The Best Actress Oscar lineup features multiple musical performances for the first time in 60 years
Wicked‘s Cynthia Erivo and Emilia Pérez‘s Karla Sofía Gascón earned their widely predicted Best Actress Oscar nominations on Thursday. Their bids represent a rare double in Oscar history: This is the second time — and first in 60 years — that multiple musical performances are nominated in Best Actress.
Counting just traditional musicals with non-diegetic music (i.e., no musician biopics or films in which singers perform), the last time this happened was, naturally, during the heyday of musicals in the 1960s. Julie Andrews and Debbie Reynolds were nominated for their respective 1964 films, Mary Poppins and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, with the former winning. There could’ve been a third musical nominee that year had My Fair Lady‘s Audrey Hepburn made the cut.
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Andrews’ victory has been seen as a bit of sweet revenge (with a spoonful of sugar, of course) after producer Jack Warner cast Hepburn instead of Andrews, who originated the role of Eliza Doolittle on Broadway in the film adaptation of My Fair Lady. Not only that but Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon. However, Warner’s loss was Walt Disney’s gain as the latter snatched Andrews up to make her film debut in Mary Poppins. The following year, Andrews was nominated again for The Sound Music, becoming the only person to score consecutive Best Actress nominations for musicals. She lost to Julie Christie for Darling.
SEE Full list of Oscar nominations
Since then, several musical performances have been nominated for Best Actress, including winners Barbra Streisand (1968’s Funny Girl) and Liza Minnelli (1972’s Cabaret). There have even been back-to-back years with one this century — Nicole Kidman in 2001’s Moulin Rouge! and Renée Zellweger in 2002’s Chicago — but none have overlapped in the same year until now.
This year has been unusually strong on the comedy/musical front in the Best Actress race, to borrow the Golden Globes’ categorization. Four of the five Oscar nominees hail from the Globes’ comedy/musical actress lineup (Anora‘s Mikey Madison and The Substance‘s Demi Moore are the others), and the fifth is drama Globe champ Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here). Typically, there are more drama contenders in the Oscars’ final five.
The first openly trans actress to be nominated, Gascón has been favored to receive a bid since Emilia Pérez‘s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where she shared the Best Actress prize with co-stars Zoe Salda?a, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz. She has since won the European Film Award and Lumière Award for Best Actress. Despite online backlash over its depiction of trans issues and Mexico, Jacques Audiard‘s cartel musical drama has been an industry and international favorite. The four-time Golden Globe winner received TK Oscar nominations.
Erivo rapidly ascended into the top five in the Best Actress odds after Wicked opened in November and became a box office sensation. Like Gascón, she’s received Golden Globe, Critics Choice, Screen Actors Guild, and BAFTA Awards nominations for her turn as Elphaba. However, in the lead-up to nominations, some fans and prognosticators feared she could miss a la Margot Robbie last year for Barbie. But Erivo defied gravity doubters and collected one of Wicked‘s TK nominations.
But will this race produce the same result as 60 years ago with one musical performance prevailing? Prior to nominations, Moore displaced Madison for the top spot in the odds on the heels of her comedy/musical Globe win. It’ll be a tall order, but it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings.
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