Hans’ Oscar Bites

Oscar Bites #19 – BEST ACTRESS

Typically I reserve Best Actress as my next to last category but for the first time in years it seems to be fairly sewn up at this point! Still, this has been such a loooong season that I do wonder about complacency…this is a category that likes to throw curveballs…

The nominees are:

– Rose Byrne, IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU

– Jessie Buckley, HAMNET

– Kate Hudson, SONG SUNG BLUE

– Renate Reinsve, SENTIMENTAL VALUE

– Emma Stone, BUGONIA

In order of preference:

5) Renate Reinsve (as Nora Borg), SENTIMENTAL VALUE

As the sole lead acting nomination for the film, Renate has to do a lot of carrying of the narrative heft as the link between her sister, her father, and the house that they are all finding themselves in and out of. She does best when she is having these solo scenes where you see a rash of emotions overcome her, particularly at the beginning as she undergoes an episode of stage fright. It’s a wonderful performance and a great make-up nomination for The Worst Person in the World, but for a lead acting nomination it is lacking a little bit of meat in the teeth.

4) Kate Hudson (as Claire Sardina), SONG SUNG BLUE

This was the last movie I saw before Oscar nominations, and after I watched it I ran straight to my predictions to put her in my final predicted five. Was it because I thought this was one of the year’s five best lead female acting performances? Nah, but this is the kind of baity movie star performance that the Academy once nominated in spades, and with a lot of 25 year retrospectives on Almost Famous happening over the least year, it was not surprising that the Academy would be charmed by one of our, shall I say, classic actresses making a return to some prestige fair. It’s pretty fun and the Midwestern accent is so, oh shucks, don’t ya know, seemingly spot on.

3) Jessie Buckley (as Agnes Shakespeare), HAMNET

Initially I was knee jerk resistant to this performance because how do you have a character based on Shakespeare’s wife, whose name was Anne Hathaway, and not cast Anne Hathaway?? That aside, and of course, knowing the character is actually adapted from a book and only loosely based on the real Mrs. Shakespeare, I think that ended up giving Jessie Buckley a lot of room to really let this performance feeeeeel itself out. She plays the loving mother, the longsuffering wife of the tortured playwright, the woman with the ?witchy? Secret, and ultimately, the mother then consumed with grief. Much has been made about how she acts during the final Globe Theater performance of Shakespeare where it seems like Jessie is playing her as someone who has no idea how plays work, but I counter somewhat that perhaps that works in the context of the dizzying delirium of her grief.   

2) Emma Stone (as Michelle Fuller), BUGONIA

Emma Stone’s growing symbiosis with director Yorgos Lanthimos has inspired a lot of hot debate with regards to range and actors’ willingness to expand their boundaries, but I think a case could definitely be made for the fact that Emma feels already sufficiently challenged when she works with Yorgos. She makes this performance look so incredibly effortless, as if she’s walking on air, in all three acts and stages of her character’s physical and situational transformations. In particular, I think the coda helps bring a lot of her performance home as she is clearly visibly pained at what she has to do, despite all that she has endured. Coming so soon after her win for Poor Things, there has been some discussion over whether this nomination was really necessary but I think it’s a performance that very much speaks for its own merits.

1) Rose Byrne (as Linda), IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU

The “mothering is hard” genre can be a very fertile playing ground for actresses to sink their teeth into (see JLaw this year in “Die My Love”, who I thought was really good), but Rose Byrne here brings her own unique sense of style that has made her such a fun and fascinating actress to follow all these years. I know a lot of folks have a tough time with this movie, and one of the theories I offer up is because of so much of the stress comes from an unseen child that we can still hear and feel in our bones, it ends up unnerving us, much like the fear of the unseen shark in Jaws. A lot of viewers I think then end up projecting their feelings of uneasiness on Rose Byrne’s performance, and you can almost visibly see her carrying that weight as well that she knows is coming her way. It’s a tour de force and it would be such a worthy win for one of the funniest, most talented actresses still churning out quality work. (Also a shoutout to a very fun supporting turn from Mr Pretty Flaco himself, A$AP Rocky.)

– WILL WIN: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

– COULD WIN: Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

– SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE: Chase Infiniti from One Battle After Another is the obvious answer, but I’ll also offer up Amanda Seyfried’s phenomenal turn in The Testament of Ann Lee and Keke Palmer in “One of Them Days”