Viola Davis
Age: 55
Film: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Role: Ma Rainey, early Blues legend and vaudeville star who comes to Chicago on a sweltering day in July, 1927, to make a record of some of her hit songs. Though Ma lives up to her reputation for being difficult, she’s the one who has the coveted voice and the final say, so she also has the respect and allegiance of every member of her backup band—except Levee, a rash and gifted young trumpeter with big dreams (and an agenda) of his own.
Nomination History:
Won Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2017 for Fences (2016).
Previously nominated for Best Actress for The Help (2011).
Previously nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Doubt (2008).
Why She Should Win:
If Viola Davis does win, she will become the first black Actress to win two Oscars, and she might just pull it off, too.
Certainly her performance is one of the best and most memorable I’ve seen this year. Here’s the thing. Davis has a screen persona that works for her. Though she’s an excellent, powerful actress, she typically plays someone strong, centered, assured with a slightly stoic demeanor. She departs from that a bit in Fences, steps outside her usual wheelhouse. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, she’s outside the wheelhouse and up on land, around the corner, across the street, down in the basement and back up again, inside a sweltering Chicago studio making a record with Chadwick Boseman and a bunch of seasoned jazz musicians, and demanding a cold Coca-Cola. I have never seen Davis like this before.
Usually she plays characters who are somewhat composed even in their distress. Here she’s drenched in sweat, performing in a tent. She’s got heavy make-up, gold teeth, flowing gowns, rings, feathers, earrings, bangles. Did I mention that she’s drenched in sweat? In every frame in which she appears, Davis’s Ma Rainey glistens like a melting snowman. Maybe you want to object, “You’re only describing the way she looks, Sarah, not the way she acts.” My point is, she acts the way she looks. It’s the most un-Viola Davis-like persona you could imagine.
As I watched the film, I wasn’t surprised to see Davis give an excellent performance. She’s a powerhouse. She got her first Oscar nomination for stealing a scene from Meryl Streep. In Doubt she had less than ten minutes of screentime yet still nabbed a nomination for Best Supporting Actress. And don’t think it was a weird fluke, a weak performance from Streep. Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress for that role. Co-stars Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman got nominations, too. Yet Davis was the standout, the one everybody was talking about. (I love Doubt, by the way. Such a riveting film!)
When I first got a glimpse of Ma Rainey, I was just excited to see Davis bring such an eccentric character to life. I thought, “Well, she’s getting an Oscar nomination for this for sure.” For quite some time, hers was the only performance of 2020 I thought worthy of winning Best Actress. (Ranking artistic work is always a bit weird, but when somebody is great in a role, it stands apart. And Davis stands apart here.)
As we watch, we believe that Davis is Ma Rainey. Initially, the character seems prickly, unpleasant, perhaps even a bit scary. Then she gets this wonderful scene that allows her to explain why she behaves in such an intractable manner. Suddenly we understand her. In fact, we sympathize with her. We like her. She’s right. Her attitude may be off-putting, but the observations inspiring it are absolutely true. Davis brings such complexity to the character. She makes her simultaneously unpleasant and borderline heroic. I liked her performance just as much as Chadwick Boseman’s, and Levee has far more screentime. She even sings a little.
Does she deserve an Oscar for pulling out all the stops like this? Yes, absolutely. I’ll confess I’m rooting for Carey Mulligan, but if Davis wins on Oscar night, I will clap and cheer. She’s always a superb actress. Here she goes beyond anything I’ve ever seen her do before.
Why She Might Not Win:
Davis could win, but I don’t expect that outcome. (I’ve been surprised before, though). Her performance itself cannot be faulted, but there is one key area that might prove problematic for an Oscar win.
