Food for the Soul: Academy Awards Season 2024/25 – Best Actress Contenders
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout
On March 2, the film industry will be celebrating new movies by bestowing Best Picture, Director, and Actor awards, along with a dozen other accolades to movies screened in 2024. This year’s crop of movies seems to be particularly unimpressive. Apart from a few outstanding contenders like Conclave in Drama and Flow in the Animation category (both previously written up here), there are several other films that are not necessarily high on my list of recommendations but which are in the running for major awards and whose stars have been nominated for Oscars. These movies do bring out interesting female roles, even if the movies themselves are not necessarily very entertaining. Let’s take a look at three of the Academy contenders.
I’M STILL HERE (Brazil, France)
This is a true story of a Brazilian woman forced to reinvent herself after her husband, a congressman and vocal critic of the military regime, disappears one afternoon in 1971 into secret imprisonment. His wife (played by Fernanda Torres—a leading contender among the Best Actress nominations) tries to discover her husband’s fate while raising five children and entering a university to get a law degree at almost 40 years old. Directed by auteur filmmaker Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station), it is a hard-hitting drama showing how the life of a middle-class family is marred not just by the uncertainty about the father’s fate but also by economic decline and the profound negative effect that government persecution has on several generations. The actions of the military juntas of Argentina and Chile are much better known to international audiences than those of Brazil, so there is also a documentary aspect to this story. As reflected by Torres’s nomination for Best Actress, most poignant is the drama of an ordinary, middle-aged housewife whose life takes an unexpected turn when she has to become head of the family.
EMILIA PEREZ (France)
This movie is now making the entertainment press headlines, albeit for all the wrong reasons. A story of a female lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) who is tasked with helping a Mexican drug warlord escape his kingdom in order to have a sex change operation is a stylistic and thematic mess. Some of the scenes are expressed in musical numbers, but it is not a musical in the sense of La La Land (a multiple Oscar winner in 2017) or Wicked (a strong contender this year). The narrative of a woman confronted by drug cartels is usually told in hard-hitting action dramas like, for example, Sicario, but this story veers away from the drug war theme toward personal drama. Karla Sofia Gascón plays a person destined to be a commanding boss of a crime enterprise but who wants to be liberated from a mis-attributed body. It could be material for a psychological drama, but once it includes a musical sequence in a Bangkok clinic, the story loses its dramatic potency. All these narrative threads could be valid stories within definitive film genres, but instead they are all squashed into a mix of styles and themes. This feels like fusion cuisine where you serve an Asian dish, Cajun-style.
Speaking of cultural misappropriation, this is actually part of the controversy surrounding the film, which was shot by French director Jacques Audiard on locations in France. Because the story is supposed to be taking place in Mexico but was shot in France—with all the main roles played by non-Mexican actors—Mexican artists have protested. A group of them have even put together a hilarious pastiche of the romance story taking place in France, with actors in fake mustaches, dressed in striped shirts evoking the mime Marcel Marceau, and carrying plushie rats à la Ratatouille. This half-hour, home-made video satire of cultural insensitivity, titled Johanne Sacrebleu, has already garnered 2.5 million views on YouTube. Both the Mexican artists and social media viewers feel that this movie went too far beyond the globalization of themes and into annoying cultural appropriation.
Emilia Perez’s awards campaign also got embroiled in a controversy around some negative posts by Gascón, whose entire campaign is now reduced to profuse apologies for attacking Fernanda Torres (see above), the star of another movie about violence in Latin America as well as some racially negative comments years ago (nothing ever disappears on the internet). Regardless of whether this negative vibe can be overcome in time for the Oscar voting, the film itself is a mish-mash of styles and messages that personally left me cold but which may appeal to some viewers and some voters.
ANORA (U.S.)
This film entered the Oscar race with the pedigree of having won a Palme d’Or in Cannes, but as with Emilia Perez, I’m struggling to recommend it beyond its importance in the Awards season. Its star, Mikey Madison, gives a tour de force performance as Anora, a small-time hooker from a bleak and seedy Brooklyn neighborhood, but the story itself is beyond depressing. Anora believes that the tide of her hard life is turning when she manages to marry a young Russian son of an oligarch. However, this is hardly a Cinderella and a prince story when harsh reality intervenes. The boy is at the same time pathetically immature and yet cunning, his thug bodyguards are predictably trying to use violent solutions to solve problems, and the boy’s parents are ruthlessly determined to annul this marital union. Everyone in this sordid story has more depths than is immediately apparent, but none of the revealed facets of their personalities are particularly enticing. This is perhaps a sign of the times—this Cinderella story is a far cry from the fluff fantasy of Pretty Woman that swept screens 35 years ago.
All three movies attempt in various ways to provide unconventional, provoking, or ambitious portraits of women. However, this does not necessarily make the movies themselves outstanding. The actual Best Actress statuette might go to either Cynthia Erivo in Wicked or Demi Moore in The Substance. The race is on….