria’s. It’s the greatest tragedy of the film as far as I’m concerned. What happens to Maria is not so direct a betrayal. It’s more like a series of unintended catastrophes. But Anita loves America. She gives herself freely to America. What happens in the drug store is awful. It’s even worse because Valentina (Rita Moreno’s character) is there to witness it and to name it. (We get double the tragedy because the hopes of both the current Anita and the former Anita are crushed by the same act.) I really don’t understand why Kushner wasn’t nominated in acknowledgement of that scene alone. I do understand why Moreno wasn’t nominated (though I might have nominated her because…I want to). But the refinement of Anita, the tweaks to the drug store scene, the new use of the song “Cool,” the changes to Chino, the reimagining of “Pretty”—for these and other reasons, Kushner should have been nominated, too. He must have been responsible for some of these changes!
Maybe people didn’t want West Side Story changed. (But then why nominate Steven Spielberg?) (I realize that nominees are chosen by branch, but this still annoys me. I know people don’t always focus on writers. Even I, a writer myself, am often guilty of overlooking the contributions of movies’ writers. But come on! These were huge change! And if people didn’t like them, then why did the film get so many other nominations?)
At any rate, Ariana DeBose is fabulous in the role. My daughter and I have been listening to the new West Side Story songs all winter, and we usually begin with “America” and listen until “A Boy Like That.” DeBose is a strong singer and a fantastic dancer (in my inexpert opinion). She has the best part in the musical, and she doesn’t disappoint.
This new West Side Story is sort of unusual in that we were much more captivated by the supporting actors—DeBose, Mike Faist as Riff, David Alvarez as Bernardo—than by either of the leads (although we like Rachel Zegler. My daughter actively dislikes both the character of Tony and the performance of Ansel Elgort. We also agree that Zegler and Elgort don’t have the best chemistry). Despite these issues with the male lead, the movie is quite good, one of our favorites of the year. A movie cannot be that enjoyable without at least one cast member that you want to watch. DeBose is the conspicuous standout of West Side Story, so the idea of her winning an Oscar makes total sense.
Why She Might Not Win
I think she will win. At this point, most people seem to expect DeBose to win the Oscar. And I’ll be happy if she wins because her songs in West Side Story have brought me weeks of entertainment. Her scene with Rita Moreno captivated me much more than most movies I saw in 2021. (I’m still dying for my husband to see it. He wants to watch the movie, but the idea of making an entire trip to the theater for it is a bit exhausting. When are we supposed to do that? There are already new movies to watch!) I enjoyed West Side Story so much that I’d like to see it win something. Ariana DeBose winning Best Supporting Actress just makes sense.
Judi Dench
Age: 87
Film: Belfast
Role: Granny, Buddy from Belfast’s loving Irish grandmother coping with the reality of her husband’s grave illness and the fact that the Troubles mean that her son and his family might move away.
Nomination History:
Won Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Previously nominated for Best Actress in 2014 for Philomena (2013), in 2007 for Notes on a Scandal (2006), in 2006 for Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), in 2002 for Iris (2001), and in 1998 for Mrs. Brown (1997).
Previously nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2001 for Chocolat (2000).
Why She Should Win
This nomination took some people by surprise. I’ll confess that I was mildly surprised Caitríona Balfe didn’t get nominated, but I certainly wasn’t surprised that Judi Dench did! I’m not saying I knew she would, just noting that it is never a surprise if Judi Dench gets nominated for an Oscar. And I don’t like the phrasing that Dench got Caitríona’s Balfe’s nomination because that is not what happened. Judi Dench got Judi Dench’s nomination. Don’t be too sure that there weren’t some Academy members who planned to nominate her the moment they saw Belfast. She gives a lovely performance. In fact, on a first watch, I was sobbing into my popcorn watching Dench and her frequent scene partner Ciarán Hinds and thinking of my grandparents. They’re my favorite part of the movie. (If I’m being brutally honest, of course, I wouldn’t mind if they nominated Judi Dench just for being Judi Dench at this point. But this is not that. Her performance in Belfast is deserving on its own merits. If some unknown actress were playing the part, she would get nominated, too. (Everyone would say, “Who is that amazing unknown actress playing the grandma? She’s like an Irish Judi Dench!”) It’s a good part, and she plays it well.
