2020 Oscars: A Closer Look at the Leading Actors and Actresses

I know the Oscars are fast approaching, but I probably won’t get to my review of the ceremony until Tuesday (tomorrow’s reserved for Doctor Who!) So, while we wait, I thought I’d sneak in one final Oscar-related post, looking at this year as well as the recent past. (Note: I’ve realized tend to label Oscar seasons by the year in which the awards happen, not the year in which the movies came out. I’ll leave it as is for now, since this Oscar season is nearly over anyway, but for clarity’s sake, I should probably fix that next year.)

Back in 2015, I wrote a post about that year’s Best Picture nominees and how they corresponded with the Leading Actor and Actress categories. It had struck me that four of the five nominated men were in Best Picture nominees, while only one of the five women were, and as I looked those lists, I realized that it wasn’t that the leading actresses in most of the Best Picture nominees weren’t giving Oscar-worthy performances – it was that most of the Best Picture nominees didn’t have leading actresses.

The 2015 Best Picture nominees were American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything, and Whiplash. Except for The Theory of Everything’s Felicity Jones (the one nominated leading actress in a Best Picture nominee,) the most prominent female character in all the other films was a very decided supporting role. And hey, some of those actresses got nominated in the supporting category! The male lead’s daughter, the male lead’s mother, the male lead’s friend and colleague. This was the window that showed me the larger picture of that year’s Best Picture nominees: seven male-led stories and one story with dual leads (and even in The Theory of Everything, Felicity Jones’s leading role was still secondary to Eddie Redmayne’s.)

Ever since, I’ve always looked at the ratio of Leading Actor and Actress nominees who appear in Best Picture-nominated films. The pattern isn’t always as clear-cut as that, although 2017’s nominees saw the same 4/5 and 1/5 ratios as 2015, with the one Leading Actress nomination for a Best Picture nominee going to another dual-lead movie, Emma Stone’s performance in La La Land. That year, there actually were other Best Picture nominees with leading actresses – Arrival and Hidden Figures – but neither Amy Adams nor Taraji P. Hensen received nominations. The best year for leading actresses was 2018, where four of the nominees were in Best Picture-nominated films. That was the year of Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, and Three Billboards, along with the dual-lead films The Post and Phantom Thread (although the latter didn’t garner a Leading Actress nomination.) It’s the only time in the past six years that four Best Picture nominees also got Leading Actress nominations, while that’s happened for Leading Actors four of the last six years. Coincidentally, 2018 is also the only year since I’ve started counting that there’s been nearly an equal number of male-led and female-led stories up for Best Picture.

How about this year, then? My Leading Actor/Actress litmus test doesn’t show a super-stark contrast – 3/5 for the men, 2/5 for the women – but when you look at the films themselves, the deck is still pretty stacked towards the guys. Of the nine Best Picture nominees, only one (Little Women) is decidedly female-led, with one dual-lead film (Marriage Story) and one ensemble piece that features men and women pretty equally (Parasite.) That leaves six movies that are decidedly-male-oriented enough that they really can’t be considered to have leading actresses as all (1917, Ford vs. Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.) Note: I did debate about Elsa in Jojo Rabbit, but even though she gets some focus, it’s Jojo’s story, not hers.

It all boils down to what’s considered “Best Picture material” and what’s not, and pretty overwhelmingly, “Best Picture material” means “male-dominated stories.” That means that even when female-led films like Room or Lady Bird crack the boys’ club, they’re rarely believed to be real contenders for the top prize, positioned more as “it’s an honor just to be nominated” also-rans. In the six years that I’ve been keeping track, a female-led film has actually won Best Picture only once (2018 again, with The Shape of Water.) This is why it’s been so easy for some voters to dismiss Little Women this year, because there’s a long tradition of the Academy showing us what a Best Picture looks like, and it’s a movie that only infrequently has a woman out front.