Best Actress at the Oscars is always a bloodbath. Or maybe it only seems that way because so much of Oscar fandom leans gay and passionate, where a standard dinner party trivia game is naming all the films Meryl Streep has been nominated for (Music of the Heart should get you two points, frankly). Still, this year’s Best Actress category has felt more bloody than most, with the final five nominees – announced earlier today – seemingly curated for maximum discourse-bothering. And, yes, I do mean the surprise nod for Kate Hudson, for a film so under-the-radar that a colleague has already termed it “Song Sung who?”. But I am ready to raise my head above the parapet and declare it actually one of the better nominations today – even if something tells me Hudson will be pelted with metaphorical fruits and vegetables until Oscar day.
The prospect of a Hudson nomination – for playing a real-life Neil Diamond tribute act disabled in a tragic accident – had been circling for a while. And today the prophecy came true: her work in Song Sung Blue now sits alongside the category’s inevitable winner (Jessie Buckley for Hamnet) as well as Rose Byrne for the black comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Renate Reinsve for the family psycho-drama Sentimental Value, and perpetual Oscar magnet Emma Stone for her bold, bald work in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia.
It’s easy to see Hudson as an outlier here. Song Sung Blue is old-school Oscar catnip – a film that is inspirational and heartwarming, glossy yet sensitive, and a true story about artistic dreamers and people on the fringes of the American heartland, who are surviving against the odds. It’s a bit basic, I suppose, full of crowd-pleasing musical numbers and Hugh Jackman in a funny wig. But it’s also undeniably touching, with Hudson particularly lovely in it. She is steely, warm, and characteristically effervescent, and when her entire mood depletes once her character experiences a life-altering accident, Hudson takes the upbeat frivolity of the film with her. She is the movie, and you miss her enormously when she’s not on screen.
Hudson has always been an actor you sort of forget about in between watching her. This is partly because she doesn’t make films enormously often, and has taken gaps in her career to build a brand outside of acting – podcasts, fashion, vodka. And she’s been in lots of films that are, to put it bluntly, absolutely dismal. But then you re-watch her in Almost Famous, where she played a rock music muse orbiting a variety of musicians, and you completely fall in love with her all over again. You see her mother in her, the dazzling Goldie Hawn, and the sense of breezy, aspirational normality she brings to her characters. We tend to overlook women like this on-screen – women who are so real, and earthy, and plain pleasurable to watch that their work seems almost too easy. Song Sung Blue and Hudson’s nomination are reminders of just how brilliant she can be.
That said, Best Actress this year is sort of messy. The big absence is Chase Infiniti, who is a star-is-born spitfire as a revolutionary’s rebellious daughter in One Battle After Another, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. But it’s tough to break through in this category – particularly as a young woman in her first movie role – if the film doesn’t arguably belong to that actor. That logic falls apart a bit though when you think of the other two big Best Actress snubs this year, both of whom gave career-best performances that demanded of them raw physical transformation, and a kind of feral, unfettered wildness that is intoxicating to watch.
Amanda Seyfried should have earned more acclaim for The Testament of Ann Lee, a tricky and ambitious epic about the birth of the religious sect known as the Shakers, and I’m still slightly horrified at how many awards bodies this season have so far ignored Jennifer Lawrence’s devastating work as a mother descending into madness in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. They both join last year’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste – so brilliantly destructive and damaged in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, and not even nominated – in the category of “what on earth were they thinking?”-style snubs.
In a sense, though, it’s good news to see so many incredible women miss out on Best Actress spots this year. It means that those parts are out there in the first place, in movies that revolve around complex female characters experiencing grief and turmoil and all kinds of psychological messiness, and in movies entirely anchored by their performances. (The nominees in this year’s Best Supporting Actress category also follow suit there, nicely.) It’s all very, very positive, and a sign of real Hollywood progress. And, yes, I’m including Kate Hudson in that too.