The Film Experience

The Oscar Volleys continue. Today, LYNN LEE and NICK TAYLOR discuss the surprisingly stable Oscar race for Best Actress.

Jessie Buckley in HAMNET | © Focus Features

LYNN: At the risk of stating the obvious, Nick, Best Actress has been the most predictable stable of the four acting races by far. Is there a world in which Jessie Buckley doesn’t take this? And are we basically fine with that?

NICK: I mean, where else is there to start? Buckley’s the surest winner of the acting categories, and among a handful of artists (PTA, Ludwig Göransson) who have to know they’re winning the Oscar. I’m not complaining. Buckley’s been delivering ambitious, awards-worthy turns since she debuted with Beast in 2017, and her turn as Agnes is such an ideal use of her screen persona. The practical intelligence, the precise-yet-walloping emotions, the way her characters are so irreducibly themselves that their odd edges and peculiar beliefs doom them to black sheep status even when things are looking their way. She’s incredible, and just because the grieving mother is an easy type for awards groups to notice shouldn’t diminish how powerful her work is in Hamnet...

All that said, and my vote is still easily Rose Byrne’s powerhouse performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. What about you, Lynn? Is Buckley your pick of this year’s lineup, and do you feel okay with her winning Best Actress?

LYNN: Those are two separate questions, right? :) To answer the second one first, I am more than ok with a Buckley win. Her work in Hamnet is exemplary, highlighting without overplaying the touch of wildness that so entrances Will before it curdles and nearly extinguishes itself in the raw despair of losing their child. She’s perhaps most moving in the last scene, where that spark starts to flicker back to life as she finally sees what her husband’s done to sublimate and memorialize his grief.

Rose Byrne in IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU | © A24

Byrne is also fantastic and the only one who has even a whisper of a chance of unseating Buckley. If I Had Legs is, by design, something of an endurance test, but Byrne keeps you invested by drawing you into the chaotic helplessness of a woman loaded with more burdens and demands than any civilized human should be expected to bear. Even when she makes bad decisions, you can’t help cheering her on to destroy that myth of Women Who Can Have It All, one bottle of cheap rosé at a time.

But as to who’s my pick of the five...the answer might surprise you, as it certainly surprised myself! I should preface by saying that I found watching Bugonia an extremely grueling and unpleasant experience (talk about endurance tests!), and the coda felt like (literal) overkill. And yet – while I still don’t like the film, it’s stuck with me, and so has Emma Stone’s performance. The latter is hard to talk about without major spoilerage, so suffice to say the more I think about it, the more impressed I am with what she does with a character who only becomes more elusive as she reveals more layers.

There’s something so inhuman about her initial affect, you think she really could be an alien – or maybe just an asshole CEO because what’s the diff, right? – until, under duress, she shows glimmers of what looks like real fear and pain. Or is it? She never really loses control and keeps the viewer guessing until the very end, and unlike all the other nominated performances, she makes no appeal to our empathy outside of the objective horrors of her predicament. Yet there’s something mesmerizing about her diamantine hardness that stands out. I’m not rooting for her to win (two Oscars before the age of 40 is quite enough!), but she’s my personal favorite of this bunch.

Emma Stone in BUGONIA | © Focus Features

NICK: Your personal favorite in the category is my least favorite, yet I more or less completely agree with your assessment of what Stone achieves. I enjoy how she’s able to find so many grace notes of comedy and pain that exist almost independently of whether or not she’s human. Negotiating with her kidnappers using corporate vernacular is funny! There’s even some unexpected sympathy in the flashbacks with Alicia Silverstone, cracking the edifice of a cold business bazillionaire to have a human-level connection with someone who can barely share the frame with her.

She keeps you guessing about her alienness, but she’s not aided by Bugonia’s own wavering interests in answering that question and making its revelation thematically coherent, and I think Lanthimos either needed to be slightly less stylized in his direction or push her and Plemons into a more inhumane register. Stone’s performance here is better than any of her post-Favourite collaborations with Lanthimos, but at this point I’m kinda desperate for her to work with someone else. Go deep into a Julio Torres playhouse, or hit up a humanist director like Mike Mills who’ll ask you to play a normal person again! I miss the casually layered, utterly normal women she showed us in Easy A and Battle of the Sexes, let alone the loony perfection she and Torres created in The Actress and Wells for Boys.

You said a lot of what makes Byrne’s performance so special. I’ll very quickly add that I think Byrne’s ability to make Linda’s implosive behavior so empathic is an insanely difficult feat. It’d be so easy to make Linda into a one-dimensional creation, yet she and Bronstein are heroically committed to presenting recognizable human experiences within a destabilizing tone. Her moments of quiet tranquility are well-earned, her slide into helpless desperation inevitable and legible at every step. I’m amazed Byrne is able to thrive inside Bronstein’s claustrophic frame while still connecting fully to her unseen daughter and reacting to the charisma of her scene partners. To steal a very vivid description from my friend Robert, her eyes are so expressive they feel like extra mouths. Byrne’s work is tremendous, and I’m sad If I Had Legs I’d Kick You never had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting nominated anywhere else.

