In the comment thread that followed yesterday’s piece about Netflix’s official launch of Karla Sofia Gascón’s Best Actress campaign for Emilia Perez, HE reader “NPalma759”, seemingly irked, posted a question:

HE reply: A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is less of a big deal…it’s a little more elastic or experimental or in some cases a “here I am” greeting-card thing. Miyoshi Umeki for Sayonara…Donna Reed for From Here to Eternity…that line of country.

A Best Actress Oscar is or can be monumental, at least in voters’ heads. When a name-brand actress wins one, it can be fairly stated and without hyperbole “now she belongs to the ages.”

Young Jennifer Lawrence entered that hallowed realm when she deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for her passionate eccentric nutter in Silver Linings Playbook, performed when she was only 21. But Lawrence scored like a champ, and in the same guns-blazing way that young Mikey Madison (25) managed for her lead role in Anora. Madison is fated to win the Best Actress Oscar early next year or I’m a monkey’s uncle.

A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is fine and fully noteworthy, but it’s “not quite Ivy League” in the Richard Masur sense of that term — it’s something else — call it a career launcher (Mercedes McCambridge in All The King’s Men), a respectable milestone, a you-go-girl salute…it can be a tribute to a wowser blast-off performance by a respected veteran (Beatrice Straight in Network) or a passing fancy applause for a newcomer…an eye-opener, a cluck-cluck, an approval-meter surge.

In this sense I would’ve been fine with (or would have at least understood) Lily Gladstone’s Molly Burkhart performance taking the 2023 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I would have felt badly for the most deserving winner, The Holdovers’ Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who in fact won) but I would’ve gone along with it.

You can’t just elbow your way into the Best Actress realm as a strategic woke poker player…you have to show a tiny bit of reverence for the heart and soul histories…if you believe in Movie Catholicism and if you’re part of that dwindling fraternity that believes (or once believed) that movie theatres are churches, you really shouldn’t use a Best Actress Oscar campaign as a means to promote or validate or celebrate a formerly marginalized identity. It lowers the property values when you do that. It’s called “gaming the system.”