At the same time as the SAG results have us wondering whether to readjust our expectations in what’s felt like a cut-and-dried best actor category, we’re starting to entertain the idea that best actress—which has been this awards season’s most reliably compelling free for all—may never have been particularly close.
For what it’s worth, a quick glance at our predictions below will affirm that we still believe the majority of this category’s nominees have a legitimate path to a win. Hell, Wicked fulfilling its destiny as this year’s Barbie, going an anemic zero-for-five at the SAGs, has us wondering if Karla Sofía Gascón might still be better positioned than Erivo, despite her all-timer of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Oscar campaign. (Since we know that Gascón is actually attending the ceremony, we assume that means she’s also preparing a speech, and we’d personally rather read that dishy screed than 100 “brutally honest Oscar voter” missives.)
Such is the wild ride this category has taken us on this season—indeed, ever since The Substance’s Demi Moore was tipped to take the award at the Cannes Film Festival last spring but the jury instead advanced Emilia Pérez’s women, collectively—that we’re going into Oscar night deprived of a genuine trial heat pitting the specific combination of Moore, the Palme d’Or-winning Anora’s Mikey Madison, and Fernanda Torres, of I’m Still Here.
Torres, like Moore and Madison, lost out on an acting award at her festival (Venice, where Nicole Kidman triumphed in the awards-season footnote Babygirl) but is at the center of arguably the Oscar race’s most notably ascendent proposition overall. That is, the film that’s going to give voters the chance to exorcize their embarrassed enthusiasm for Emilia Pérez at the same time as they get to turn their vote into a statement against fascism.
It’s unquestionably that last element that feels enough to turn Torres’s otherwise modest pre-Oscar awards profile (it’s that Golden Globe and, honestly, not much else) into a viable upset. Meanwhile, Madison’s “hooker with a heart of gold” role in Anora is equally dominant, and her film is arguably in the best position to eke out a nailbiter best picture win. And doesn’t her star-is-born moment have this category’s notoriously ingénue-friendly history in her corner?
Most years, probably. This year? Not so fast. Over the last three weeks, Ed and I have spilled more email and iMessage ink on this category than maybe all other races combined, and yet we’ve always come back to the same essential presupposition: that this is Moore’s race to lose, and arguably was long before her Golden Globes speech emphatically framed her entire half-century career as an act of perseverance—no, defiance—against typecasting, against underestimation, against commodification, against the double standard.
Moore’s “narrative” here would’ve probably been enough to keep her firmly in the conversation this year even if she were clocking in for Isabella Rossellini’s cameo in Conclave. But rarely has an actor’s Oscar narrative so palpably shared DNA with the inherent mission statement of their star vehicle. In juxtaposing Elisasue Monster’s Carrie-like fall from grace against Moore’s impending best actress glory, you might say “respecting the balance” has never been more overt.
Will Win: Demi Moore, The Substance
Could Win: Mikey Madison, Anora or Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here
Should Win: Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here
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