Renate Reinsve in SENTIMENTAL VALUE | © Neon

We have only two women left in this category, one a lone nominee like Byrne and the other the headliner of a Best Picture nominee. Neither Kate Hudson or Renate Reinsve have a real shot at the Oscar, but I’m very happy to see both of them recognized. How do you feel about their performances?

LYNN: First, I *love* and am totally stealing the line about Byrne’s eyes/mouths. Also, I share your desire to see Stone take a break from Lanthimos, though I guess she more or less did with Eddington? Not exactly the kind of “normal” role you’re craving, of course (I did not see it).

Reinsve is excellent in Sentimental Value, but I tend to think of her performance as one of a quartet with Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. and Elle Fanning, and not just because they all got well-deserved nominations. They are truly a perfect ensemble, playing beautifully off each other, though I do view Reinsve and Skarsgard as the leads given that their characters’ relationship is basically the central axis of the movie. And Reinsve does a great job capturing the talented hot mess that is Nora, who both has and hasn’t worked through her psychological issues through her profession. Hers is emotionally the most overtly rangey of SV’s four major characters, which she uses to full advantage, from her stage freakouts to her painful brittleness with her dad to her moments of true, open vulnerability with her sister. Yet – dare I say it? – I feel like the other three all slightly outshone her.

Kate Hudson in SONG SUNG BLUE | © Focus Features

As for Hudson, I rate her a bit lower than the other nominees. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very good – and very charming – in Song Sung Blue. She hits all her marks. And she can sing! But there’s no moment in the movie where she really surprises, notwithstanding the wild swings of her character’s arc (most of which appear to have actually happened to her real-life counterpart, proving truth really is stranger than fiction). And here again, I feel like she’s somewhat upstaged by her co-star, though some of that is due to how their characters are written. All in all, while I don’t begrudge her the nomination, I can think of at least a couple other performances I’d rather have seen in her place. What about you?

NICK: I really like Kate Hudson, though she’d probably also end up on the lower scale of this year’s nominees for me. I don’t quite get why she’s not in slightly more of the movie. We never really get a scene of Claire independent of her beau, and even then the moments rooted in her POV feel curtailed to make sure Mike’s not gone too long. I’d have loved to spend more time with her after the accident, especially since the missing and scenes detailing her addiction and recovery mean Hudson is only shown at major points in Claire’s journey rather than connecting dots or building bridges between scenes.

Script problems aside, and as someone who’s never been dazzled by Hudson, I thought she was just luminous here. Her moment-to-moment inflections when singing are so real and lively. That electricity carries over to her non-singing scenes, and the loss of that light is as palpable as her joy and determination. Her chemistry with Jackman, the actors playing her family, and the other professional impersonators is believable even when the wigs aren’t. Hudson never plays down to the working class milieu or Claire’s ambitions. She and Jackman make Song Sung Blue into something heartfelt even when it should be falling apart.

Sentimental Value being a much better movie than Song Sung Blue, and Joachim Trier being a more dexterous writer, means Reinsve’s Nora is able to fade from the foreground completely without the movie seeming to lose anything. She’s so savvy at embodying her character’s depression letting it manifest as in various shades of panic, indignation, and exhaustion in non-cliched ways. Her bonds with her sister and her dad are so rich, and the actors communicate as much through body language as they do dialogue. A late revelation about Nora’s mental health works because Reinsve doesn’t telegraph it too hard. It’s just another fact of who she is, not a “key” to unlocking her whole deal. I liked her in Sentimental Value far more than her star-making turn in The Worst Person in the World, and her performance has grown on me a good deal since I first saw it.

Chase Infiniti in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER | © Warner Bros.

So, all in all, a very strong category. I do wish Chase Infiniti had gotten nominated for her vividly internal performance in One Battle After Another, and that Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love or Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee had made any real headway for their ferocious star turns. I have many more names to endorse, but before I start rambling out twenty names, I’d love to hear your favorites from this year.

LYNN: Well, you just named the two performances I had in mind! I, too, was super impressed by Chase Infiniti in One Battle – I can’t believe this was her movie acting debut. It’s more than just her natural screen charisma. Her Willa radiates not just poise but a centeredness that makes a really effective contrast with the panicky, spiraling mess that is her father. At the same time, her eyes speak volumes, wordlessly conveying her deep affection for said mess of a father, the repulsion she feels for the alternate father who intrudes so violently into their life, and her questioning sadness as she finds out more about the mother she never knew. Even as she turns into something of an action hero in the last act, Infiniti never lets you lose sight of the terrified but fundamentally grounded not-girl-not-yet-a-woman whose core of integrity defies her sordid biological legacy. You know this kid will be all right.