I said that Davis sings a little. The truth is, she sings a very little. Someone else provides her vocals on most of the songs. That usually counts against someone hoping for an Oscar. Granted, Jamie Foxx doesn’t sing in Ray. Rami Malek’s vocals are blended with other voices in Bohemian Rhapsody. But those are special circumstances. There is a real, historical Ma Rainey, and she is not the one dubbing Davis. The ghost vocalist’s name is Maxayn Lewis. Now, there’s definitely nothing wrong with having a strong singer lend her voice to a role. (Marni Nixon sang half the 1960s!) And there hasn’t been any effort to cover up the fact that Davis doesn’t do most of the singing, so there’s not going to be a potentially damaging last minute scandal about it. Still, I think Davis’s chances of actually winning the Oscar would be substantially higher if she did do the singing herself. (Note, fellow nominee Andra Day does all of her own singing, and she does it in the style of the legendary Billie Holiday.)
I also found myself asking right after watching the film, “Is Davis the lead actress? Is she really?” (Maybe categories don’t matter anymore. Maybe they never did. But how can the Academy keep a straight face when saying Davis is the lead in Ma Rainey and LaKeith Stanfield is supporting in Judas and the Black Messiah?) Sure, there’s no actress in the movie who can claim to be the lead instead, but if you ask me, Ma Rainey is a supporting character. (It struck me as a good supporting part enhanced to draw a star, but I’ve never seen the play.) Chadwick Boseman is clearly the lead here. If a lesser actress played Ma Rainey, people would surely consider it a supporting role. Even though Davis is indisputably magnificent, she doesn’t dominate her film the way the other four actresses in this category do. They own their movies. Boseman owns this one.
That’s another problem. Boseman is winning Best Actor for sure. Wouldn’t voters prefer to see more movies honored? Usually when a film wins Best Actor and Best Actress it is more beloved than this one seems. At the very least, it is nominated for Best Picture. (Then again, maybe enough voters think Ma Rainey should have been a Best Picture nominee to vote for Boseman and Davis to make things right.)
I’m not sure who will win Best Actress this year. I’ll confess that I’m rooting for Carey Mulligan to win, and I also think she has the best chance. But any of these women could take home the Oscar. If Davis wins, I will clap and cheer because this performance is one of the year’s clear standouts as well as one of the best and most interesting of her career. Plus she’ll make Oscar history by becoming the first black actress to win twice. Who doesn’t want to see that happen?
Andra Day
Age: 36
Film: The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Role: Billie Holiday, beloved jazz and swing singer who despite the FBI’s warnings, persists in performing the provocative “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching in the South. Unable to charge Holiday with a crime for singing the song, the FBI instead focuses on her ongoing battles with heroin abuse, imprisons her on drug charges, then hounds her for the rest of her life.
Nomination History:
This is Day’s first nomination.
Why She Should Win:
When Andra Day won Best Actress in a Drama at the Globes, everybody was surprised–the audience, Day, me. But afterwards, I did something that greatly lessened my surprise. I watched her performance.
Day is riveting as Billie Holiday. Yes, as an actress, she’s basically a newcomer, but unlike fellow nominee Viola Davis, she does her own singing (and in Holiday’s highly recognizable, gravelly style, too!). Like a teeming number of people, Day was a fan of Holiday long before signing on for the Lee Daniels biopic. In fact, she took her stage name from Holiday’s nickname Lady Day. (The Andra part is short for her own birth name, Cassandra–just like fellow nominee Carey Mulligan’s character in Promising Young Woman, and a certain doomed Trojan prophetess, who like Holiday was tormented for giving voice to the truth.) To give her own voice Holiday’s signature gravelly ring, Day abused it, doing things like smoking and screaming herself hoarse. Following a regimen of vocal abuse must take a psychological toll on a singer, and Day herself is a singer of some note. I promise you’ve heard her song “Rise Up.” A short time ago, it was everywhere. Even I know it, and I’m not the person you go to for help in navigating the music scene. I do always watch the Oscars, though, and if you watch, too, you may remember Day performing “Stand Up for Something” with Common from the movie Marshall a few years ago. Though the song was nominated, Day didn’t write it, so this year’s nomination is her first.
Day could hardly be better as Holiday. Sure, the film surrounding her performance is a little messy, but I think that works in Day’s favor. She’s the one who makes the movie work. She’s the one we want to see. She’s the star. We’re left with the impression that there’s this imperfect (though provocative) film built around Billie Holiday. And its purpose is to show us Billie Holiday. And Andra Day is Billie Holiday.
