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.
