FINAL 2024 Oscar Predictions: BEST ACTRESS – The Race for the Final Infinity Stone

Close Oscar races are the bread and butter for awards prognosticators. In cases where frontrunners are so far out ahead that 2nd place barely merits a conversation (and we have quite a few of those this year, including two of the four acting categories), there’s not much discussion to be had when a coronation is set. When it appears that a race is just between two people or two films, sometimes outlets need to create highly clickable bad faith arguments to stir the pot, using false theories like vote splitting or ‘anonymous Oscar ballots’ to bolster online fervor and divisiveness, pitting fan bases against each other and bringing out the worst in everyone. It happens every year, and it’s certainly happening this year in Best Actress.

As I mentioned in Best Actor, the idea that Oscar voters might gravitate to not one but two lead performances of subtlety and nuance when the fallback here is loud, over the top and bombastic is refreshing. That isn’t to take away, in any way, from Emma Stone’s personally groundbreaking work in Poor Things as Bella Baxter. It’s a performance of physicality and emotional intelligence for the previous Best Actress winner (2016’s La La Land), one that she’s been building towards her entire career. Lily Gladstone has been steadily working with directors attuned to her as an actor and giving performances that have been favorites among cinephiles (she’s a true cinephile herself) and garnered some awards attention for 2016’s Certain Women but was never ‘in the conversation’ before Killers of the Flower Moon. She is the first Native American actress to be nominated for an Oscar, an historically contextual fact that voters are aware of and while a focal point of Gladstone’s campaign (internally and externally) has never felt like the reason she should or could win. It’s been a part of the conversation but not the conversation. When people talk about Gladstone’s nuanced work in Killers it’s about her performance. There’s also the narrative of the film’s script being completely rewritten to take her Mollie Burkhart from the background and make her the film’s center. But it bears repeating, voters don’t like being told how – or why – to vote. You can nudge them along but they have to get there themselves, or at least believe they have.

Let’s break down how this season’s awards kudos went for our contenders. Data and information is one thing and while it’s not passion and it’s not an Academy vote, it always helps guide us to likely scenarios. Before we got to the four main precursors of Critics Choice, Golden Globes, BAFTA and SAG, critics groups large and small, coastal and regional, bestowed their honors went for Gladstone over Stone 33-22. Each won one of the trifecta – Gladstone with NYFCC and Stone with LAFCA in a tie with Sandra Hüller (LAFCA utilizes non-gendered acting categories with two lead winners and two supporting winners). Hüller also won NSFC and in both places her wins came for both of her 2023 films, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest. The Netflix biopic duo of Annette Bening in Nyad and Carey Mulligan in Maestro did not earn any critics wins and of the two only Mulligan pulled off BAFTA/CCA/GG/SAG nominations.

Digging into the precursors, they exist in two different spaces – Critics Choice and Golden Globes being journalists and non-industry with BAFTA and SAG being the industry voters – but as all are televised awards and exist together as opportunities for fellow voters and Academy members to see actors in action, giving speeches, meeting each other and charming rooms (or putting them off if the case may be). The Globes kicked off the season with both Stone and Gladstone winning, in comedy and drama categories, respectively. Gladstone received a standing ovation and began her speech in Blackfeet, from the Indigenous nation that she’s from and highlighted the historic context of her win as the first Indigenous actor to win a Golden Globe, and detailed the importance of being able to speak the language as it is, telling the audience that in earlier days of film Native speakers would speak their lines in English and then be sound mixed backwards and dubbed. Stone, who had about half the time Gladstone did, reserved her speech for the traditional thank yous to her cast and crew. Critics Choice came the next week, where Stone won over Gladstone in direct competition. It started off with a very different tone for Stone, surprised with her win and having prepared nothing on the assumption that she’d lose to Gladstone, but calling out each of her fellow nominees as well before settling into her cast and crew thank yous again before ending on a snappy, funny and very Emma Stone note about critics.

