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The best actress category at the 95th Oscars is full of great awards season drama, from the surprise nomination of Andrea Riseborough to the potential history to be made if Michelle Yeoh wins, which AP’s film writers predict will happen.
All will be celebrated during Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, which airs live on ABC beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern. There’s still time to catch up on their performances before the show.
Here’s a bit more about the contenders.
ANA DE ARMAS
“Blonde” may have been reviled by many critics, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any who didn’t admire Ana de Armas’s portrayal of Marilyn Monroe nonetheless. De Armas prepped for a year and was thrown into the fire on her first day on set: In the actual apartment Norma Jeane lived in with her mother — a nightmare sequence in which she rescues a baby from the dresser drawer that she was kept in as an infant, as the place burns around her. Her second day was her visit to her mother in the mental hospital, where she got to speak as Marilyn for the first time on camera.
“I wasn’t in character all the time. But … I felt that heaviness and that weight in my shoulders. And I felt that sadness,” de Armas said. “She was all I thought about. She was all I dreamed about. She was all I talked about.”
Trivia: De Armas is the first Cuban woman to be nominated for best actress.
Age: 34
CATE BLANCHETT
“Tár” wouldn’t exist without Cate Blanchett because Todd Field, the writer and director, wouldn’t have done it with anyone else. That might be Hollywood bluster from most, but with Field you believe it. In the process of preparing to play Lydia Tár, the fictional conductor of a German orchestra, she’d learn to play piano, to speak German and conduct an orchestra, all of which she does really does in the film.
“I am still processing the experience, not only because it spoke to a lot of things that I had been thinking about, but I feel so expanded by having been in Todd’s orbit,” Blanchett said.