She shows us a Holiday who is persecuted for suffering. Holiday sings the truth about lynching in the South, so the FBI arrests her on drug charges. What makes the situation interesting is that Holiday is, indeed, a heroin addict. So the charges are true (at least initially). But as we watch Day, we begin to see that Holiday has turned to drugs because of a background of trauma and abuse. Day lets us see Holiday’s suffering but also her strength. One of her great strengths is her ability to acknowledge suffering, not just her own but the suffering of others, as well. As the movie makes us ponder why it is necessary to criminalize suffering, Day reveals Holiday to us in a real, unflinching way. She lets us see so many sides of the performer, and yet we want to see more, more. That’s one of the great things about this performance. Day leaves us hungering for more Billie Holiday. At one point she defiantly strips naked. But we want to see more. At another, she lets us peek into her traumatic childhood, but we want to see more. Near the end of the film, we see Day’s Holiday on her death bed, ravaged by cirrhosis (and plagued by federal agents). She is broken. She has given everything. She is dying right before our eyes. But we want more, more. We can never get enough Billie Holiday. (And wisely there is a bit more. The film offers us a lively curtain call, a musical number performed by Day as Holiday during the end credits.)
That’s what makes Day’s performance great. We can’t take our eyes (and ears) off her for the entire film, and yet, somehow, we have the sense that this just isn’t enough Billie Holiday. We need more.
I’ve seen plenty of movies where by the end, I’m begging, “Enough! Enough! Less!”
Day is immensely captivating in a difficult role and would be more than deserving of the Oscar.
Why She Might Not Win:
Day could win.
She did win the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama, which is often a predictor of how the Oscars will go. But this year the Globes seem more irrelevant than ever. They were full of exciting surprises—Jodie Foster won Best Supporting Actress! Rosamund Pike won Best Actress in a comedy!—and people talked about how those things might shake up the Oscar race. But then nothing happened as a result (except continued conversation about the Globes’ low ratings and tiny voting body lacking in diversity). Andra Day was another surprise winner from the Globes. If Foster and Pike didn’t even get nominated, why should we believe that Day’s Globes win will make any difference to the Oscars?
I don’t expect Andra Day to win this award. Hers is the sole nomination from her film (which definitely did not get the glowing reviews of most movies in this category). She’s also by far the best part of the film according to critics, awards bloggers, audiences, and me. The movie is a little weak for Oscar wins. Plus, Diana Ross already famously played Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. Ross was nominated for Best Actress, too, and that film also scored nominations for screenplay, art direction, costume design, and score. Since this film is not as well received overall, Day winning the Oscar (when Ross did not) would be surprising.
If I put money on it, I would put a little on Carey Mulligan and a little on Frances McDormand. I think one of them will be the winner, hopefully Mulligan (because I think her performance is the most special as I will explain when I get to her). In terms of merit, I would also give Davis the edge, although Day does do her own singing.
Weighing all the factors as the race stands now, I’d say a win for Day would be a surprise, but not a shock. She probably won’t win. But she could.
Vanessa Kirby
Age: 32
Film: Pieces of a Woman
Role: Martha, a young woman who endures an unexpectedly difficult labor, then loses her baby daughter moments after the infant’s birth. As Martha struggles to process the unexplained death of her newborn, her life unravels, and her marriage falls apart. Her overbearing mother insists that the midwife who delivered the baby must be punished. Martha isn’t sure what she wants. She focuses on memories of her baby’s scent and pulls away from everyone.
Nomination History:
This is Kirby’s first nomination.
Why She Should Win:
Before the film’s title even appears, Pieces of a Woman gives us a twenty-four minute, single-take scene of Vanessa Kirby’s Martha giving birth in her home. Describing the power of her performance in this harrowing scene is impossible without revealing that mere moments after birth, the child dies. This is the part of the film that gets the most attention. When people praise Kirby in Pieces of a Woman, they’re most likely to mention the birth scene. And she does take us through the various stages of the childbirth with convincing realism. Of course, Martha and her husband Sean (Shia LaBeouf) have a plan. Of course, the birth does not go at all according to that plan. This is one great virtue of the film. It presents a real birth experience, raising awareness of just how often something goes wrong. (I know far more people whose pregnancy and labor experiences did not go as expected than otherwise.) Even when it goes right, labor is emotionally and physically exhausting. I do appreciate films that try to shine a light on what the actual experience of giving birth to a baby is like. Until recently, actual birth experiences were something that popular media shied away from depicting honestly. So many women get blindsided by the shocking reality of what it means to carry, bear, and care for a baby. Kirby should be commended for her work here, especially since she’s never given birth. Every real detail in her performance she had to research and hone herself.
