Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actress

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Actress

The nominees are:

Jessica Chastain for The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Olivia Colman for The Lost Daughter

Penélope Cruz for Parallel Mothers

Nicole Kidman for Being the Ricardos

Kristen Stewart for Spencer

We saved the best for last, as far as these acting categories are concerned. For once, a truly wide-open race. I have spent almost 4,000 words talking about the acting categories already this year and have mentioned the BAFTAs over and over again. If it wins the BAFTA, it wins the Oscar. Well, we cannot rely on that here. Why? Because not one of the performers nominated for the Academy Award this year was also nominated for the BAFTA.

Going back to 1990 – before that, eligibility deadlines just don’t line up in a way that makes the data useful – this has never happened. Not once. The closest approximation is 2003, when the organizations matched just one nominee – Naomi Watts in 21 Grams. That year, the BAFTA went to Scarlett Johansson for Lost in Translation, while the Academy went with Charlize Theron in Monster (Note: At the BAFTAs, Theron was not eligible until 2004, when she lost to Imelda Staunton for Vera Drake). 

We are not flying blind, per se – Jessica Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild award and the Critics’ Choice – but we are missing our most significant bellwether. As a result, the predictions are all over the map, with support spread out across three or four of these nominees. For our purposes, what this means is one fun race right down to the end. By the way, for those curious, the BAFTA this year went to Joanna Scanlon for her work in the British drama After Love.

Jessica Chastain for The Eyes of Tammy Faye – Tammy Faye Bakker, as portrayed in this film, is an enigma for our times: a completely sincere person. It would seem her love of people is surpassed only by her love of god. Her desire to spread a message of acceptance and understanding (through Christian faith) runs up against the money- and power-hungry men in her life, including her husband. It is a fascinating story in a film that could have been better, but what is not in question is Chastain’s commitment to the role and passion for bringing it to life.

Though she had been around for a while before, Chastain broke onto the scene in a big way in 2011, when five films in which she had a role were released. Most importantly, she starred in the Palme d’Or winning The Tree of Life, the critically acclaimed Take Shelter, and the popular hit The Help, for which she earned her first Oscar nomination. She is a remarkable performer who brings intensity and drive to everything she does, and here, she applies that intensity and drive to a role that requires every ounce of her talents. She proves more than up to the task.

Penélope Cruz for Parallel Mothers – A four-time nominee who previously won Best Supporting Actress for her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cruz has never been better than she is in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film. She plays Janis, a single pregnant woman who befriends a younger unwed mother-to-be. I will not reveal more than that since the movie’s secrets are among its great pleasures, but suffice it to say, Janis is presented with a moral dilemma no one should ever have to face.

Cruz plays this conflict wonderfully, showing the depths of Janis’ moral questioning with little more than a shift in her tremendously expressive eyes. One thing that has defined some of Cruz’s most memorable characters has been the sense of energy and motion the actress imbues them with, particularly in her previous Oscar-winning role. For Almodóvar, she drops all artifice and affectation, utilizing stillness and silence in ways we are not used to seeing from Cruz. In this silence, however, Cruz is able to speak volumes.

Olivia Colman for The Lost Daughter – Colman delivered one of the most memorable and rewatchable Oscar acceptance speeches in recent times when she won Best Actress for The Favourite in 2018. Among the standout lines from that speech was when she addressed her children watching at home, saying “This is not gonna happen again.” Little did she know. Now, after a Supporting Actress nomination last year and another leading nomination here, it seems almost inevitable that it will happen again, if not this year, then someday.

For my money, her work in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stunning directorial debut is the best of the nominated bunch. She plays a woman on holiday, haunted by her past and beset by dread of the nefarious characters around her. She is not without sin, and there is never a moment in Colman’s performance that belies that fact. She is wounded but also capable of wounding. While her actions may on the surface seem inexplicable, Colman makes us understand what could drive this woman to do the things she does and hurt the people she hurts.

Kristen Stewart for Spencer – What a wild ride this awards season has been for Stewart, who after getting close on a couple of occasions, now has her first Academy Award nomination. As we talked about with Will Smith in King Richard, sometimes a performer and a part just seem to add up to an Oscar. That was the feeling around Stewart playing Princess Diana when the first trailer for Spencer dropped. Then, she won handfuls of critics awards, and the buzz would not die down. That was until she missed out on a SAG nomination and a BAFTA nomination. After that, it was an open question of whether she would even be Oscar nominated, let alone in line for the win. Now, here we are.

To her credit, Stewart has remained mostly nonchalant about the whole thing, blasé when it seemed she might miss out but humble and grateful when she made the final list. Her work in the film is sometimes uneven, but the longer you watch, the more she forces you to get on her wavelength. This is not the Princess Diana we all knew from the papers and the pictures, but rather a private Diana, dealing with demons and devils all around her. For bringing us into the world of the unseen Diana, Stewart deserves this recognition. 

Nicole Kidman for Being the Ricardos – If you enjoyed Being the Ricardos, I am sorry if it seems like I am down on the film. The truth is I really feel nothing about it one way or the other. The film is not engaging enough to have strong feelings about, which is a fatal flaw of a different kind. It seems Kidman was always going to be nominated for this performance, which has the patina of something like Renée Zellweger’s recent Oscar-winning turn in Judy. Like that performance, this is a serviceable imitation of life, but it never really goes deeper than that.

