Both Sidney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried are coming in hot in this year’s Oscar race. They not only star together in the suspenseful thriller, The Handmaid, but each of them is showcased in different films that might push them into the race. Sweeney will star in Americana, releasing in August.
Seyfried will star in Ann Lee, where she does a Manchester accent from the 1770s:
I have no idea whether any of these will deliver Oscar-worthy performances but considering how big the Housemaid will be, I imagine that both will be “in the conversation.”
Sweeney is also transformed yet again in the Untitled Christy Martin biography where she plays a boxer.
No one knows if that will release late in 2025 or early in 2026, however.
The big one everyone is waiting for is Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Like The Housemaid, it offers a meaty, dramatic performance for Roberts, something we haven’t seen her take on in a while, if ever. She will play a teacher involved in a “cancel culture” incident at a university involving a case in the present and a case in the past.
And then there’s Cynthia Erivo for Wicked for Good, a film that was an enormous hit last year and comes to a conclusion this year. Will it be time to give Erivo the Oscar for both performances? Will her work be good enough? It might be. That’s my bet at the moment but we’ll see how it goes.
No Black actress has won since Halle Berry in 2001, an embarrassing stat for an industry that genuflects its goodness 24/7. It seems a little hypocritical, no? The same will go for Ryan Coogler, who could become the first Black director to win. If he does win, it will be well deserved and not “just because” he’s Black, and he will make the voting Academy look good.
Erivo’s work is also Oscar-worthy, at least in Part One. But I’m told Part Two is more about Galinda so I don’t know if it will be enough for a win.
Just for fun I went to look at Mark Johnson’s predictions on the Awards Expert App for Best Actress. He has:
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
Jennifer Lawrence, Die My Love
Julia Roberts, After the Hunt
Cynthia Erivo, Wicked for Good
I don’t quite see it that way but we have a long way to go yet. I have always seen Best Actress to be decided by three key factors:
Likability of Actress
Likability of Role
Likability of Movie
Usually, a winner will have all three. When a winner is in a movie people don’t like, like The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Jessica Chastain will win on how beloved she is, how overdue she was, and maybe there is another element at play, the level of difficulty. I have not found that to be a big influencer in the Best Actress race but maybe it is now because there is such an abundance of roles for women now. The industry has rebuilt itself for that reason.
There are so many other possible choices for this year, and they are:
Emma Stone in Bugonia
Olivia Colman in The War of the Roses
Rebecca Ferguson in the Kathryn Bigelow Netflix movie
June Squibb in Eleanor the Great
Jessica Lange in Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Luise Heyer in Sound of Falling
Margot Robbie, Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Emma Mackey, Ella McCay
Tessa Thompson, Hedda
Right now, on Awards Expert, they’re very high on Sentimental Value because they just came out of the Cannes Film Fest, and it’s what they have to work with. But this will change as the film festivals dump new contenders into the race. All eyes will be on Julia Roberts, however, to see whether or not After the Hunt is what everyone thought it would be.
But remember, the likability of the film matters too. Roberts won for Erin Brockovich all those years ago because she nailed all three. Nobody was more liked than she was back then. They loved the role. They loved the movie. If the movie is hit with controversy or if people don’t like it, then that makes it harder to win in a competitive year. But by the same token, it’s hard to win if people don’t know you, as with Renate Reinsve.
Jennifer Lawrence has an uphill climb for a win because it would be her second Oscar, and the movie itself is not that well-liked, at least now. It’s a rough sit, as they say. That is why I’m so bullish on Erivo. She has the likability of a star, a likability of a role, and potentially, a likability of a movie.
But I know nothing and neither does anyone else. It is very early yet.
Here are my predictions for this week, from the Awards Expert APP.
One thing I know for sure is that Best Actress will be among the most competitive races, right up there with Best Picture. But it’s too early to know how any of it will go. These are my suspicions. I’ll dig into some deeper themes next time.