But if I could swap Hudson out for anyone else, it would be Seyfried for Testament of Ann Lee. She goes hard in that role, and – sort of like Stone, though obviously in a very different register – she’s not afraid to be alienating. The film does build up empathy for Ann early on by showing her terrible experiences with marriage, childbirth, and loss of her children, and makes a point of underscoring her lifelong search for religious transcendence. But as she becomes a leader, rather than humanizing or tempering her unearthly visions, her rigid credo of celibacy, or her absolute conviction that she is literally the second coming of Christ, Seyfried embraces and, if anything, plays up their utter strangeness. Interestingly for a movie about a religious figure, her performance is far more externalized than internalized; there is simply no division between her inner and outer self. While some may find that limiting or off-putting, I think it’s fascinating.

Amanda Seyfried in THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE | © Searchlight Pictures

Now I’m curious about some of your other names! I personally found 2025 much stronger for lead actor performances than lead actress, though there were of course many movies I missed, including Die My Love. (I guess I could only see so many movies about stressed-out-of-their-mind mothers this year!) Who else stood out to you?

NICK: I love everything you said about Infiniti and Seyfried. The Testament of Ann Lee was such a potent experience yet also one I’ve had a hard time putting into words, so hearing anyone describe it as beautifully as you just did is as much of a treat as the film itself.

I would very much encourage you to see Die My Love, which would program beautifully with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as highly stylized visions of maternal depression. Jennifer Lawrence is fantastic, giving maybe my favorite performance of hers. It’s great casting for her rough-edged acting style and physical intensity, demanding as much of her body as mother! did but in service of a character, rather than a cipher. Wu Ke-Xi in Blue Sun Palace is another favorite, evolving from an interesting face on the sidelines to a carefully gauged portrait of grief in the face of unimaginable loss.

Sally Hawkins weaponizes her sweetness in Bring Her Back to very disturbing effect, while Zhao Tao imbues the ethnographic study of Caught by the Tides with real feeling. If you want something that doesn’t sound as depressing, check out Andrea Bræn Hovig in Love and Ella Øverbye in Dreams, giving relaxed, full-bodied performances of, respectively, a 40-something woman deciding to play the field and a college student re-litigating her first love. Or try Liz Larsen’s unflashy comic and dramatic ingenuity in The Baltimorons.

Still, my absolute favorite leading performance this year is Kathleen Chalfant in Familiar Touch. As an octogenarian woman moved into a nursing home due to her cognitive decline, Chalfant has to show how this intelligent woman copes with her new living situation while slipping further away from herself. In fact, by the time the movie starts she’s already started to switch between old personas, treating an orderly like a coworker and a family member like a possible lover. She’s never once fully accessible to the audience, yet her behaviors reveal so much about who this woman is (was?) and what she’s prioritizing. It’s so touching, and so smartly realized at literally every level. I love Chalfant and the film so much.

LYNN: Our TFE award nominations back you up on Chalfant and I do need to see Familiar Touch, even though I admit the subject is one I find difficult to confront as it’s one of my worst fears. Still, if I was able to make it through Away From Her, Still Alice, and Amour, I should be able to watch this.

One final thought, or more of a thought exercise: It struck me that this year all of the Best Actress nominees are roughly in the same age range (mid 30s to mid 40s). True, Byrne and Hudson are about a decade older than Buckley, the youngest, but they all theoretically could have played each other’s parts. Just for fun, which ones would you be the most interested to see swap roles? (Let’s set aside for the moment that none of these ladies other than Reinsve probably speak Norwegian, even though that’s obviously a key thematic element of Sentimental Value.)

NICK: Oh, I love this game! This is a wonderful suggestion. My first thought was Byrne in Sentimental Value, which seems like a great canvas for her to use her smarts and simmering neuroses. Emma Stone in Song Sung Blue sounds like exactly the opportunity to play a normal woman with charismatic detail we’ve been dreaming of, even with all the crazy shit Claire went through. Frankly, all of the nominees seem like they’d do interesting things in Bugonia, but maybe Reinsve is the one I’m most curious about? What about you?

LYNN: Like you, I think Byrne would be great as Nora; in fact, I could see her and Reinsve trading roles as they both have that nervy, tensile quality – what’s that line from If I Had Legs, “Mommy is stretchable?” – that keeps you watching to see how far they can stretch before they snap. And your giving Song Sung Blue to Stone made me reciprocally imagine Hudson in Bugonia. It seems like a total mismatch, yet there’s something intriguing about the idea of casting the nominee who exudes the most warmth as the coldest of these characters.

Otherwise, I think I’d really enjoy seeing Buckley in Song Sung Blue. As demonstrated in Wild Rose, girl has serious pipes and could definitely sink her teeth into the crazy of Claire Sardinia's life. I don’t know what it says, though, I find it almost impossible to imagine anyone other than Buckley as Agnes in Hamnet. Perhaps it’s a testament to how dominant her performance has been this season? It certainly underscores, for me, that she’s earned that Oscar.

Anyway, thanks for a fun discussion of a high-quality race!

NICK: It’s been a delight to talk to you about this category. Even with no suspense, there’s a lot to appreciate, and the company has been terrific!

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