Even though the birth scene is the one everyone talks about, I personally find the rest of Kirby’s performance far more impressive, more moving. In the wake of the baby’s death, Martha grapples with post-partum depression, grief, and trauma as she mourns a lost child, a lost innocence, a lost connection to her spouse. Over (an alarmingly long) time, she checks out of her career, her life. Her husband has a style of grieving completely incompatible with hers and seems unable to provide the support she needs, instead demanding emotional support from her that she refuses to give. (And how can she provide him support? She is still so broken herself.) Not surprisingly, her marriage falls apart. Her overbearing mother persists in “helping” by offering unwanted advice and trying to force Martha to confront her midwife and seek legal restitution for the baby’s death.
Kirby is utterly convincing as a woman experiencing the natural emotions that would follow such a tragedy. She’s brilliant in a scene in a clothing store. In fact, in this section of the movie, her despondent, longing, miserable gazes at the living children she seems to find everywhere really resonated with me. I remembered how I felt when I kept trying and failing to conceive. I remembered how I worried when my daughter was in the NICU, when I didn’t know for sure if she would ever come home with me and have a normal life. (If you haven’t guessed by now, this is kind of a heavy movie.) Most of Kirby’s best moments are non-verbal. Without saying a word, the actress manages to keep our sympathy no matter what Martha does. Late in the film, Kirby also gets to deliver a moving speech after coming to a revelation that we have been waiting most of the movie for her to experience.
Why She Might Not Win:
I, personally, don’t think that Kirby should win the Oscar. Others’ tastes will differ, of course, but in my opinion, Kirby’s performance (though good) is the weakest of the five nominated this year.
(Maybe the problem is that I don’t watch The Crown. Everyone kept raving about Claire Foye in First Man, too, and I didn’t get that, either. I don’t know why I’ve never watched The Crown. The royal family interests me, and the show always sounded good when my mother used to tell me all about it. Had I watched Kirby play Princess Margaret and formed an emotional attachment to the actress, then maybe her work here would excite me more.)
My biggest problem with Kirby’s performance is that it was overhyped. Before this film released to ordinary viewing audiences, buzz for Kirby was so loud and intense that its reverberations could probably have carried her all the way to Mars. I myself was practically sick with excitement to see this film. With that kind of build-up, her actual performance could not but disappoint. To be clear, she is good. Yes, she’s good. But the buzz seemed to suggest that she was once-in-a-century good. I expected life-changing perfection. At the very least, I expected the surge of feeling I got when I first watched Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (That’s the movie experience that surprised and blew me away most recently.) Pick whatever iconic Oscar-winning performance you like best. I expected something on that level.
But Kirby is merely good. Is she good enough for a nomination? Yes. But, at the same time, her omission in this category (in favor of someone like Rosamund Pike) wouldn’t have been a huge injustice. (The thing is, Pike herself is merely good in I Care A Lot. Had Pike replaced Davis or Mulligan in the line up, I would have felt furious and dejected. But swapped out for Vanessa Kirby? Okay. Keep in mind that I really like Rosamund Pike, and I have nothing against Vanessa Kirby. I simply find Kirby’s actual performance in this particular film the least exciting in this category.)
To me, Kirby seems the least likely to win. It’s not just that Pieces of a Woman is my least favorite of these films (though it is). It’s that nobody else seems excited about Pieces of a Woman right now either. You can blame that on Netflix for having so many contenders that it chooses to focus on promoting some over others. You can blame Kirby’s co-star Shia LaBoeuf (whose personal life seems to be derailing his acting career yet again). You can blame the fact that audiences may not be excited to watch a movie that’s entirely about a labor gone wrong. Blame whatever you want. All I know is, last fall, people could not stop raving about this incredible, mind-blowing, Oscar-worthy performance by Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman, and now the roar of support for Kirby has quieted to a whisper. If Academy members plan to vote for her for the win, they’re playing it really close to the chest.