I spent my whole first watch of this movie beside myself with worry that Branagh would pull the rug out from under the audience by having Granny unexpectedly die instead of Pop. I would not have handled that well.
I love the scene that features Dench and Hines together in the window. First they fondly reminisce about the time he saw her in brown stockings. (As it turns out, she had stained her legs with tobacco water. Laughing, she goes on to reveal the seams were drawn on, creating the illusion of stockings that fit like magic.) Unlike the leads of West Side Story, these two have wonderful chemistry. Dench is at her best here. Just the way she laughs during the interaction is wonderful. There’s a natural, unforced quality to the laughter that is not easily achieved. I can’t tell you how much she reminds me of my grandma here. Then the moment becomes deadly serious when she announces her intention to take him to the hospital herself on the bus, walking him in and walking him home. No matter how firmly she asserts this—and in that moment, boy does their marriage feel real—it’s quite clear from the look on her face as he walks away from the window and coughs that she’s more than aware he probably won’t leave the hospital.
I keep rewatching this scene, struggling to articulate what makes it work so well. If I watch it one more time, I’m probably going to swim over to Judi Dench’s house and give her a home-made Oscar! She’s very good here. (Now I’m rewatching the scene on the bus. My mother is right. Dench sure does look like my grandma. This movie makes me cry!)
Why She Might Not Win
Imagine if Judi Dench does win this Oscar! What a shock! The surprise of that would outweigh any fleeting sense of outrage I’d have. (I say “outrage” meaning only that based on the way things usually work, Ariana DeBose or Kirsten Dunst seem to “deserve” the win this year.) Exactly what part of Dench’s performance isn’t Oscar-worthy, though? She gives a perfectly lovely, genuinely moving performance in Belfast. She would be just as deserving of a win this year as anyone else in this category. But by unwritten rules of Oscar logic (that I’ve apparently internalized from years of following the Academy Awards), a win by Dench this year would be the most off-the-wall Oscar moment since John Travolta introduced Adele Dazeem. It would just be crazy.
I don’t know. Helen Hunt told me that Judi Dench deserved to win an Oscar back in 1998 for Mrs. Brown, and I believed her. (I mean, she was making an acceptance speech. She looked like she knew what she was talking about. Why would she lie?) Maybe the Academy will say, “Judi Dench is 87, and she still feels an Oscar short, right? Everybody in this category is pretty good, and it’s taking forever to have any televised awards ceremonies this year, anyway. Let’s just give the Oscar to Judi Dench.”
Now that I’ve thought through that joke, I want Dench to win because A) I love it when unlikely things happen, and 2) Why doesn’t she deserve to win? She certainly does. It’s a charming performance. But people were surprised enough when she got nominated. They’ll never be able to survive the shock if she wins. What a strange mystery it is that this sort of thing happens every year! Why does the idea of certain perfectly deserving performances actually winning seem so far-fetched and impossible?
For me, Dench and Hinds are the best part of Belfast. I personally find his performance a bit more special than hers, but if I’m being honest with myself, that’s only because Judi Dench goes around giving special performances all the time. There’s clearly a reason this cast is all Irish actors and Judi Dench. She’s a great actress. She doesn’t seem likely to win this Oscar to me, but I’ll be happy if she does.
Kirsten Dunst
Age: 39
Film: The Power of the Dog
Role: Rose Gordon, who along with an adoring new husband gets a brother-in-law who resents and despises her and goes out of his way to make her married life miserable. Burdened by her new life of comfort, Rose tries to adapt but finds herself losing her nerve more and more in the presence of Phil Burbank, the man who once took pleasure in humiliating her sensitive teenaged son Peter and now seems to take perverse delight in psychologically torturing her.
Nomination History:
This is Dunst’s first nomination.
Why She Should Win
Watching Kirsten Dunst gradually fall apart in The Power of the Dog is torturous. In the novel, Rose is an even more piteous and sympathetic figure. Like all the characters, she’s easier to be sure of in the novel. Campion’s film insists on ambiguity and instills far more uneasiness in the viewer. We watch and feel a vague and growing sense of danger, but we aren’t entirely sure how to orient ourselves among the characters. It’s hard to be completely certain which characters are dangerous and which are in danger.
