Five weeks ago I declared for the third or fourth time that Glenn Close is definitely going to be Best Actress nominated for The Wife, and she actually may win this time. Repeating: The Wife is a solid double-A quality package — a tidy, well-ordered, somewhat conservative-minded, theatrical-style drama. Some may say it’s a little too stagey, but it’s as good as this sort of thing gets. It satisfies, add up, delivers. Will the New Academy Kidz fall in line? They should. Brilliant acting is brilliant acting.

Right now 20 out of 22 Gold Derby “experts” (myself included) have Close among their five most likely Best Actress contenders. (The two hold-outs are USA Today‘s Brian Truitt and KPCC’s Claudia Puig.) But what’s the feeling within the HE community? The Wife has been playing in theatres since last month so what’s the verdict? Is Close a lock for a Best Actress nomination or not? The fact that she’s been nominated six times previously is a decisive factor or not?

Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, from a 9.26 podcast interview with Close: “Is The Wife, a film about an older, smart, accomplished woman who was wronged by a man, but stood by him, and who eventually comes to realize her own worth and stands up for herself, particularly resonant in the aftermath of the presidential election defeat of Hillary Clinton, not to mention the onset on the #MeToo era?”

Glenn Close: “Yeah. What I love about this movie is that what we ended up creating with a very, very close collaboration of all of us, is a highly-complex, very specific relationship. And I think the more specific you can be, funnily enough, the more it can universally resonate with people — they will bring to it and take away from it whatever it is that they have in their life. But it will be an authentic resonance and an authentic emotion.”