Kristen Stewart & the Globes

One of the biggest questions headed into the Oscar nominations, which will be announced in ten days, is around the Best Actress field.  For quite a while headed into the season, five names had shown up as probable contenders: Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos), Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter), Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), Lady Gaga (House of Gucci), & Kristen Stewart (Spencer).  These five were the contenders at the Golden Globes for Best Actress in a Drama, in fact.  But since that announcement, they've gone on a bit of a wild ride.  While Kidman & Colman feel like sure things (I suspect one of them is probably winning), Kristen Stewart, a figure whom many pundits assumed might win the trophy, now feels like a "nomination is its own reward" contender.  She missed out at the SAG Awards in favor of Jennifer Hudson (Respect), and didn't even show up on the BAFTA longlist, despite her film being about British royalty (usually a gimme nomination for a prestige picture at the BAFTA Awards).  Spencer has failed at virtually every one of the guild awards, indicating that Stewart, at best, is likely going to be the film's only nomination if it happens, but increasingly names like Hudson or Penelope Cruz (Parallel Mothers) seem to becoming more en vogue.

But Stewart's nomination at the Globes combined with one other factor makes me stubbornly keep her in my Top 5 predictions (coming out in the next week) despite a definite yen to want to cite Hudson or Cruz (both with more heat and former Oscar winners themselves).  That other factor is the fact that Kristen Stewart has never been nominated for an Oscar.  While AMPAS will oftentimes skip one of the Golden Globes nominees for Best Actress in a Drama (Best Actress is generally easier to get in for a Musical or Comedy than Best Actor, and of course there's more than five dramatic performances in a given year so Oscar can go off of the HFPA menu all-together), they're weirdly averse to letting the chance to honor a Globe-nominated actress in this category not end up with "Oscar nominee" in front of her name before the season ends.

In the past forty years, sixty times have actors have been nominated for a Globe and not gone on to be nominated for an Oscar that same year (I say it that way to count out both figures like Debra Winger, Nicole Kidman, & Kate Winslet, who got nominations for different films, and Bjork, who got a nomination in a different category, neither of which are an option for Stewart this year)-so about 70% of the Globe nominees ended up with an Oscar nomination, a very high percentage considering that's on par with just one miss a year.  This already basically puts Stewart's odds at about 4-in-5 that she'll get a nomination.  But if you further examine those sixty, 43 of them were former Oscar nominees or winners-less than a third of the time did it happen that Oscar ignored an actress they'd never cited before, and only one time in the past decade (Jennifer Aniston in Cake) did this happen.  When it comes to this category and first-timers, Oscar has a bad case of FOMO.

If you look at the kinds of performances that missed with Oscar, there's not a lot of consistency other than most of these films were not a big deal with the Academy (which, admittedly, Spencer seems to be headed that way).  Only four of their movies (Rachel Chagall in Gaby: A True Story, Courtney Love in The People vs. Larry Flynt, Evan Rachel Wood in Thirteen, & Maria Bello in A History of Violence) were nominated for other acting trophies, and none of their movies were cited for Best Picture.  A few dominated the tech awards (Emily Blunt in The Young Victoria & Zhang Ziyi in Memoirs of a Geisha), but by-and-large most of these movies were going at it alone, which is probably where Spencer is most vulnerable, though recent nominees like Andra Day & Vanessa Kirby prove you can make the AMPAS list even if you're the only part of your film in contention.

This is all to say that you shouldn't count out Kristen Stewart just yet, even if she's clearly vulnerable, as statistically someone like Gaga or Chastain feel more vulnerable as former nominees.  It's worth noting that if Kristen Stewart does miss with Oscar, it won't necessarily preclude her from ever becoming an Oscar nominee.  Of the seventeen performances that missed in the last forty years after a Globe nod, seven of them were given by people who would eventually be Oscar nominees, and a few of the women that remain in the "missed with Oscar" category are performers like Aniston, Wood, & Blunt, who still work in prestige film/television projects regularly, and could still get their Oscar moment.  So Stewart fans shouldn't give up yet, not until February 8th, and certainly not after-history is definitely on her side.