FINAL 2019 Oscar Predictions: BEST ACTRESS

The time has come. After seven nominations, Glenn Close (The Wife) will finally be an Oscar winner.

With the Golden Globe, SAG and Critics’ Choice in her pocket she’ll enter the Dolby as the frontrunner in the strongest position she’s ever been in before. BAFTA winner Olivia Colman (The Favourite) will give her some chase (especially playing real life royalty, which the Oscars love) but it won’t be enough to topple a performance and a role that so clearly is defining the conversation of women in the workplace, in the film industry, in life. While Close hasn’t quite sealed everything up along the way like Julianne Moore did with Still Alice (also Sony Classics, sole nomination and a TIFF pickup) she’s doing it in a more competitive year and that can’t be underestimated. Fun fact: of her four Best Actress nominations, this is the first time she’s been the sole nominee of her film and the first she’s not nominated against Meryl Streep.

If there is a wild, crazy occurrence of a shocking win it would be because we’ve concentrated solely on this being a two-person race between Close and Colman, similar to the year when Adrien Brody won Best Actor for The Pianist, when our focus was on Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York (BAFTA, SAG, Critics’ Choice winner) and Jack Nicholson (Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice winner) in About Schmidt.

While those two were previous multiple Oscar winners already and not a direct comparison, there is an outside chance that Roma‘s Yalitza Aparicio brings the house down with a shocking win. The Academy has embraced first-time performers before (like Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God) and if there is a surprise win, Aparicio is who it will be.