If you ask me, the subject matter of this film makes it a hard sell for a general audience. Nomadland keeps picking up prizes for Best Picture and Best Director, and everybody (voting) knows two-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand. Everybody will watch that movie (or pretend they did). Promising Young Woman is also nominated in multiple categories including Picture and Director. Despite the seriousness of the subject it addresses, it’s fun to watch. (It has lots of energy and incorporates well known songs in creative ways.) Chadwick Davis is winning Best Actor. Everyone will watch Ma Rainey. (Davis herself is enough of a draw, to be frank.) Do people know Andra Day? They do now that she accepted that Golden Globe for playing Billie Holiday with such gracious excitement. (Holiday’s star power will work in Day’s favor, too.)
But Pieces of a Woman? The problem with the film is that the more personal experience you bring with you, the better it is. If you yourself or someone close to you has lost a baby, this film will mean more to you and work better for you. But if you’ve lost a baby, do you really want to watch a full-length movie which focuses entirely on the death of a newborn and the subsequent unraveling of a woman’s marriage and life? The content of this film could be traumatic (legitimately triggering) to those most likely to relate to it.
LaBeouf’s offscreen difficulties have probably hurt the film’s chances, too. Despite his troubles, LaBeouf is a good actor, and I actually think his work in Pieces of a Woman is worthy of a nomination, too. Yet not only was LaBeouf not nominated, but the very idea of him being nominated seemed insane. Even Ellen Burstyn didn’t get nominated for Best Supporting Actress. And I like her work as Martha’s mother even better than Kirby’s turn as Martha! If you ask me, Burstyn would be a worthy Best Supporting Actress winner just for that one great monologue alone. But nope. No nomination for her this year.
There’s just no support for this movie, and while Kirby is good, she’s not good enough. A first Oscar nomination is its own reward. This is not Vanessa Kirby’s year to win.
Frances McDormand
Age: 63
Film: Nomadland
Role: Fern, a woman mourning a late husband, a lost life, and a forgotten world, living in her van by choice, taking seasonal jobs and drawing emotional support from other self-proclaimed “nomads,” those who reject the prison of traditional mortgages (which have left them impoverished) and instead savor a different kind of richness, the only kind available to them. (Fern sounds a lot like Fran, don’t you think?)
Nomination History:
Won the Best Actress Oscar in 2018 for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).
Won the Best Actress Oscar in 1997 for Fargo (1996).
Previously nominated for Best Supporting Actress for North Country (2005) and Mississippi Burning (1998).
Also nominated this year as a producer of Nomadland.
Why She Should Win:
McDormand has her work cut out for her in Nomadland. Instead of dazzling the audience with a flashy, searing, sizzling performance, she must instead act as ordinary as possible. With the notable exception of David Stratharin (and the less notable exception of a few others), McDormand’s co-stars in this film are all non-actors. They’re just real people living their actual lives (some in their actual vans). Most of them are the modern day “nomads” that Jessica Bruder profiles in the non-fiction book that inspired this movie. Apparently, during filming, some of them did not even realize that McDormand was an actor. She fit in so well that they just assumed she actually was one of them.
Working with non-actors is tricky. It presents three challenges that I can imagine. 1) Your scene partners will have little to no dramatic experience, which means that you’ll often have to adlib dialogue to keep up with their unscripted statements or try to react naturally when they’re having trouble delivering the occasional lines they have rehearsed. 2) You don’t want to upstage the real people or distinguish yourself from them so much that you don’t seem to belong. 3) The audience knows you’re a star, so within these constraints, you still must entertain us and hold our interest.
