Watch scenes from the performances nominated in the category of best actress at the 97th annual Academy Awards, as well as interviews with the nominees below. The 2025 Oscars will be presented on Sunday, March 2.
Universal Pictures; Netflix; A24; Mubi; Sony Pictures Classics
Cynthia Erivo, “Wicked”
“Wicked,” the film version of the long-running Broadway musical (which was itself based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel), is a prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” and tells of the friendship and falling-out between Glinda (the most popular student at Shiz University) and Elphaba (an outcast who would go on to become the Wicked Witch of the West).
This tale of frenemies is anchored by best actress Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo, whose performance echoes the pain of being seen as different (she was born green) and of being targeted by an authoritarian power (which she has dared to stand up to), resulting in her using her new-found power to thwart capture.
In this scene, having decided that she must leave the Emerald City as the nefarious forces of the Wizard close in on her, Elphaba parts ways with Glinda (best supporting actress nominee Ariana Grande), and expresses her wish for freedom, with the song “Defying Gravity”:
Asked what she brought to the role of Elphaba, Erivo told “Sunday Morning,” “The vulnerability, her humanity.” She described that vulnerability for herself, personally, as “always wanting to do well and not wanting to fail, not wanting to let family down. Those are the insecurities. Finally owning how I look.”
What do you mean? “Well, I think we’re not necessarily told that, you know, dark-skinned Black girls are the prettiest girls,” Erivo said. “And the only person that really is telling you, thankfully, is your mother. It’s up to you to figure out that for yourself, and to start owning what beauty is to you.”
Erivo, who won a Tony Award, a Grammy and an Emmy for her role as Celie in the 2015 Broadway revival of “The Color Purple,” was previously nominated for two Academy Awards, for best actress and best original song, for the 2019 drama “Harriet,” about abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
Erivo’s performance as Elphaba is notable not just for her singing, which is astounding, but for singing live on set, rather than acting to pre-recorded vocal tracks. She said it allowed her to play, and change her performance, moment to moment: “It means that you can act on impulse. … You have more breath, more space.”
She told “CBS Mornings” that she did change the character slightly from the original Broadway show (which was originated by Tony-winner Idina Menzel), in order to inform Elphaba with her own experience. “I definitely felt like I had a responsibility to the character and to the piece because I didn’t want to remove it so far away that you just didn’t recognize her anymore,” she said, “but I also wanted to find out what the truth was for me playing this character. So, I knew it would feel different, but I wasn’t trying to make it different. I just knew that if I told my truth, it would end up being different anyway. There’s no need to force the difference in. Just happened.”
Nominated for 10 Oscars (including best picture), “Wicked,” from Universal Pictures, is in theaters and available via VOD.
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Karla Sofía Gascón, “Emilia Pérez”
The operatic crime film “Emilia Perez” leads this year’s Oscar nominations, with 13, including best picture, director and screenplay. Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays the title character, became the first transgender woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for best actress.
Gascón is introduced in the film as Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a Mexican drug lord who kidnaps Rita, an attorney (best supporting actress Oscar nominee Zoe Saldaña), to hire her for an unusual task: Manitas wants to become a woman. A fake death is staged, Manitas’ wife and children are relocated to Europe, and Manitas becomes Emilia Pérez.
Flash forward to London, where, in this scene, Rita and Emilia are reunited:
Emilia’s desire to reconnect with her wife and children leads to an arrangement whereby Emilia pretends to be a distant relative. Tragedy follows. Written and directed by Jacques Audiard, the film is a highly theatrical musical that earned its four leads (Gascón, Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz) a shared best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.
In May, Gascón told the Associated Press, “I want to get to the point where trans actresses are not limited to only playing trans characters. Just because you’re trans doesn’t mean you can’t also play a lady going to the bakery. Just because you’re trans doesn’t mean you can’t play a philosopher. Trans people are normal and ordinary just like anyone else. Not every trans person is engaged in prostitution on the street and if they do pursue it’s because society rejects them, not necessarily because they wanted to do it. So, the opportunity for me to play these two roles is a gift from the universe. … It’s marvelous to be able to find myself with roles like these.”
After Gascón’s Oscar nomination was announced (she was also nominated for a BAFTA, Golden Globe, César, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards), she received backlash over a series of offensive and racist social media posts she’d made several years earlier. In one, from 2021, she slammed the Academy Awards ceremony as something akin to “an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or [International Women’s Day].” Other posts attacked Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, and George Floyd.
Gascón apologized, and deleted the posts. But she was dropped from Netflix’s promotional tour for “Emilia Pérez,” was absent from Spain’s Goya Awards and Britain’s BAFTAs, and had a book cancelled. The film’s director disavowed her, telling Deadline, “I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to.”
