2022 Oscars: Best Actress In A (Just Okay) Motion Picture

On Sunday, Jessica Chastain won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. It was the culmination of well over a decade of incredible work. Unfortunately, it's for a film that will be forgotten by the next awards cycle.

Of the five nominees for Best Actress this year, three were nominated for biopics. All three of those films had the same problem: perspective. The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Spencer, and Being The Ricardos all struggled with finding a lens to examine their subjects. Instead, their filmmakers largely shove the responsibility of giving the story any memorability onto the lead actors' performances.

The Eyes Of Tammy Faye is a fable about fame that we've seen many times over. A subject rises, they fall on their face, but by God's grace, they get back up again! That is the extent of the film's exploration of its namesake character. The film has no interest in examining the depths of Tammy Faye Bakker,. It certainly has no interest in exploring the ways in which she was complicit in the crimes of her husband, or the wider rise of evangelical conservatism in America. Instead, we are asked to cheer for her as she overcomes obstacles at every turn. Frankly, it's a Lifetime Original Movie masquerading as prestige cinema. Underneath pounds of makeup and prosthetics, Jessica manages to find a character deeper than the one on the page. Despite that, Jessica was the safe choice; the feel-good performance in the feel-good film. You don't leave thinking particularly deeply about anything, even the performances fade away after a while.

Spencer finds itself with a similar problem. Where Tammy Faye has too much reverence for its subject, Spencer has next to none for Princess Diana. She is not a real person in this film. Pablo Larraín seemingly wanted to make a movie about a woman having a breakdown. That woman being Diana Spencer is barely relevant to the story. Kristen Stewart manages to overcome this with a performance that grabs you from the moment she arrives at Sandringham. From her shrug when informed that the royals have been waiting for her to her refusal to wear what she's told, you understand her to be a woman trapped under the expectations of other people. Stewart finds a focus in her performance that the film itself never does. This was the best performance of the five nominated.

Searchlight Pictures

Nicole Kidman does her best in Being The Ricardos. Her performance as Lucille Ball is one of her best in recent years. She does not bow to the usual biopic mimicry instead portraying Lucille Ball as a woman who is quite serious when the cameras are off. Her performance isn't enough to justify the muddled film's existence, and it likely won't be considered one of her most memorable.

The two women not nominated for biopics are still the driving forces in their films. In lesser hands, Leda, The Lost Daughter's main character, would be an unlikable psychopath. Olivia Colman turns her into a complicated woman that simultaneously garners support and detestation. In the same vein, Penélope Cruz portrays a complicated woman faced with a hard choice in Parallel Mothers. Like Olivia, she manages to find heart in a character that could otherwise seem heartless.  In any other year, Colman would have been a strong contender, but a second win so soon after her first wasn't likely. There was some buzz about a surprise win for Cruz, which would've been more than justified.

It's often said that the Oscars are the story Hollywood likes to tell about itself in that particular moment. What does it say about Hollywood at this moment that our best actresses are largely recreating iconic figures of the not-so-distant past? Or that many of them have previously gone unnominated for much better work in far better movies? Who knows.

Best Production Design

This year, production design in film was more noticeable than it usually is. It often feels like production design tends to fade into the background, and that's often the point. They are responsible for the look and feel of a film. You often aren't meant to notice their work. This year, however, it was almost impossible to ignore.

This year's crop of nominees featured Nightmare Alley's highly stylized 1930s Art Deco aesthetic, West Side Story's recreation of a torn-down New York City, The Power of the Dog's western world, Dune's sci-fi deserts, and The Tragedy of Macbeth's breathtaking soundstages. Production design certainly came out to say hello! In many cases, the sets became characters in and of themselves.

It's a shame that it's been decided that production design isn't important enough to be broadcast with the rest of the Oscars. Most of these films would lose part of their emotional gravitas without their incredibly nuanced sets made to match each film's mood and tone. Perhaps next year we'll see them return to the main event.