What I love about The Power of the Dog is that it not only holds up to repeat viewings, but it seems designed for them. I keep rewatching sections to study the performances more closely, and Dunst’s performance gets better and better this way.
I particularly identify with Rose when she’s trying to practice the piano, and Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) keeps interrupting on the banjo. It’s bad enough when your own self-doubt is gnawing away at you. When someone else finds you in that condition and begins actively attempting to undermine you, that makes it so much worse. In light of Phil’s behavior, Rose’s inability to perform at the dinner party is understandable and so painful to witness on a first watch. (For me, it’s so easy to identify with Rose. Why can’t she play the piano? What’s happening to her is immediately comprehensible if you’ve experienced it. Even if you haven’t, it’s impossible not to notice her distress.) On a first watch, I mainly saw how tortured Rose looks most of the time. But when I watch again and again, I notice nuance and complexity in the way Dunst conveys her anguish. She’s not simply looking tortured in a static way for the entirety of the film. She’s doing more than that. Ironically, a performance that seems a little one note at first glance ends up having too many subtleties to take in at once.
In fact, that’s what I like best about Dunst’s performance. You can watch one of her scenes fifteen times in a row, and instead of getting old, it seems to get better every time.
On a first watch, I liked Dunst best in the tea party scene between Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Even as I watched it though, I thought, “She spends so much time looking tortured in this movie. And this scene is a little stagey, like she’s simultaneously playing both the mother and daughter in The Glass Menagerie.” If Dunst’s performance doesn’t work for you, it may quickly become grating—on a first watch. But watch it again once you’ve formed a fuller understanding of the character, I beg you! Dunst is creating a consistent and complex character who is slowly descending into such inescapable misery.
After you’ve watched the film and read the book (preferably in that order), I also recommend watching some interviews with Kirsten Dunst. I enjoyed hearing all about how Allison Janney taught her to spin around to seem drunk, and how Jane Campion kept cutting crucial moments from the movie, so that the actors performed scenes we never see and experienced a reassuring continuity that the audience does not.
Why She Might Not Win
I’ll be honest. I want Kirsten Dunst to win. (This is surprising, when you consider that I probably like Ariana DeBose’s performance better, and I might even like Aunjanue Ellis’s performance better, too.) (I also really love Judi Dench!)
I was a weirdly opinionated fifteen-year-old (in that I chose weird things to have strong opinions about). Every major political or social issue? “I can see both sides of that.” Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire or Little Women? “She is an unusually gifted child actress, and one day she should win an Oscar.”
I felt very strongly about that, not out of any self-interest on my part but just because it seemed objectively and manifestly true.
So I would watch her career and think in dismay, “You’re never going to win an Oscar for being in Spider-Man. You’re never going to win an Oscar for being in a Lars von Trier film either!” It’s very strange that I care. I feel like Dunst is less concerned about winning an Oscar than I am about her winning one. (As an actor, your goal really shouldn’t be winning an Oscar. You should just want to give good performances. Wanting someone else to win an Oscar seems like an even less defensible goal!)
The weirdest part is, I’m not a huge fan. I haven’t watched everything she’s been in. (My sister and I did like Drop Dead Gorgeous more than most people.) Maybe I just want the satisfaction of being right when I was fifteen. Maybe it’s that when we watched Little Women in the 90s, my sister and I identified so strongly with Jo and Amy that we felt like we were watching our own life. Maybe I associate Dunst with my little sister.
I think Kirsten Dunst has a real chance this year. The Power of the Dog could win Best Picture and probably will win Best Director. There’s so much support for the film that her real-life partner Jesse Plemons even got nominated for playing her husband George. That’s four acting nominations from the same movie!
That said, though, objectively, I think Ariana DeBose has a better chance. I wouldn’t call DeBose’s victory a foregone conclusion, though.