On February 9, at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Selena Gomez commented on the controversy swirling around “Emilia Pérez” and Gascón’s posts: “Some of the magic has disappeared, but I choose to continue to be proud of what I’ve done, and I’m just grateful. I live with no regrets,” she said, adding, “I would do this movie over and over again if I could.”
“Emilia Pérez” is streaming on Netflix.
Mikey Madison, “Anora”
Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which won the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a sly and at times uproarious comic-drama of a Brooklyn sex worker who enters into a Cinderella romance and marriage with the flighty son of Russian oligarchs. Mikey Madison portrays Anora (preferred name: Ani) as a woman older than her 25 years, but still young enough to believe in the sanctity of elopement, when she and her immature lover, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), decide to tie the knot in Las Vegas.
In this scene, Ani takes a stand about the working conditions at her club – she will not countenance rudeness from the DJ! (Note: Graphic language):
In this scene, Ivan makes his proposal, to a young woman not quite sure whether to believe the guy (Note: Graphic language):
Madison told Variety that it was a long, engaged process for her to get into the world Ani inhabited: “It was a character that felt so far away from home in every single way. It was very intimidating at first; how do I empathize with her? I was like, I just need to start small. I did quite a bit of pole training. I did this stripper boot camp where I was taught how to give lap dances, how to twerk. And I would know everything about her — what cigarettes she smokes, what her school life was like.”
Madison, whose credits include Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” “Scream,” and the TV series “Better Things,” told “CBS Mornings” that she “absolutely fell in love” with Ani when she read the character. “She’s such a complicated woman. There’s so much nuance to who she is. She’s so vulnerable on the inside, but she presents herself as this very fierce, tough person. And she has such a fighting spirit, and I was excited to explore all the different parts of what that would be.”
Baker, whose past films include “The Florida Project,” “Tangerine” and “Prince of Broadway,” told Madison he would write the character of Ani expressly for her if she agreed to be in his movie. “It’s very surreal, and I am very lucky, because I dreamed of working with someone like Sean my entire career as an actress,” she said.
Madison’s accent in particular was key to her getting the character. She moved into the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn a month before shooting, in order to absorb the sound of the locals. Luna Sofía Miranda, who plays Ani’s best friend, Lulu, and who is herself a stripper, also instructed Madison on the vernacular of the world of “gentlemen’s clubs.” “She is amazing and was so sweet, and made me [two] PowerPoint presentations,” Madison said. “One of them was just stripper memes, and then another one was lingo and slang.”
What was some of the slang? “Brick. Oh, it’s brick outside, which means it’s cold. And then another one, I think, was a whale, which means a very wealthy, powerful person who comes into the club, someone who has a lot of money.”
Madison told the Hollywood Reporter that one of the lessons she learned from Baker was, “He really made it clear that he cared about my ideas and what I was bringing to the film. The most important thing I learned from him is that my opinion and my voice matter.”
She returned to Brighton Beach since the film was released and found everything to be exactly the same. “That’s one of the things I love about Brighton Beach, is that it’s such a time capsule. It’s basically been the same for 30 years,” she told “CBS Mornings.”
This is Madison’s first Academy Award nomination. She won the BAFTA, was nominated for Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, and received best actress honors from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (tying with Marianne Jean-Baptiste for “Hard Truths”).
“Anora,” a Neon release, is now playing in theaters and is available via VOD.
Demi Moore, “The Substance”
In the darkly comic body horror film “The Substance,” Demi Moore plays an aging TV star who discovers a sinister-looking potion that can give her a younger, more perfect version of herself, but at a terrible price.
Moore, who has been a Hollywood fixture – and a target of the tabloid press – since the 1980s, told “Sunday Morning” that she recognized the story’s message about the pains those in the public eye would go through to meet supposed social standards. “I put so much pressure on myself,” she said, when discussing the value she had placed on her attractiveness in the past. “And I did have experiences of being told to lose weight. And all of those, while they may have been embarrassing and humiliating, it’s what I did to myself because of that.”
In this scene, Moore’s character, preparing for a date, looks in the mirror, applies makeup, then purposely smears it. She said the process of shooting that scene was difficult. “Emotionally, that idea that I think many of us have been where we’re trying to make something better, and then we just keep making it worse,” she said. “For me, it’s one of the most heart-wrenching moments in the whole film. And it was at least 15 takes each time. And so, by the end, my face was raw.”
Asked what she thinks when she looks in a mirror, Moore replied, “Uhm, it fluctuates. Some days I look and I’m like, Wow. That’s pretty good. And some days, I catch myself dissecting, hyper-focusing on, you know, things that I don’t like.
