by Nathaniel R
As you have undoubtedly heard by now, Michelle Williams has opted for a Lead Actress campaign for Steven Spielberg's memoir film The Fablemans. This shocked both the armchair and professional pundit community a good percentage of whom had already handed her the Best Supporting Actress statue a week ago. This despite it being a full six months until Oscar night (March 12th) with other movies yet to screen when everyone decided to call it.
Some people are angry because they feel the role is clearly supporting but most seem angry because they thought they had it all figured out already. But opinions vary (like they always do) about what constitutes a leading role versus a supporting one. Consider...
Glad to help! She's in lead because she's a lead, with more screen time than all but one Supporting Actress nominee in the last 20 years, more than half the ACTRESS nominees in the last 20 years, and more than she does in My Week with Marilyn. No one wants category fraud, right?
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 22, 2022
Here is where I must get personal and share with you the experience of this great divide. As someone who has observed the Oscar race my whole life and been writing about it for about twenty, i have felt a slow centrifugal drift from the center. I didn't want this to happen! And this is not, I repeat not, because I have lost love or interest in the Oscars. It is also not a loss of interest in the unique and specific art of awards campaigning whether that happens to be silly, sordid, or serious. It is merely that the nature of Punditry has moved further and further away from discussing art and more to just punditry for punditry's sake with art as a tiny possibly irrelevant afterthought, movies as dinner mints. I first noticed this a handful of years ago when people started asking me very early in the year who would win. The question used to be "who do you think will get nominated?" which I was always happy to answer. Those are very different questions with very different mindsets; One is about the conclusion and other about the journey.
It's such a game to people now that nobody even wants to see the movies, preferring to proclaim winners based on trailers (or even film stills). The "locked to win" discussions start earlier and earlier each year and it's really killing the conversation but for, arguably, who can shout the loudest or with the most authority about WHAT WILL BE six months from now. That's SIX MONTHS in which we could be talking about the movies and the performances themselves.
As some of you know there have been financial struggles at TFE HQ so I have not personally been able to hit the out of town festivals this year (NYFF is home base and screenings start Monday - yay!) While I have not yet seen The Fabelmans, my position would remain the same even if I had. Let's see all the movies first (some yet to screen and few in theaters even if they have screened at festivals). Then we can discuss the merits, acting and otherwise. Then we can get to the grand declarations about what will happen (according to our own oft-faulty crystal balls). Until then, by all means, have fun with predicting but why force any stories? Why all the f***ng before the foreplay? The uncertainty, the in-the-moment twists, the building emotional arcs, and the big triumphant payoffs (or losses) are where all the joy and the magic and the drama are, just as with the individual movie themselves.
In short, Stop trying to make Oscar night happen in September (or earlier). It's like reading the last page of a novel well before you've been introduced to all the characters or seen what the plot was about and which themes took hold. With that said, here are the updated predictions for Best Actress. Predictions... not certainties, not desires, not forced narratives. At this writing, September 23rd, I have not seen all the movies yet and neither has anyone else.