The other awkward thing is less about acting than about being a human being. Imagine someone candidly opening their heart to you, sharing their real-life experiences, pouring out their feelings. Wouldn’t it be strange to hear real stories and give a fictional story back? That would make me so uneasy. And you know Frances McDormand must care about these people’s stories because she’s a producer of this project. She chose to be involved in bringing this material to the screen. Not only did she work with fellow producer Peter Spears to option the screenplay, but she’s the one who (after watching The Rider) thought of approaching director Chloé Zhao with the material. Part of her role in the movie was encouraging the non-actors to open up, to share, to speak naturally while on camera.
The blending in part is hard enough. It takes the right actress. Think of Meryl Streep, an undisputed (by anyone who is right) paragon of acting. Can you imagine her blending in anywhere? Streep is a well-known chameleon, but when people call her that, they mean that she can change her accent and manner to convince us that she is any number of people. She’s not a chameleon in the sense that she uses camouflage to disappear into the background. In Nomadland, McDormand is acting best by acting unremarkable. Not just anyone can do that. Often real, average people (non actors) faced with the challenge of appearing on camera do not seem natural and unremarkable at all even though they are appearing as themselves and are (in the sense that they are not famous) unremarkable.
Another challenge for McDormand is the complex nature of the character itself. I’ve only read half of Nomadland so far, but Bruder’s book seems to emphasize a kind of desperate rebranding of an itinerant life of menial labor. So many of the nomads are retirees who simply can’t afford to live any other way. But Chloé Zhao’s film is more layered and complex. I went into it expecting a kind of exposé of injustice against the elderly. But Zhao doesn’t just shine a light on the unlikely world of those who become perpetually on the move because they have no place to stay. She does show us that, but she also turns the idea of being a nomad into a spiritual quest, a path of mourning or of discovery. To make the movie work, McDormand must bring similar complexity to her performance. Fern is like the nomad life itself. The more time we spend with her, the more we get to know her, to appreciate new and surprising aspects of her character. Unlike some others, Fern has options, more than one realistic and attractive alternative, but she chooses to live as a nomad instead. Why? As we eventually learn, Fern doesn’t feel ready to return to a conventional lifestyle, and perhaps she never will. For her, the journey in itself is a kind of end, or perhaps more accurately, the journey is what she seeks to avoid the end of something cherished. She is on a spiritual quest, mourning for a life lost by perpetuating it in the only way that she can. Can you imagine conveying all that to the audience while at the same time blending into the crowd, making them believe you’re just another nomad? What a task! What an achievement!
Why She Might Not Win:
If McDormand wins Best Actress, she will have as many Oscar wins for acting as Meryl Streep. This should give voters pause. In fact, McDormand will have one more win for Best Actress than Streep (one of whose wins is in supporting). I’m not sure how much that matters to Oscar voters, but it will matter to journalists and Oscar bloggers covering the ceremony. Also, if Nomadland wins Best Picture, McDormand, as a nominated producer, will pick up yet another Oscar.
Look Frances McDormand is awesome. I love her. I love her work. Her turn in Fargo is one of my favorite Best Actress performances ever. And her work in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri energized me beyond belief. But doesn’t it seem likely that some voters will say to themselves, “She already has two Oscars. How many more does she need?” Four Oscars is a lot for one actress. The only other actress with four Oscar wins is Katharine Hepburn.
And this isn’t a sexy, screen-igniting, scene-stealing role. In this movie, McDormand’s goal is actually to blend into the crowd, to fit in among the other real-life “nomads.” To me, that sounds hard, but maybe it’s not as hard as I imagine. (I can’t imagine another great actress, four-time Best Actress winner Katharine Hepburn, blending in anywhere. And yet I seem to recall an anecdote from Spencer Tracy’s daughter about a man wandering up to Hepburn in an English gardening shop, assuming she worked there, and asking if they had any gooseberries. Maybe the reason I can’t imagine Meryl Streep blending into a crowd is that when she does that, I don’t notice her. I probably saw her yesterday. She was probably playing another parent in my son’s virtual kindergarten meeting.)
There’s also the possibility that some voters may be put off by the charge that the film isn’t as harsh on Amazon as it could be, glossing over the horrible working conditions and sketchy management practices mentioned in Jessica Bruder’s book. Remember, McDormand is a producer who helped develop the material. Actors shouldn’t necessarily be blamed for flaws in the films in which they appear, but McDormand is also the producer of Nomadland.