The biggest problem, though, is that it just isn’t funny, and Kidman does not have the comedy chops to make the material funny. Lucille Ball is famously one of the funniest people in the history of television, so casting a talented dramatic actress in a bland day-in-the-life story does no one any favors, least of all Lucille Ball. Kidman is too cerebral, and to some degree, that is what the movie asks her to be, but it is wrong for the character and frustrating to watch.

The final analysis

I try not to read too many other sites when I am writing my pieces and making my predictions. Just enough to stay informed but not enough to be influenced. I confess, however, that I have read a lot about this Best Actress race, and what I have read has left me more confused than when I started. So, let’s reason this out together.

Who won what? Kidman won the Golden Globe, which was meaningless this year. Colman and Stewart each won a handful of minor critics awards, while Cruz won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award and the National Society of Film Critics award, two of the biggest around. Then, there is Chastain, who as mentioned, has won the SAG award and the Critics’ Choice. The signal is all over the place.

It would be foolish to discount how helpful making a big, televised speech can be, which tips things in Chastain’s favor. Stewart is probably too young for the Academy to go that direction, and she will have other chances. The only arguments I am seeing for Cruz and Colman – other than the obvious quality of the work – is that they are both well liked by a broad selection of Academy members. But, perhaps the similarity of their narratives works to cancel them both out, which brings us back to Chastain.

With everything I have witnessed this season, I just don’t see a compelling enough argument in any other direction, and some of the buzz around the other performances could really just be boredom with the frontrunners leading to wild second guessing. I will be okay if I get this wrong, but for now, I am sticking with Chastain.

Will win: Jessica Chastain for The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Should win: Olivia Colman for The Lost Daughter

Should have been here: Rachel Sennott for Shiva Baby

Next time: Best Director

New movie review: Still Alice

Julianne Moore plays Alice in the excellent new drama Still Alice.

Disease is the great enemy of our time. Though we fret about terrorism, gun violence, and unforeseeable accidents, most of us will not meet our ends in these ways. The forces that conspire to destroy us exist less from without than within ourselves. Cancer, heart disease, dementia – these are the fates most likely to befall us. If we are lucky, we will live long, happy lives filled with love and joy before it strikes. Some of us will not have this good fortune.

Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s new film Still Alice concerns Alice Howland, a 50-year-old linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She is famous the world over for her insights into language and human communication. She is a smart, beautiful woman with an adoring husband and three grown children leading mostly model lives.

Into this happy world drops the disease, bringing darkness like a power outage. The tragedy of Alzheimer’s is that not everything goes black at once. Instead, it creeps around your home, turning out the lights in one room at a time until nothing is recognizable in the void. It is this slow deterioration of mind, body, and spirit that Still Alice captures so well. Alice is in an inexorable downward spiral, slipping from her children, her husband, and the life she knew.

Played by the always remarkable Julianne Moore, Alice is a woman who has been defined by her intelligence. More than once, her husband, John, calls her the smartest woman he knows or has ever known and says that is what attracted him to her. Though we never see her before the disease rears its ugly head, Moore’s performance gives the audience a sense of the woman who would have been a witty dinner companion, a sage adviser, and a marvelous lecturer.

It begins with little things. The word “lexicon” escapes her during a speech. She becomes disoriented while out for a run. She forgets appointments. Then, it progresses. She does not know her daughter’s name. She cannot find the bathroom in her home. The cruelty at this stage, however, is she is lucid enough to know what she is losing, and it scares her, as it would most of us.

In addition to Moore’s wondrous performance, Glatzer and Westmoreland do an excellent job of forcing the viewer to see things from Alice’s perspective as her mind becomes less and less able to process the world around her. Objects and people come in and go out of focus, familiar places are cast in unfamiliar light, and conversations sail past her before she can comprehend them. She is unmoored, and each day, she drifts further from who she once was.

While this is Alice’s story, she can be our narrator only until she becomes unreliable, at which point, the storytellers must shift their focus to the family. This switch is handled so deftly and delicately it would be easy to miss. Alice wakes up in the middle of the night and frantically searches for her lost phone, which she does not find. The next time we see her, she is doing a puzzle in the kitchen as her husband and oldest daughter cook. He discovers her cracked iPhone in a drawer.

She takes it and tells her daughter she had been searching for it the night before. As she sits, her husband whispers, “That was a month ago.” Just like that, we realize she is irretrievably lost. See, the thing with Alzheimer’s is that the shell remains. She looks the same, feels the same, smells the same, but she is fundamentally changed. When she tries to interact as she once could, the difference is made crystal clear.

Based on a novel of the same name by Lisa Genova, Glatzer and Westmoreland’s screenplay embraces the despair of Alice’s story and provides no easy answers or escape. Even when the opportunity presents itself to end on a note of triumph, the film carries on beyond that into the abyss of the disease. Alzheimer’s does not end in triumph. Whether it comes slowly or quickly, it always ends in defeat.

It is not a battle Alice faces alone, as she is surrounded by supportive family members who can do nothing but watch as the wife and mother they love dissolves before their eyes. Alec Baldwin plays John, and Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart, and Hunter Parrish appear as the couple’s three children. All do fine work, and Baldwin is particularly good, though they are a bit overshadowed by Moore’s central transformation.

Though distinctly tragic, there is something refreshing in watching a family on screen that is not defined by bickering, jealousy, and spite. They all care for one another and want to do the right thing. While the right thing in this case may be sad and unpleasant, it is justifiable and understandable. None of these people are villains. They are simply humans placed in an impossible situation and doing their best to act with tenderness and integrity. In Still Alice, the only villain is the disease.

See it? Yes.