Oscars 2023: Best Actor and Best Actress

If you’ll permit me a small confession: These are my two favorite Oscar categories, and also my least favorite. There are just so many good actors these days, the annual task of whittling down the best performances of the year to five names is always a colossal challenge—both tantalizing and torturous. Even more so than the supporting fields, finalizing your selections in the lead categories requires making impossible choices that you’re destined to regret years later. I mean, did I really not include Marion Cotillard on my Best Actress ballot in 2014 for The Immigrant??

The good news is that the Academy makes plenty of its own mistakes, making the pick of a preferred winner from the given slate of nominees much easier. Small mercies, and all that.

BEST ACTOR

NOMINEES
Bradley Cooper—Maestro
Colman Domingo—Rustin
Paul Giamatti—The Holdovers
Cillian Murphy—Oppenheimer
Jeffrey Wright—American Fiction

WILL WIN
This is a race between Giamatti and Murphy, though it seems like less of a race than it used to. It isn’t as though Murphy has the award sewn up; Giamatti is beloved in the industry, he’s leading a Best Picture contender, and his work happens to be wonderful (not to mention the whole “weird eye” thing). But once Murphy won at BAFTA and then at SAG, it became clear that this is his Oscar to lose. From a warped gambling perspective, you could talk me into placing a value bet on Giamatti’s candidacy. But if the question is simply, “Who’s most likely to win Best Actor on Sunday night?” then Murphy is the pick.

SHOULD WIN
I like all five of these performances; relatedly, none of them appears on my own ballot. (Remember what I was saying about there being too many good actors these days?) When he isn’t busy showboating, Cooper locates some genuine emotion, and the same is true of Domingo, who operates with a similar combination of gusto and sincerity. (That Maestro and Rustin were both Netflix releases—meaning I couldn’t watch them in theaters—inevitably harms their cause.) Murphy’s inhabitation of a mid-century antihero is even more slippery; there’s a powerful sadness at his core, even if his natural charm always peeks through. Wright is a delightful rascal who’s also ferociously intelligent.

But I’m voting for Giamatti, and I’m doing so as much because of his movie as his performance (which, to be clear, is excellent). I don’t love The Holdovers, but it’s a deeply enjoyable movie, and its success derives materially from the caliber of its acting—in particular Giamatti’s soulful, dyspeptic turn at its center. Take his craft out of the picture, and you’re left with a real mess, which isn’t true of any of the other nominees (Rustin partially excepted, though it’s sort of a mess anyway). Is that an unfair criterion? Maybe, but that’s what happens when you’re picking a winner from a group you didn’t choose yourself.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
Leonardo DiCaprio—Killers of the Flower Moon
Joaquin Phoenix—Beau Is Afraid
Franz Rogowski—Passages
Thomas Schubert—Afire
Andrew Scott—All of Us Strangers

DiCaprio sheds his usual vibrant charisma and still delivers a transfixing performance, one full of jittery energy and pitiful helplessness. Phoenix is electric in a movie that clings desperately to his discipline. Rogowski is a rapacious force of sexual destruction. Schubert is so persuasively and monumentally self-absorbed, he definitely doesn’t remind me of anyone I know. Scott crams years of regret into his tight-lipped smile.

MovieManifesto’s winner: Joaquin Phoenix—Beau Is Afraid.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT: SECOND TIER
Paul Giamatti—The Holdovers
Glenn Howerton—BlackBerry
Chris Pine—Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Jason Schwartzman—Asteroid City
Michael Thomas—Rimini

Howerton is a force of nature—a black hole of greed whose appetite can never be sated. Pine is the opposite, winsomely wielding his star power in the service of buoyant camaraderie. Schwartzman locates additional layers within Wes Anderson’s artful artifice. Thomas is spellbinding as a flailing has-been who’s still clinging to his past.

BEST ACTRESS

NOMINEES
Annette Bening—Nyad
Lily Gladstone—Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Hüller—Anatomy of a Fall
Carey Mulligan—Maestro
Emma Stone—Poor Things

WILL WIN
In terms of pure uncertainty, this is the most suspenseful category of the night. To be clear, there are only two viable contenders, Gladstone and SadStone. Stone won at BAFTA; Gladstone won at SAG. Both star in Best Picture nominees. Stone won seven years ago (for La La Land), which cuts whichever way you want; it proves that the Academy admires her talent, but voters may also want to look elsewhere this time. (To be fair, they didn’t feel that way with Frances McDormand in Nomadland.) Gladstone is a relative newcomer; does that mean she lacks broad industry support, or that voters will embrace the opportunity to honor a fresh face—one which also happens to belong to a minority that’s been grossly neglected at the Oscars for decades?

In the end, I’m just picking the SAG winner. That’s hardly foolproof logic; over the past five years, the Academy has deviated from the Guild twice in this category alone (McDormand instead of Viola Davis for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Olivia Colman for The Favourite over Glenn Close for The Wife). But the acting branch is the most populous of the Academy, and in a coin-flip race like this, that’s enough to convince me. Gladstone takes it.

SHOULD WIN
Stone. I like the other nominees, especially Gladstone, who imbues Killers of the Flower Moon with its brittle soul. But Stone is out of this world in Poor Things—the physicality, the accent, the comic timing, the gradual molding of a lump of hedonistic clay into a fully formed individual. She plainly has a fabulous career ahead of her (she’s already been pretty damn good to this point), but this might end up being the best performance of her life. She deserves the Oscar.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
Julia Garner—The Royal Hotel
Jennifer Lawrence—No Hard Feelings
Park Ji-min—Return to Seoul
Florence Pugh—A Good Person
Emma Stone—Poor Things

Garner is achingly vulnerable and quietly resilient. Lawrence turns a dopey little sex comedy into a movie that brims with feeling. Park is a rustling force of desire and obstinacy and regret. Pugh elevates clumsy material with masterful skill, infusing an overheated melodrama with genuine anguish.

MovieManifesto’s winner: Emma Stone—Poor Things.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT: SECOND TIER
Lily Gladstone—Killers of the Flower Moon
Greta Lee—Past Lives
Margaret Qualley—Sanctuary
Eliza Scanlen—The Starling Girl
Teyana Taylor—A Thousand and One

Ask me yesterday or tomorrow, and any one of these could have easily slid into my top five. Lee’s glances and hesitations convey a lifetime’s worth of rattling contemplation. Qualley oozes sex appeal and confidence, only to modulate it with stealthy intelligence. Scanlen is a natural with agony, which makes her ecstasy all the more explosive. Taylor makes you envision her character far beyond what you see on screen.

Honorable mention: Keira Knightley—Boston Strangler (she has my sword); Saoirse Ronan—Foe (and my axe); Emma Mackey—Emily; Rose McEwen—Blue Jean; Thomasin McKenzie—Eileen.

Coming tomorrow: Best Director and Best Picture.