Some of you might be saying now, “Come on, Sarah! Frances McDormand earned this Oscar. She pooped in a bucket on camera, for crying out loud!” (Was she actually pooping in that bucket or only acting? I can’t find a clear answer.) But consider that the willingness to be vulnerable enough to do strange things on camera isn’t unique to McDormand’s performance. So she pooped in a bucket (or pretended to)! Supporting Actress nominee Maria Bakalova nearly had a sexual encounter with Rudy Giuliani (or pretended to, if you hear Giuliani tell it). Many actors do whatever it takes for a role. (None of this should count against McDormand, really, but some voters actually may consider Nomadland and Borat the same kind of stunt-driven projects. I don’t know if that will work against McDormand or in her favor, but I do know that Bakalova seems to be generating more buzz for her antics than McDormand is for her subtlety.)
At any rate, McDormand’s performance is high caliber but unconventional. Maybe voters would prefer to give Carey Mulligan or Andra Day one Oscar before rewarding McDormand with three (or four!). Or maybe enough people will get excited about the prospect of Viola Davis becoming the first black woman to win two Oscars to make that happen. McDormand has a shot at a win, and I love her work, so I’d be thrilled for her. This doesn’t feel like her year to me (in Best Actress). But we’ll just have to wait and see how it plays out.
Carey Mulligan
Age: 35
Film: Promising Young Woman
Role: Cassandra, once a young woman with a promising future until she dropped out of med school for personal reasons several years ago. Her parents don’t understand why she spends her days wasting her talents as a barista at a small coffee shop. They don’t know how she spends her nights. When a chance encounter with a former classmate stirs Cassie’s memories of the past, she decides to get revenge for a crime everyone else seems to have conveniently forgotten.
Nomination History:
Previously nominated for Best Actress for An Education (2009).
Why She Should Win:
I hope Carey Mulligan does win this year. I’m shamelessly rooting for her with full, unabashed transparency. It’s not just that Promising Young Woman is my favorite Oscar film this season (though it is). It’s that the stars have aligned for Mulligan in this role. Since her first nomination for An Education, Mulligan has regularly played starring or supporting roles in Oscar baity projects, but until now, she’s never gotten a second nomination. Every year, a chorus of enthusiastic Mulligan fans pleads with us, “Carey Mulligan was great in Drive! Carey Mulligan was great in Shame! Carey Mulligan was great in Mudbound! Carey Mulligan was great in Wildlife!” And they wait and hope and clamor for an Oscar nomination that never comes. For the record, I think Mulligan was pretty great as Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. I’ve never care for that character, but Mulligan brought her more complexity than I expected. Unless you follow the Oscars, you wouldn’t realize how many times Carey Mulligan has come close to earning that second nomination. (And her fans always assure us that if she can just get that nomination, then she has a real shot at the win.) Essentially, Carey Mulligan has been circling an Oscar win for twelve long years, my daughter’s entire lifetime. This ought to be the year that something big finally happens for her, and here’s why.
This isn’t just any performance, this is a star-making performance, the performance of a lifetime (the caliber of performance that I was hoping for from Vanessa Kirby.) Mulligan’s work as Cassandra Thomas is special. Promising Young Woman has its finger on the pulse of something happening right now, and Cassandra represents the reality of that even as she sticks in our minds as a well-crafted fictional character. Mulligan has done a lot of great work, but average movie goers keep mixing her up with Michelle Williams. That shouldn’t happen anymore. (Now they’ll mix her up with Margot Robbie thanks to that notorious Variety review.) That’s a joke (sort of). After a stunning, once-in-a-lifetime performance like this, nobody should be mixing Carey Mulligan up with anyone anymore.
After reading this far, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Okay, so Sarah is the world’s most massive Carey Mulligan fan.” But that’s the thing. I’m not. Though I usually like Mulligan’s work, until now, I’ve had no particular feelings about her one way or another. But I love her performance as Cassandra (love it with a capital L, in italics, with all the exclamation points). And I think others feel that way, too. (The film is certainly well received, and writer/director Emerald Fennell just won Best Original Screenplay at the WGA, a feat I hope she repeats at the Oscars.) From now on, when people think of Carey Mulligan, they’ll think of Cassandra Thomas.
