Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 2023

The Contenders:

Sandra Hüller: Anatomy of a Fall
Lily Gladstone: Killers of the Flower Moon
Carey Mulligan: Maestro
Annette Bening: Nyad
Emma Stone: Poor Things (winner)

What’s Missing

I need to start this out by saying how disappointing I find this field of nominations. Given a completely open field, I’m keeping two of these and dumping three. As for who I would consider replacing them, I’d entertain both Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman in May December, but I don’t think either of them make the cut. Priay Kansara in Polite Society is probably the one right on the edge of nomination for me, likely my first runner up. Greta Lee in Past Lives feels like a huge miss to me, like an “obviously she’ll get a nomination” pick, and yet here we are. The biggest elephant missing from the room is Margot Robbie’s turn in Barbie, the nomination all of us expected and the snub none of us deserved. As a dark horse, I would suggest that her television career prevented Julia Louis-Dreyfus from getting any traction for You Hurt My Feelings, and that’s a damn shame.

Weeding through the Nominees

5. There’s a bit of a race to the bottom for me with this group of nominations, but I’m going to start with Annette Bening for a very specific reason. Bening is fine in Nyad, and it genuinely helps that she looks a lot like Diana Nyad. The problem for me is that the most compelling characters in the film are Nyad’s friend Bonnie, played by Jodie Foster, and her navigator John, played by Rhys Ifans. When you’re not the most interesting character in your own biopic, it starts me wondering, and while Bening is very good in the role, I think this is a good reason to consider leaving her off the dais.

4. I thought long and hard about who I wanted in third and who I wanted in fourth. When I watched Maestro, I thought Carey Mulligan was the best part of the movie and that she earned her nomination, but I hadn’t seen a lot from 2023 at that point. I like Mulligan and I think she has an Oscar or two in her future, but for this set of nominations in this year, she remains the best part of a not-very-memorable film that didn’t deserve most of the nominations it got. Being the best part of a great film is impressive. Being the best part of a forgettable one is far less so, and I might make the case that Sarah Silverman is actually more memorable in this one.

3. I don’t understand how we live in a world where Emma Stone has two Oscars and Saoirse Ronan has none, but that’s the world we live in. She’s the winner for Poor Things, and the only reason I put her in third instead of fourth is that at least her performance is memorable. I also am fully on board with the idea that Stone put herself out there for this role, and she was ultimately rewarded for it. But did she deserve to be? I think I’m in the minority on this, but I stand by it. Stone is memorable in this film, but it’s an ugly film and an ugly role, and I wouldn’t have nominated her, let alone given her a statue.

2. I’m not an actor, but I think one of the hardest things to do is to look passive and unemotional while demonstrating that there is a lot going on beneath the surface. This is the strength of Lily Gladstone’s performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, the first of the nominations that I support. In fact, the one thing that might keep her from winning in my opinion is the slight possibility that this is category fraud. Is Lily Gladstone actually more of a supporting role in this film? That’s a legitimate question—she’s on screen for nearly an hour, but this is a film that runs about 3 ½ hours. If she’s truly in a leading role, she should be here. If not, then only one actual nomination is one I would support.

1. Limited to the nominations, Sandra Hüller and her work in Anatomy of a Fall is the clear winner. Her goal in this film is extremely difficult—she has to be someone credibly accused of a crime, someone who needs to demonstrate her innocence clearly to the point where it’s at least plausible that she would not be convicted, and she has to be someone that the audience genuinely dislikes. Hüller does this incredibly well. While we may want justice done, we also don’t want her to win, even though she is the focus of everything happening on screen. It’s magnificent work, and it should have been rewarded.

My Choice

Margot Robbie, Barbie. You knew this was coming, and you know it’s the right choice, and in fact the only choice.

Final Analysis