Vote on Best Actress. (Plus 'How'd they get nominated?')

The Best Actress chart is fully updated for your viewing pleasure with details, stats, and trivia. Here's one curio trivia bit. We believe that this is only the second time in history when all five Best Actress nominees are from different countries! (Usually it's some combo of Americans, Brits, and Aussies). All that plus our semi-annual "How'd They Get Nominated?" breakdown. Before anyone takes offense at the guesstimate percentages (it's all in good fun) please note that these are NOT performance critiques. A truth: You can give the most brilliant performance of all time and still be nominated for other reasons entirely. Awards races, Oscar and otherwise, are meritocracies only in the utopian ideal sense; People are people (including, thus, all voting bodies be they fans, high brow critics, or Academy members) and their reasons for voting in any given way are multiple and varied and heavily influenced by all sorts of things. Plus, it's all subjective too!

Adrien Brody & Ana de Armas in "Blonde" (Netflix)

Let's start with Ana de Armas in Blonde for an example. How'd she get nominated?

67% Role. Awards bodies have always loved Marilyn portrayals which have led to Emmy, Oscar, and Tony nods for various actresses across multiple decades (though not wins curiously enough).
20% Performance. Even people who didn't love the movie admired her work in it.
6% Globe nomination / ceremony shout-outs revived interest in a crowded race.
5% Knives Out + No Time To Die = rapidly ascending stardom (Big stars have a built in advantage in popularity contests) 
2% Early traction! That September release struck while the iron was hot from Venice festival buzz. Blonde was widely seen (via Netflix) before all but one of the major competitors for the nomination arrived (Michelle Yeoh was the exception).

The other four breakdowns are on the Best Actress page where you can vote daily in the "Who SHOULD win?" poll. 

A Record Number of First Time Nominees at the Oscars!

By: Christopher James

Four cast members of Everything Everywhere All At Once received their first career Oscar nominations this year.

Every Oscar year brings both big snubs and wonderful new stats. In particular, this year stands out due to the overwhelming crop of first time Oscar nominees in acting. Out of the twenty acting nominees, sixteen of them are celebrating their first time nominees. This doesn’t point to a green crop of actors since many of them are veterans who have been long overlooked, such as Bill Nighy and Jamie Lee Curtis. In fact, the average age of the Best Actress lineup is 46, which would put it in the top ten oldest Best Actress lineups, based on The Film Experience’s work years ago. Having a healthy crop of new nominees is a sign of health for both the Academy and the film world - they aren’t defaulting to people they’ve rewarded before, but are searching elsewhere for new faces or people they’ve overlooked in the past.  So how rare is it to have this amount of first time nominees?

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Doc Corner: A to Z of the Longlist (Part 5)

By Glenn Dunks

History can unfold in a lot of different ways. So too, how filmmakers choose to uncover, reveal and tell it in films for audiences. This week’s selection of films through the alphabet of 2022 titles that were eligible for the 95^th Academy Awards (parts one to four available in the archives) show this off to great effect (even if the movies themselves don’t always succeed).

One uses comedy to explain how a man hoodwinked his way through one of the more baffling true crimes (if you can call it that) in modern history. Another takes a brief snippet of archival war footage to unravel a hidden queer love story at a time where such things weren't to be spoken about. Another is more traditional, detailing an incredible story from the annals of cinema history that could very easily have been ignored.

And at least in the first one—we get to see Alan Cumming lip syncing for his life.

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Review: "80 For Brady" is a winning comedy

by Matt St Clair

Good timing! 80 For Brady is opening the week before the Super Bowl but it's also opening in the thick of Oscar season, the Super Bowl for movie lovers.  Making it feel yet more timely is the fact that its main quartet consists entirely of actresses with Oscar pedigree. As unlikely as it is that this’ll make any dent next year at this time, 80 For Brady is still a winning comedy...

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Sundance review: Judy Reyes and Marin Ireland give the pregnancy horror 'birth/rebirth' its juice

by Jason Adams

Let me just stop you right here, at the start, and admit that I am going to be terribly biased in this review of writer-director Laura Moss’ horror film birth/rebirth. Why? Do I know the director? Have I played ping pong with the cinematographer? Did the boom mic operator donate a kidney to my mum? No no nothing like that – it’s just the entirely sane fact that I love love love the actress Judy Reyes with all of my being and seeing her be given a leading role in a movie is too much for me to bear, qualitatively speaking. 

Here at The Film Experience, within this safe space of actressexuals, I know I can admit this freely. But I just feel an upfront warning is due...

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