“The difference is, now I can catch myself. I can go, Yeah, I don’t like that loose skin. But, you know, it is what it is. So, I’m gonna make the best of what is, as opposed to chasing what isn’t.“
Moore endured hours of body prosthetics, and spent much time naked on-screen. She told “CBS Mornings,” “The interesting thing for me was the exploration of that violence we have against ourselves, the harshness of how we can sit in judgment – that heavily comparing and dissecting. That for me was something that really resonated, because I felt that was so human.”
She broke out in such films as “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “No Small Affair,” and starred in “The Seventh Sign,” “Ghost,” “A Few Good Men,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Striptease,” “G.I. Jane,” and “Margin Call.” “The Substance,” which marks her first Oscar nomination, won Moore a Golden Globe for best motion picture actress (musical or comedy) and the Screen Actors Guild Award.
“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress,” she said, accepting her Golden Globe. “And at that time, I made that mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have. And so today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me. And for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong.”
“The Substance” is in theaters and available on Mubi and via VOD.
Fernanda Torres, “I’m Still Here”
Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres won the Golden Globe for best motion picture actress (drama) for her performance as Eunice Paiva, the wife of politician Rubens Paiva, who opposed Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1971 Rubens was kidnapped by the military, tortured and killed.
The film, directed by Walter Salles (“Central Station,” “The Motorcycle Diaries”), is based on the 2015 book “I’m Still Here,” written by Marcelo Rubens Palva, about his parents. “[The book is] when we really discovered Eunice,” Torres told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “The book is about the son in his adulthood discovering that the real hero of the family was not the father, not him, but it was this amazing woman called Eunice Paiva.”
It was a story almost lost to history. Following her husband’s murder, Eunice – a housewife and mother of five – not only fights to protect her children, but also fights to confront a repressive system. She returned to university and became a lawyer, and eventually led efforts to protect the rights of Indigenous people in Brazil and for protection of the Amazon rain forest. But her contributions were never fully acknowledged by the public.
“It’s like a woman who always fights the right fight, and she never had the will to be recognized by this, which is kind of strange nowadays,” Torres said. “She was a woman who never felt like it was important for [herself] to be recognized.”
In this scene, Eunice – alerted to the death of the family dog in front of their home – confronts two mysterious men parked across the street, who have been spying on her:
Torres has appeared in more than 60 films and TV productions, including “Love Me Forever or Never,” “The Invisible Woman,” “Foreign Land.” She is the second Brazilian actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. The first? Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, nominated for “Central Station.”
Torres told W Magazine, “I was raised in the wings of theaters. My father, Fernando, is also an actor and producer. And they named me Fernanda. So, I couldn’t escape, you see? I paid a lot of hours in shrinks, and I really don’t know how I did it, but I did it. I started working as an actress from the time I was 13 years old. … I find it a miracle. Isn’t it a miracle? Even now, to be here with this film. The other day, I saw Judi Dench saying that there is a lot of luck involved in this business, and I think she’s right.”
“My mother reminded me a lot of Eunice – the intelligence, a kind of woman that is down-to-earth and courageous,” she told Interview Magazine. “It’s a form of femininity. It has so much to do with my childhood that I think it became universal because of that.
“It’s a tragic story,” she said. “In tragedy, you face the unfaceable. You restrain, and you endure. That was very clear, and I never worked in anything like that, where I have restraint and change through the restraint. She was just like a sketch of what she could be, and after the disappearance of the man, she becomes herself, which is a beautiful tale.”
“I’m Still Here” has become a sensation in Brazil, where the nation’s collective memory about the hundreds who disappeared under the dictatorship, and the 20,000 estimated to have been tortured under military rule across two decades, is being revived through the story of Eunice and her family. But the film also met with universal acclaim outside of Brazil, and earned Torres the Golden Globe for best motion picture actress (drama).
Commenting on the packed category of actresses, Torres talked with “Entertainment Tonight” about her “Cinderella night,” at the Golden Globes, saying, “Everybody deserves it. Everybody. So I don’t know why they choose this street dog that speaks Portuguese, but I’m so glad!”
Like Gascon, Torres has been made to address her past, in her case a performance from 2008 in the Brazilian sketch comedy series “Fantastico,” in which she appeared in blackface. She told Deadline, “At that time, despite the efforts of Black movements and organizations, the awareness of the racist history and symbolism of blackface hadn’t yet entered the mainstream public consciousness in Brazil. Thanks to better cultural understanding and important but incomplete achievements in this century, it’s very clear now in our country and everywhere that blackface is never acceptable.”
“I’m Still Here,” released by Sony Pictures Classics, is also nominated for best picture and best international feature film. It is screening exclusively in theaters.
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