Aunjanue Ellis
Age: 52 (53 by March 27th)
Film: King Richard
Role: Oracene “Brandy” Williams devoted mother of five daughters, including her youngest (and most famous) two, Venus and Serena Williams. Most women would get lost in the shadow (or at least drowned out by the speeches) of super-dad Richard Williams, but not Brandy. She answers his rambling monologues with well-timed gazes and always holds her ground, keeping her family together, and challenging her larger-than-life husband when he tries to go too far.
Nomination History:
This is Ellis’s first nomination.
Why She Should Win
On a first watch of King Richard, I left the theater even more impressed by Aunjanue Ellis than Will Smith, so I’m thrilled to see her recognized in this category. Smith and Ellis work so well together in this film. Fittingly for a biopic of Venus and Serena Williams, the film feels like a metaphorical tennis game between its two leads, a balanced back-and-forth exchange that both Smith and Ellis execute with elegance and skill. Since some critics are calling this the greatest performance of Smith’s career, equal recognition for Ellis seems only fair. It takes two to play metaphorical tennis, after all.
Ellis probably impressed me more than Smith on an initial watch because her character is so sympathetic and so familiar. Behind every loquacious man, there’s a woman commenting silently through charged gazes. We all know this woman. (Many of us are this woman.)
In a fairly early scene, Richard takes his family out for dinner, then abruptly leaves before the meal is over, announcing that he has work to do. Brandy asks if he’s okay. That’s all she really says, but her eyes follow him all the way out the door and say about twenty more things to the audience before the brief scene is over. This is not a singular occurrence. Ellis’s eyes talk to the audience throughout the entire film, like a reliable commentary track on every single grandiose statement Smith makes.
On a second watch of King Richard, the tennis metaphor underpinning their marriage became even more clear to me. Brandy frequently asks Richard where he is going. In two of my favorite scenes of the movie, she flat out tells him not to leave her girls, then refuses to abandon the point even when he has moved on from it. (I love the way she pulls at her hair in that scene, love her body language.) Later on, she pointedly takes issue with Richard not letting her in on important decisions, asking if they’re a team or not. It takes two to play tennis, and both partners must also be fully engaged to make a marriage work. The audience doesn’t learn until late in the movie that Richard had another family and abandoned them. Brandy has known this the whole time, and that explains much of the tension in their dynamic.
Every time Smith speaks out loud, Ellis answers non-verbally. She also gets a long, showy scene in the kitchen when Brandy reminds her husband that she, too, has been a parent to their children the entire time, that she is an equal (and necessary) partner in his schemes. She isn’t going anywhere. He had better not either.
She’s a character of inimitable fortitude. Watching her a second time, I made these notes: 1) I could never teach my daughter to serve. 2) I am glad I’m not that neighbor getting tersely called out by her. 3) I could never be married to Richard Williams.
Why She Might Not Win
I have trouble believing that Ellis can prevail over both Ariana DeBose and Kirsten Dunst in this category. Both give captivating, scene-stealing performances. It’s a bit hard to steal a scene from Will Smith playing Richard Williams. Ellis is more of a scene partner than a scene stealer. In their tennis match marriage, Richard is wildly knocking balls all over the place, and Brandy is ready with her racket, making sure that none of them is out of bounds. (Who would play tennis like that? Wouldn’t you want the erratic serves to go out of bounds? But Brandy is playing not to win the game but to prolong it. She won’t let her marriage end and her home life fall apart because of her dedication to her children. It doesn’t really matter what crazy thing Richard does, she has a reliable answer for it.)
I’m getting side-tracked from addressing why she might not win because that I love this performance. Aunjanue Ellis is a skilled veteran actress who has gotten surprisingly little recognition (of this scale). I like her performance here much better than some performances from similar actresses (veterans with little awards recognition) that actually won Oscars. If I got to cast a ballot, despite how much I loved some other performances in this category, I might even vote for her. But realistically, Will Smith is probably going to win for this movie. Everyone in the whole cast doesn’t need to win. Ariana DeBose is the obvious standout of West Side Story (playing an Oscar-winning role). By general consensus, DeBose is the best part of that film. I personally liked Aunjanue Ellis here a bit better than Will Smith, but I cling to many unpopular crackpot opinions, and I wouldn’t advise basing your Oscar home ballot on my personal enthusiasm for this particular performance.