93rd Academy Awards: The Women of Best Actress

By Abe Friedtanzer

When I requested to cover this category just one week after Oscar nominations were announced, I didn’t realize quite how competitive it was going to be, putting us in a scenario where anyone could win. Day won the Golden Globe, Mulligan scored with the Critics Choice Association, Davis won the SAG, and McDormand won the BAFTA! Fortunately, this is a truly fantastic slate, and as a result, I’m not going to rank them in any order of quality. Let’s dive into a remarkable list of some of this year’s best female performances…

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So ... um ... who is going to win Best Actress?

by Nathaniel R

This is the way all awards seasons should be. Well, not the Zoom breakout rooms... but the uncertainty. There's no godly reason why sweeps should ever exist in awards season given that art is subjective. If you poll any group of people on anything you will see a vast array of opinions. Yet season after season there are sweeps wherein one performer snaps up every award in sight. It is extremely rare that this happens because the performer is miles ahead of their competition (like, say, a Blanchett in Blue Jasmine effect) or because the performance is gorgeous and it's also the very last chance (like say Ledger in The Dark Knight or Boseman this year). It is more commonly an effect of a lack of imagination and groupthink. If we ran the world every acting category almost every year would be like Supporting Actress was for 2007 and Best Actress appears to be for 2020. Each awards show that arrives throws punditry into disarray again and a season can close with joy knowing several actors were honored for great work...

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Sundance: "The World To Come" review

by Jason Adams

As a writer it must be said (or written even!) that I love words. Perhaps on occasion, it has been said and written, more than I ought to. It's the romance of my life. You can spend hours staring in the eyes of one -- erasing it, putting it back, looking for it the absolute best of partners. It's in words where I find meaning, too much and too often -- the experience of a thing is here and gone but once you've dug it back up and defined it, encased it into the tombs of steely-sided capital letters, well then it's a thing, right and proper. Understanding one's life, the un-understandable, becomes a matter of word puzzles.

It's this same tension, between word and feeling, that fuels Mona Fastvold's same-sex romance The World To Come, and like its heroine its that tension that very nearly undoes it...

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Oscar Charts - All acting categories two weeks before Globe & SAG nods

by Nathaniel R

Zendaya smiling because the camera is absolutely besotted with her.

As strange as it is to note, it's still worth reiterating that Academy voters don't begin to fill out their nomination ballots for another five and a half weeks (!!!) A lot of things can change in that long of a stretch of time. Films and performances can move in or out of favor in two weeks time, let alone five!  But here is where our crystal ball is right now...

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Review: Vanessa Kirby is a tour de force in "Pieces of a Woman"

by Matt St Clair

British thespian Vanessa Kirby has been on a steady rise, having earned an Emmy nomination for playing Princess Margaret on The Crown while kicking action ass in both Mission Impossible: Fallout and Hobbs & Shaw. With Pieces of a Woman, Kirby is finally given a project where she takes center stage and she emerges as the shining star of a picture that’s drenched in darkness due to its distressing subject matter.

The first major sequence in Pieces of a Woman involving Martha's (Kirby) home birth will be a deal-breaker for some viewers...

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