by Jason Adams
Today we wish a happy 38 to the actress I have come to consider (give or take a Carey Mulligan) my favorite working actress, Elisabeth Moss. At the start of quarantine I binge-watched Mad Men for the very first time (here's the Twitter thread if you missed it) which only cemented my love, which had been gaining momentum like a great big boulder rolling down a hill (there's a "gathering Moss" joke in there somewhere) over the past few years to become, now, this unstoppable force.
The top of the hill was definitely 2014-ish when the triumverate of Listen Up Phillip, The One I Love, and Queen of Earth came out swinging and knocked me out of my socks...
Soon after came Top of the Lake and her hilarious turns in The Square and The Seagull and Us. And astride all of that of course were all things Offred, which is where my pleasure turned to true obsession. By the time she went and gave last year's best (and most egregiously ignored) female performance in Her Smell I was basically stopping strangers on the street, holding up pictures of her, shaking and crying.
And now here we are and it's 2020 and she's given two of the year's best performances to date, with the gaslit Cecelia in The Invisible Man reboot and Shirley -- Miss Jackson if you're nasty -- in Josephine Decker's exquisite, mossy bio-pic Shirley. No idea what the size of her role will be in Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch (or if that is still coming out, even) but she'll no doubt be something special -- she literally always is.
So now I ask you fine knowledgable people -- will the Academy finally deign to notice her here in 2020, overdue and at last? Or should I go ahead and start my online petitions and/or letter-writing campaigns right now? I can't do the whole accosting strangers on the street thing during a pandemic sadly, so it'll have to be virtual this time. Somebody get me David Rubin on Zoom, stat!