That’s what I mean when I say this is a star-making, career-defining role. Take Anthony Hopkins. He’s always been a good actor. I’ve seen him in one of his earliest film performances, playing Richard in The Lion in Winter back in 1968. He’s good there. But not until he played Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 did audiences sit up and pay attention and start raving about him. Sometimes even when you’ve had a solid career for years, it takes just the right role to get people to remember you. For Carey Mulligan, this is that role.
That’s why I hope so much that she’s recognized for her work as Cassandra Thomas. If she doesn’t win now, then whether or not she wins an Oscar in the future, film historians and movie buffs will never mention Carey Mulligan’s name without saying, “Cassie Thomas in Promising Young Woman, that’s the role she should have won the Oscar for!”
Her performance is phenomenal, endlessly engaging and energized because our perception of her character changes as the film seems to slip seamlessly from one genre into another. Sometimes Cassie seems as deliciously vicious as Hannibal Lecter. At other moments, she’s a friend in mourning, a woman in love, a daughter adrift, a victim of tragedy, an angel of vengeance. Fennell’s concept is brilliant, and her screenplay is great, but none of it would work without the right actress playing Cassandra. Mulligan rises to all of the unique challenges such an ambitious story throws at her. Fennell’s premise is deeply compelling, but in the end, the movie works because Mulligan’s performance as Cassandra works.
Promising Young Woman is my favorite movie of the year, and I hope Carey Mulligan does win the Oscar. Plus unlike Davis and McDormand (two other worthy options), Mulligan has never won an Academy Award before. I believe that she deserves the win this year.
Why She Might Not Win:
Mulligan didn’t win the Golden Globe and didn’t even get nominated by BAFTA (thanks, partially, I’m sure to their fun new system). (Well, actually, I’d guess that it’s thanks entirely to that.) Still, she did win the Critics’ Choice Award (if that matters) and could win the SAG. (We’ll see.)
If there is a clear frontrunner for Best Actress this year, then it’s Carey Mulligan…
But…
But I’m not convinced that there is a frontrunner for Best Actress this year.
Viola Davis could easily win the SAG. Everyone will watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom because of Chadwick Boseman, and it was shut out of Best Picture. Maybe SAG voters will show Davis some extra love because of that snub. That would give her momentum to win Best Actress at the Oscars. And (as I first mentioned back at the very beginning of this write up) if Davis wins Best Actress at the Oscars, then she will make history by becoming the first black woman to win two Oscars. That’s a huge milestone, and I wouldn’t be disappointed (much) by that outcome. Davis’s performance really excited me, too. She would be an extremely worthy winner.
Frances McDormand is another real threat. She stars in one of the most acclaimed films of the year (which she also produced), a movie that could take Best Picture and will almost certainly win Best Director. Could it win Best Actress, too? Sure. Why not?
And then there’s Andra Day. She’s new. She does her own singing. She won the Golden Globe. While I consider a win for her less likely than these other scenarios, it certainly is possible. Her performance as Billie Holiday is the reason to watch that movie.
If I personally were to rank the performances in this category, they would go 1) Carey Mulligan 2) Viola Davis. Then there would be a tiny bit of distance. Then 3) Frances McDormand. Next, measurable distance. Then 4) Andra Day. And then, after an immense amount of distance so enormous that Rosamund Pike, Yeri Han from Minari, or Sophia Loren could have taken the nomination instead with my blessing, 5) Vanessa Kirby. (It’s not my intention to insult Kirby. They’re all doing fine work. I just find it easier than usual to rank the performances this year. Normally ranking things is not my forte. But this year, it seems unusually clear to me.)
Though I’m pulling for Mulligan, I’d cheer for Davis, I’d clap for McDormand, and I’d be vaguely satisfied with Day. But in my heart of hearts, I hope Carey Mulligan wins, and at this point, I believe that she will. Probably. Maybe. (I’m jinxing her just by writing it!)