In this year’s crop of contenders, we’ve got three biopics, some sticky family dynamics, not a single nominee from a movie that’s in the running for Best Picture and one newbie, Kristen Stewart, joining four Oscar veterans who have 15 nominations and three wins among them. The most recent victor of the group, Olivia Colman, returns with an arresting performance in The Lost Daughter as a woman wrestling with the weight of being a parent, a predicament not unlike the one Penélope Cruz’s character grapples with in Parallel Mothers. Motherhood has long been a fertile subject for Oscar voters—as has the British royal family. And in Spencer, Stewart presents us with a Princess of Wales who is miserable about everything but her children. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman dissects Hollywood royalty as the legendary Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos, and Jessica Chastain digs into the human side of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye
From the caked-on mask of makeup to the gaudy, bejeweled clothing, Tammy Faye Bakker was a caricature of her own creation. That can be treacherous for an actor, but Chastain finds the humanity under the Betty Boop squeak and forces us to reconsider a woman so maligned. “Here’s this rebel in the church,” the actress said. “She took up so much space—her voice, her singing, her outfit, everything about her was large, and I think she was punished for that. So I want to celebrate her for it.”
Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
As Leda, an academic on holiday in Greece, Colman moves with a crisp restraint that belies deep inner turmoil, the roots of which we come to understand as she becomes increasingly fascinated with a vacationing family. She is particularly drawn to a young mother whose struggles stir up painful memories of her own maternal experience. In her review, TheWrap’s Yolanda Machado deemed Colman “absolutely fantastic: Even when Leda is sitting still, Colman’s body language, posture and facial expressions deliver worlds of emotion.”
Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers
Cruz’s seventh pairing with writer-director Pedro Almodóvar finds the Oscar-winning actress playing her sixth mother for him. But there was nothing familiar about her character, Janis, a photographer who, after giving birth to a baby girl, makes a painful discovery that she covers up. “Her moral dilemma was really interesting to play,” Cruz said. “She’s becoming an incredible liar in her own house, and to play somebody that had to become a great liar for her survival gave me crazy adrenaline. But I enjoyed every second of it.”
Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos
Hollywood lives to celebrate its own, and Kidman, playing one of the most beloved performers of all time, offers Oscar voters plenty to moon over. In Aaron Sorkin’s film about one very bad week in 1952 for Lucille Ball, Kidman incarnates the shrewd, raspy-voiced businesswoman who worked her tail off to “kill” on 36 episodes of comedy a year and the wide-eyed I Love Lucy housewife whose legendary high jinks brought in 60 million viewers a week. It was a daunting task, even if writer-director Sorkin didn’t want impersonations. In the end, Kidman simply looked to the script and found the real woman behind the famous waaaaaaaah!
Kristen Stewart, Spencer
In Pablo Larraín’s biopic/horror movie/surreal family drama, Stewart serves up a complex interpretation of a Lady Diana who is a far cry from the People’s Princess. Unraveling over a dreadful few days at the royal Sandringham estate, Diana encounters ghosts, converses with pheasants and harms herself with a wire cutter. Stewart gracefully blends the well-trod, sympathetic tropes of Lady Di—her doe-eyed,
downcast gaze, her devotion to her sons—with less familiar behavior, like self-absorption, petulance, self-pity. As TheWrap’s Jason Solomons wrote, “It’s certainly a royal biopic like no other and, losing her head like Anne Boleyn before her, Kristen Stewart gives it her all.”
Steve’s Perspective
After back-to-back nominations for 2011’s The Help and 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, it was clearly only a matter of time until Jessica Chastain won an Oscar. So it’s a shock to realize that Tammy Faye is her first nomination since then—in a year in which this category is unexpectedly wide open. Chastain’s SAG and Critics Choice wins may give her an edge, but Kidman won the Golden Globe, Stewart has a good redemption story after being snubbed by SAG and BAFTA and you can’t underestimate the possibility of international voters rallying behind Cruz.