When BAFTA nominations came out, Killers of the Flower Moon was dealt some pretty big blows. The film earned nine nominations but missed out on director, lead actor, adapted screenplay and, perhaps biggest of all, lead actress. Poor Things suffered a loss in director and for both of its supporting actors but Emma Stone was in. With the still very new voting structure of BAFTA, which underwent yet another change this season, from the acting longlists, the top three vote getters are automatically in and then a very small jury of less than 10 people choose three more to round out the nominations. We’ll never truly know if Gladstone would have made a straight five (or six) here but it did mark a potential obstacle in her path. Stone won, of course, one among the her film’s five wins. Then a week later came SAG, really the make or break for almost any acting contender. Again, as with Best Actor, which mirrored this one to a T, we were all looking to who would win to ‘lock in’ our next and/or final predictions. It was a nail-biter, to be sure, but Gladstone pulled it out, her most crucial win of the season. Opening her speech in Blackfeet once again, she highlighted the struggle of every actor in the room and not during the strikes last summer. She focused on the importance of storytellers, whether actors or not, to keep telling stories.

Here’s where the numbers start numbering and we all look like Carrie Mathison freaking out over a wall of connective tissue trying to find where it all meets. In 30 years, SAG has proven itself to be a superb precursor but certainly with hiccups. The very first year of SAG, in fact, Jodie Foster won for 1994’s Nell over eventual Oscar winner Jessica Lange in Blue Sky. Meryl Streep won her first – and only – SAG Award as a lead in a film for 2008’s Doubt. Now, this was exceptional for two reasons: she had not won a SAG Award before as her Oscar wins pre-dated the SAG Awards. We’ve seen this happen quite a few times, where a SAG winner feels like a catch-up/make-up/career win simply due to timing. But this was also the year Kate Winslet was nominated in lead for Revolutionary Road and ran in supporting for The Reader at SAG (and at the Golden Globes) but lead at the Oscars and won. While there have been other examples of actresses winning SAG only to lose the Oscar – Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Julie Christie – I want to focus on two that I think might have more context for this year.

Amazingly, there are a handful of ‘this is how Sandra Hüller can still win’ and those are the bad faith arguments I mentioned before. It’s not happening. Hüller’s chances of winning the Oscar died on SAG nomination morning. Then she lost the Golden Globe even though her film won screenplay. Then she lost the BAFTA (where her film won screenplay again). While a 3rd place finish is where I, and most people probably have her, in reality she’s more likely 4th or 5th, regardless of how much stronger her film is than Bening or Mulligan’s. Every single Best Actress Oscar winner since SAG’s inception 30 years ago has been nominated there first, Kate Winslet outlier aside (who would have been nominated in lead had she been submitted there). It’s simply a stat I’m not willing to break from until it does.

If there’s anything that would hold me back, or voters, from seeing Gladstone triumphing at the Oscars I look to Viola Davis. A two-time SAG winner for lead actress, Davis lost both of those bids come Oscar night. First, 2012’s The Help to Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady (her third Oscar win) and then 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, losing to Frances McDormand in the Best Picture winner Nomadland. While Ma Rainey was a modest Oscar player, winning two of its five nominations, it wasn’t a Best Picture contender and the narrative of Chadwick Boseman’s passing was enough to earn him a posthumous SAG but not an Academy Award, in one of the show’s most misguided Oscar show steps of all time, putting Best Actor last in hopes of a ‘moment’ that backfired horribly. But, like with Streep, Davis lost out on becoming only the second Black Best Actress winner to someone who had already won, twice. While correlation isn’t causation, there was definitely a contingent of voters who viewed Davis’ role in The Help as closer to supporting and might have felt like giving the Oscar to a ‘true’ lead. Davis shrewdly chose to run in supporting for Fences four years later, a role she won a Tony in lead for, and secured the Oscar. Early in the season, since Killers‘ debut at Cannes, Gladstone’s role has been seen as borderline supporting and online conversations about it were an early focal point (Mulligan too, to a lesser extent). Even LAFCA relegated Gladstone to supporting for their awards, where she only managed a co-runner-up finish. Could that perception have seeped in during voting last month? I’m sure some voters thought that and actively voted for someone else but it being a ‘single issue’ vote cause seems unrealistic. The larger context is how women of color are viewed by the Academy in this category and remains that. Last year we saw Michelle Yeoh’s historic win and we could see another in just a few days time. But will the Academy, while not a monolith, feel ‘been there done that’ as they have with previous historic wins? While I feel relatively comfortable in Gladstone’s position, you can never feel completely safe from an Academy that has proven to be the Lucy to your Charlie Brown in the past.

The 96th Academy Awards are Sunday, March 10.  Here are my ranked final 2024 Oscar predictions for Best Actress.