All season long, the Best Actress in a Leading role category was nearly impossible to predict, but tonight at the 93rd Academy Awards, Frances McDormand took home the Oscar statue in the end, for the night’s frontrunner “Nomadland” which was likely a close race. The award was the third Oscar Best Actress prize for McDormand, and she won a fourth the same evening for being a producer on “Nomadland.” She won the acting Oscar award only three years back for 2017’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and 1997’s “Fargo.” She’s been nominated for Oscar three times on top of those accolades.
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All season long, Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Big Black Bottom), Carey Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”), and McDormand seemed to jockey for frontrunner position with none of them really edging out the other by much; Andra Day threw the race into a bit of disarray as well when she won the Golden Globe for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” Viola Davis seemingly had the award locked up once she won the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actress; however, McDormand won the BAFTA, signaling that perhaps this would be a “Nomadland” evening in the end.
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Written by director Chloé Zhao, “Nomadland” centers on a woman in her sixties (McDormand) who, after losing everything in the Great Recession, embarks on a journey through the American West, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad. It is a beautiful and poignant movie about American struggle and economic hardship. And McDormand’s simple, effective performances is part of what makes it work so well (read our review from Venice).
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McDormand’s soulful and melancholy performance was also on The Playlist’s list of the top 20 performances of 2020.
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