Culture Slut: What Does a Best Actress Oscar Nominee Need to Win?
Words: Misha MN
Make it stand out
It’s that time again, truly the pinnacle of the gay television schedule, the Academy Awards have announced their nominations and the rumour mills have started about who was snubbed, who will win, and who doesn’t deserve to be there. One prize in particular looms large, the ultimate accolade for queer audiences, Best Actress in a Leading Role, the queen of all queens is preparing to make her speech, she approaches, she is nigh!
What with the abundance of the gays’ most beloved girlies at the Grammys this year, you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe the Oscars and the Best Actress race are a bit passe, an old stereotype that has lost it’s place in the modern age, but I disagree. To start with, Grammy awards are confusing, there’s a million and one categories and they all crossover. I know that Doechii, Beyonce, Chappell, Sabrina and Charli XCX all won different awards (and none for Taylor Swift), but I absolutely couldn’t tell you what for or how many they picked up. Even a cursory glance at the Wiki reveals more subsections than you could shake a stick at, and even more questionable winners - Why did Dave Chappelle win a Grammy? Wait, why does he have SIX! At what point does it matter who got best pop vocal over song of the year? How many album of the year awards are there? Didn’t Harry Styles beat Beyonce’s Renaissance a while ago? That seems crazy.
The Oscars are easy. Oscars are stable. Best Lead Actress and Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Actor, Best Director, Best Picture, and then all the rest if you are a professional cinephile (or aged homosexual). Best Lead Actress, I would argue, is the most important award of the night, with second being maybe Best Picture. Supporting Actress is more important to the gays than Best Lead Actor.
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Actresses are the brightest stars in Hollywood, Cinema was created so there could be vehicles for actresses. As Quentin Crisp once said, the words “film star” means a woman. Right from the days of the silent screen, women have dominated the audience’s imagination. The first film star, the first actor to be credited on screen was the toast of the 1910s, Florence Lawrence, and we’ve never looked back since.
Great actresses come in many different shapes and sizes. The experience they give to an audience can vary wildly, from shocking emotional explorations to comforting deep-hearted romance, to turbulent tragedy, to a minutely studied transformation, to an expression of that actress's own star persona caught in a perfectly written role. A great actress can be someone who completely disappears on screen, transforming entirely into a new character very unlike her own day to day life. A great actress can also be someone who is so magnetic and entirely herself that everything she does becomes noteworthy, how even the way she slinks across the screen in a silk dress and smokes a cigarette can become cinema itself. The difference between Julia Roberts’ Erin Brockovich, Charlize Theron’s Aileen Wournos in Monster, and Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois is chasmic, but they all share a Best Actress award.
Looking at Oscars history is like looking back into a wealth of emotional experience. A great performance by an actress is, at its very core, a purely personal ordeal, and there is very little anyone can do to quantify that, other than make a note of the other people that also found it moving. This is why lists of awards and nominations become so important to Hollywood scholars, it shows quantifiable evidence as to the greatness of a piece of art. Watching Bette Davis as Margo Channing down martinis with vindictive pleasure, about to cause a scene because her lover is paying attention to a younger woman, or seeing Julianne Moore’s face crumple as she turns away from her son in The Hours (2002) as she heads to the hotel room where she plans to kill herself, it all means something important to you as a viewer, and then seeing it listed amongst the nominations confirms that it meant something important to other people too. This used to be one of the functions of a film critic, someone able to give voice to the feelings that a great performance inspires inside you, but instead now we all have Letterboxd accounts to write pithy little comments in.
Awards season gives cinephiles an opportunity to become competitive. Who can make the correct Oscar predictions? If Judi Dench gets the BAFTA, how likely is it that she’ll get the Oscar too? Of course she got a Golden Globe, anyone can get a Golden Globe… Film critics and journalists turn into pundits, reeling out lists and figures and statistics with enough enthusiasm to put any sports broadcaster to shame. This is the Superbowl for gays. This is when your excessive knowledge of great actresses earns you respect, when people look to you to reinforce for them what a good performance something was, when you can feel superior and say something condescending like “Well, of course she was good, but the academy will never go for something like that…”
“The Best Actress category is in itself a compendium of interesting and diverse women’s stories, far more interesting and diverse than the kinds of roles that actually win Best Actress.”
