Anonymous Oscar voter: Emma Stone has more range & I dont get Lily Gladstone

Here are some photos of Emma Stone and Sandra Huller at the big Louis Vuitton show in Paris on Tuesday. The LV show was crazy well-attended, because Louis Vuitton spends a metric f–k-ton on brand ambassadors as if they’re collecting Fashion Girlies and trapping them into wearing unflattering clothes. Emma and Sandra are both Best Actress Oscar nominees this year, and I feel pretty comfortable saying that they’ll both turn up at the Oscars wearing Louis Vuitton. But here’s my question: is Emma Stone going to pull it out? I’ve gone back and forth on this in the past six weeks or so, when Emma’s Oscar campaign ascended just as Lily Gladstone’s stalled. I thought about it a lot this week as I’ve covered some of the “anonymous Oscar ballots,” and from the (admittedly) small sampling, it does not look like Gladstone is a sure thing at all.

The latest anon ballot comes from IndieWire, and the voter is seemingly a casting director. The voter is a big Barbie fan (voted Barbie in the #1 slot for Best Picture) and this person had A LOT of thoughts about Best Actress. Some highlights from this ballot:

Actor in a Leading Role: Every one of these actors has been working for a long time. You could vote for any of them: Bradley Cooper [“Maestro”], Colman Domingo [“Rustin”], Paul Giamatti [“The Holdovers”], Cillian Murphy [“Oppenheimer“], and Jeffrey Wright [“American Fiction”], because they’re all doing career-level work in completely different ways. They’re all wonderful actors. And it’s lovely in this particular case for Colman and Jeffrey to finally have a certain amount of recognition. Paul and Bradley obviously had recognition before…In the end, I chose Cillian Murphy. He has such a demanding role. What he pulled off well in this role was the combination of the arrogance of Oppenheimer, the brilliance of Oppenheimer, and then the moral dilemma and weakness of Oppenheimer. Cillian was the highest bar to meet in this group.

Actor in a Supporting Role: These are wonderful working actors. I’m going to leave Robert De Niro [“Killers of the Flower Moon”] because he’s been nominated so many times. I watched “Barbie” again because I love Ryan Gosling in that film. He’s not gotten a lot of recognition. But these roles are so different. You can’t compare what Robert Downey Jr. and Ryan Gosling did in their movies. So much value was added by these actors, and Mark Ruffalo [“Poor Things”], in a career performance. I went with Downey because he played against everything that people expect from what they’ve seen him do before, but he was always capable of; he’s a great actor. He got derailed somewhere along the way. And he’s come back. I don’t think he’s been given a lot of opportunities to play dramatic work. But this has brought attention to the dramatic work he’s capable of.

This person voted for Emma Stone for Best Actress: I voted for Emma Stone [“Poor Things’] because it’s an out-there performance and [because of] the level of physicality. And she’s probably the youngest one in this group. The choices that she’s making play against all expectations of what people might have thought that Emma Stone might be, based on her earlier career. She’s got a lot of range for a young actress.

They loved Sandra Huller though: And Sandra Hüller. “Anatomy of a Fall” is a great script. But that whole film hinges on that performance because it’s completely about the character’s ambiguity. That’s what makes that film. Did she do it? Did she not? She didn’t try to make you like her. No.

The voter didn’t understand Lily Gladstone’s whole deal: “I don’t get Lily Gladstone. I’ve seen her in other things, and this performance didn’t stretch her past what I’ve seen her do in other places. I’ve watched her on “Reservation Dogs.” I didn’t see a lot of dimensions to the character [in “Killers of the Flower Moon”]. Some of that is the script; it would have been a far more interesting movie if it had been told from her perspective. The character should have been aware because her whole family was dying off that she was being poisoned. It doesn’t make sense. And clearly, he’s killing her, and he’s a bad guy, and yet she falls in love with him. I don’t think she brought complexity to it. If she had been in Supporting Actress, then it would have been different, because it is a supporting role. It’s not a lead role.

[From IndieWire]

This voter also went with Da’Vine Joy Randolph for supporting, just as every anon voter has done. Da’Vine is a shoo-in, a total sure thing. I think RDJ is as well, although a lot of people sort of wanted it to go to Mark Ruffalo (I don’t think Ruffalo gave a career-best performance in Poor Things, but he was utterly delightful and very weird). For the all talk about who did not get a richly deserved nomination, Willem Dafoe was absolutely snubbed for his work in Poor Things.

As for what this voter says about the Best Actress race… I think industry people watched Poor Things and realized that Emma made a meal out of that role and she really showed off her chops in a way, ahem, she did not in the other film which won her an Oscar. I also think the “showy” nature of Emma’s role in Poor Things is tough to put against Lily’s quieter performance in KOTFM. That being said, if Lily loses, it’s mostly about “category fraud.” I even agree with this voter – it was a supporting performance. That’s not on Lily, she did what she could with the script, but that script was AWFUL. (Still, once again, if I was voting, I would go for Huller.)

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.

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