OVP: Best Actress (2022)
The Nominees Were...
Ana de Armas, Blonde
Cate Blanchett, Tar
Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie
Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans
Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once
My Thoughts: We talked earlier this week about the online nature of the Best Supporting Actress race, and the way that the contest felt like it was being parceled through in a bizarre way (links to all past contests at the bottom of this article). This goes doubly for the Best Actress race. Conversations about race (when two Black women who had done well in precursors failed to show up), category fraud (with many people viscerally, confusingly angry about Michelle Williams submitting here, rather than in Supporting Actress where she surely would've won), and the bootstraps campaign by Andrea Riseborough that won her a nomination thanks in large part to her friends (such as Frances Fisher) running an online campaign that won her a surprise nomination (which some wanted rescinded) dominated the race, making this one of the uglier contests ever for Best Actress. I'll talk about the controversies in a second, but a friendly reminder-we judge based solely on the performances at-hand with these write-ups, and not based on any personal feelings (good or bad) about the performers or how they got their nominations.
We'll start with Riseborough, an actress who broke through after years of strong supporting work. I talked about her nomination here if you want my full thoughts (it's a good, if in-depth, article, so I suggest you check it out if you haven't already), but in short-I think what she did was inventive, and a loophole she found in the Academy bylaws, and I believe people online treated her like garbage for no reason (it's not her fault that she got this nomination). The nomination itself was cool, and so unexpected in an Oscar race that rarely can pull off something genuinely surprising. Her performance, I was in the middle on. To Leslie is not a great movie, using a lot of cliches about a poor woman who struggles with poverty & addiction, and while Riseborough is better than the movie, she's still hampered with a tale that you can see over-and-over again. When you're playing a cliche, even if you're playing it well, you're not going to have much invention.
We'll get the other big controversy of the nominated five out of the way with Michelle Williams. I feel people totally overreacted here, and their anger was more so that they couldn't predict Williams as a lock (there is this weird aversion to competitive races for Oscars Twitter that I find dumb since the single best thing about awards shows are the upsets). I think Williams is marvelous in The Fabelmans, giving us a complicated look at a woman who loves her kids...but realizes that she loves her life more, and she wants to find a way to live it even if it means that she will disappoint the idyllic nature of her children's upbringing. That great monologue at the end, saying "you don't owe anyone your life" is beautifully-written & acted, and to me it kind of spells out that Williams is a very plausible lead, and I am proud of her both for saying that out loud (we need someone to defend against category fraud) & then for actually getting the (deserved) nomination. She'll show up in my nominations as well next week, and it'll be in lead.
Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win Best Actress earlier this year (only the second woman of color), and she did so in a film that in many ways is a nod to her long career in action films (it's rare an actress works in genre all the time and gets honored in said genre...after all Julia Roberts didn't get her statue for rom-coms & Jamie Lee Curtis's statue isn't for horror). Yeoh is excellent here. Like all of the actors in the film, I think she has to land too many endings for the film, but she fares the best, making sure her Evelyn is a journey, giving us prickly sides to the character while also showing the love she has for her family, even if it's not something she's comfortable showing in an unencumbered way. It's a great performance, and a worthy one for Oscar.
Her chief competition was Cate Blanchett, whose work in Tar is extraordinary. This is the sort of towering achievement that defines a career, like Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood or Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice. Every second, Blanchett is giving us a different lens into her titular Lydia, like a diamond you're exploring the angles, but the further you look at it, her Lydia isn't a gem at all but something common like glass, built on mirages and pretensions and abuses-of-power. The downfall in this movie is remarkable because Blanchett gives Lydia such indiscernible confidence that you almost believe she's a genius about to meet her maker...when in reality she's the embodiment of the Peter Principle, a pseudo-intellectual elevated to the point where she's beyond reproach at that level.
Ana de Armas is the second actress to be nominated for playing Marilyn Monroe (an actress, it's worth noting, Oscar never noticed in her own life). Blonde, coming from a director I usually drool over (I loved The Assassination of Jesse James and Killing Them Softly) is basically a student film, and is too convoluted to make any narrative sense. The phrase "she's better than the film" is usually uttered by critics praising de Armas here, but...is she? She gets a rough script, but her Marilyn isn't grounded. There are moments that she's excellent (thinking of the scene where she's openly weeping, and then smiles into a cartoon that basically becomes the real-life Monroe, it's eerily perfect), but those are littered with bad touches & inconsistencies (remember her being confused by an egg?). Is her Marilyn an idiot or just incapable of stopping the act? There's no hint in her work.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes separate their nominations between Drama and Musical/Comedy, so we have ten women nominated for these awards. For Drama we've got Blanchett winning against de Armas, Williams, Viola Davis (The Woman King), & Olivia Colman (Empire of Light) while Musical/Comedy gave their win to Yeoh atop Lesley Manville (Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris), Margot Robbie (Babylon), Anya Taylor-Joy (The Menu), & Emma Thompson (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande). SAG gave their statue to Yeoh, here beating Blanchett, Davis, de Armas, & Danielle Deadwyler (Till), while BAFTA wanted Blanchett, beating Davis, Deadwyler, de Armas, Thompson, & Yeoh. In sixth place...your guess is as good as mine. There's a lot of precursor love for Davis & Deadwyler, and Deadwyler was the performer I guessed wrong, so it's probably her (I think Davis was one of those "early season love due to her celebrity, can't sustain long enough to get to Oscar" contenders), though given both were weak enough to lose to Riseborough, I wouldn't be stunned if it was Robbie, Manville, or even someone like Jennifer Lawrence (Causeway) given this race was so dominated by Blanchett/Yeoh, as passion projects were able to take one of the remaining slots.
Actors I Would Have Nominated: Few actresses have had a rougher go with their career than Tang Wei, blackballed from acting for years for her (magnificent) work in the NC-17 rated Lust, Caution, she has been steadily building to another performance worthy of that film, and this year she got it as the femme fatale in Decision to Leave.
Oscar’s Choice: Going into the night, the race between Yeoh & Blanchett felt close, but by the time the envelope was open and we were in the middle of our first real sweep in over a decade, it was clear Yeoh had won that statue weeks earlier.
My Choice: As I said above, these awards are given in a vacuum, I don't think about if someone already has some statues or not, because I want the experiment to be fair. With that in mind, there's no doubt to me that Blanchett gave the best performance here, possibly the best performance of her career. Yeoh is very good, and a worthy silver, but Blanchett's the best nominated performance in any category in 2022. Behind them we have Williams, Riseborough, & de Armas, in that order.
Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours! Do you want to stay with the Academy's admiration of Yeoh or do you want to join me in bowing down to Cate Blanchett? How do you feel about the controversies involving Williams & Riseborough now that we're out of the heat of the actual Oscar race? And with a lot of plausible options-whom do you think was in sixth place? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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