The history of the Best Actress race is important too. Scandals are everything to a pop audience, snubs, robberies, manipulators, it all creates the most delicious stories. Who can forget the famous 1962 ceremony where Joan Crawford, angry that she hadn’t been nominated for Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962) whilst her co-star Bette Davis had been, managed to insert herself into the narrative anyway, accepting the award on behalf of Anne Bancroft, smiling from the podium out into the dark and Ms Davis’s slack jawed face? Or the infamous tie of 1968 between Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand, possibly brought about because of Clarke Gable’s more open Academy voting policy, and inclusion of actresses like Streisand herself who hadn’t even met the Academy’s membership requirements, and this nomination being for her first ever film?
Or even the most hotly contested race in history, 1951, which saw the indomitable Bette Davis go up against not only Anne Baxter, her own co-star in the seminal All About Eve (1950), but the transcendent camp monster Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard (1950), only for all of them to lose against dark horse Judy Holliday in a broad comedy? These upsets still ring out across the decades, sitting side by side with our own modern dramatic moments: Glenn Close’s face in her gold dress as Olivia Colman’s name is announced instead of hers, Hilary Swank going head to head with Annette Benning in 1999 and 2004, beating her both times; the hotly debated contest between Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett in 2022.
The glitz and the glamour and the punditry can be intoxicating, but it can never quite hide the sinister goings on behind the scenes too, especially when it comes to non-white actresses. Halle Berry remains the only Black Best Actress winner, from 2002, with Michelle Yeoh the only other woman of colour since then.
#OscarSoWhite was a campaign in the 10s intended to highlight the racial biases of the Academy, and its constant snubbing of films by and about people of colour, something that stretches back to its very inception. Gaboury Sidibe lost for Precious (2009), but even during her Oscar campaign, TV hosts were questioning whether or not she’d ever work again after this film. Halle Berry was never given the prestige opportunities usually available to a white actress after she wins an award. Viola Davis is overlooked again and again. Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Angela Bassett, Dorothy Dandridge, all relegated to just footnotes in other people’s winning stories. The first Black woman to ever win an acting Oscar was Hattie McDaniel for Gone With The Wind in 1939, and she had to sit separately from her castmates at the ceremony because the venue was segregated. Even in the last twenty years, we see time and again women of colour making fiery and explosive debuts, only to disappear because Hollywood has no idea what to do with them, women like Catalina Sandino Moreno, nominated in 2004, and Yalitza Aparicio, nominated in 2018. Miyoshi Umeki, who won Best Supporting Actress for Sayonara in 1957 reportedly hid her award afterwards, her son found it many years later stashed away in her attic with her name scratched out. Institutional acknowledgement is only as valuable as the institution itself.
The Best Actress category is in itself a compendium of interesting and diverse women’s stories, far more interesting and diverse than the kinds of roles that actually win Best Actress. The Academy is still finding its way when showing real investment in female narratives, this much is apparent from how few times a film that gets a Best Actress nomination is also up for Best Picture. It tells us how a woman can give a great performance, but a film that focuses on her is rarely worthy of bigger awards.
We still believe that the notoriously conservative Academy can change, that it is better than ever. Michelle Yeoh won with an independent film that swept almost every major category, Emma Stone’s turn in the offbeat Poor Things reframes female coming-of-age stories, 2025 sees a truly diverse lineup with Black, latina and trans women all represented, an impressive feat with the right wing withdrawal of diversity initiatives riding high in Trump’s latest presidency.
Things are looking up but I can’t help but keep thinking about 2002 and Halle Berry. Denzel Washington won for Best Actor. Sidney Poitier was given an honorary award. Whoopi Goldberg hosted. Black representation was at its highest, but was this a movement, or just a moment? During her emotional speech, Halle listed off famous Black actresses who had never received their flowers, including the unnamed performers who were never let in the clubhouse, and declared that after tonight, the door has finally been opened. Whilst that may have felt true, it seems that the Academy has been reluctant to let anybody else through.
