This year’s nominees are great but maybe Amanda Seyfried is better?
Despite giving a full-bodied performance as a witchy woman in musical, a major contender for Best Actress was unfairly snubbed by the Academy this morning. I’m not talking about Cynthia Erivo, mind; Wicked: For Good had its big-category chances at the 2026 Oscars seriously wounded months ago, when reviews emerged indicating that the filmmakers had not, in fact, pulled off the miracle of making a satisfying film out of the stage musical’s inferior second act. In a less competitive year, Erivo might have squeaked in anyway; it certainly wasn’t her fault that For Good didn’t work. But this was a year competitive enough to squeeze out a much stronger contender: Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee.
If you haven’t seen or heard of The Testament of Ann Lee, that’s probably because it was playing in a single-digit number of theaters until last weekend, when it expanded to a few dozen. Searchlight Pictures (owned by Disney) released the film on Christmas (and screened it for plenty of critics and awards’ groups all autumn), but held off on expanding it until this coming weekend, anticipating that it would benefit greatly from an Oscar nomination bump. Now that a major awards embrace hasn’t happened, the movie’s already-tricky commercial prospects are diminished. But that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from seeing it on the big screen, where the movie’s hypnotic historical sweep will feel especially immersive.
The Testament of Ann Lee feels a bit like a distaff companion to last year’s The Brutalist – appropriately enough, considering that it’s from the same screenwriting team of partners Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet. Fastvold directed Ann Lee, just as Corbet took the reins on The Brutalist, and apparently the film’s genesis came party from their fascination with Shaker furniture they encountered during the making of that film (where architect Adrien Brody begins his life in the U.S. at a Philadelphia furniture store). Ann Lee is not so much about furniture, which came later in the Shaker timeline (though the movie does show some of their craftsmanship), but rather how the Shakers as a movement spun off from the Quakers and set out for 18th century America, where Ann (Seyfried) becomes their devout leader (and eventually messiah), preaching abstinence from sex of any kind and worshiping through ecstatic song and dance. This is how The Testament of Ann Lee also becomes a musical of sorts, with the writhing intensity of the Shakers’ worship becoming de facto production-number hymns.
