My Predictions (And Hopes) For the 2024 Emmy Nominations, Week 3, Part 3

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTRESS IN A DRAMA

First of all, as with Lead Actor, I’m making room for six nominees. Now for an important distinction for this category and the Supporting Acting ones.

Despite my issues with Night Country I do acknowledge the superior quality of the acting in that series and some of my choices will reflect that. I can’t in good conscience do so for The Regime. Having watched the entire series I feel that it was one of the worst shows I have seen so far this year and despite the quality of the actors I can’t bring myself to nominate either the series or any of the performers. I acknowledge the near certainty Kate Winslet will be nominated in this category but I just can’t go along with it.

So bearing both in mind, here are my choices which include some of the greatest actresses in history.

Annette Bening, Apples Never Fall

It has taken more than twenty years for one of the greatest actresses in history to show up in a limited series. And it’s daring for Bening to take ostensibly the most important character and then spend most of the series offscreen and seen almost entirely in flashbacks. It might almost be easier for Bening to get a nomination had she been willing to be considered for Best Supporting Actress instead.

But that would be a disservice to Bening’s incredible work as Joy Delaney, the mother of the Delaney clan who has the appearance of a perfect marriage and mother when the series starts and then all of her children realize that during the first episode none of them noticed she has disappeared. Throughout the series we see different versions of Joy then we thought, a mother who has been struggling with her marriage her whole life, trying to be a good parent and who has been so unappreciated that when a total stranger shows up on her doorstep, she takes her in and believes in her despite all evidence to the contrary that she is dangerous. By the end of the series, it’s clear Joy clung to a dangerous predator because it was the closest thing to a loving relationship she’d had in a while.

Bening is an extreme long shot in this category, I grant you, but having watched every episode of Apples in nearly three weeks it’s hard to say she hasn’t deserved the nomination more than the likely winners in this category. Besides, given that they are certain to nominate her co-star from Nyad in this category, I’d argue she deserves it too.

Jodie Foster, True Detective: Night Country

Jodie Foster had not acted in television for more than half a century and she chose a hell of a role and a hell of a series. True Detective has been notorious for having some of the worst portrayals of female characters in any anthology so it was a great choice to bring back one of the greatest actresses of all time to lead the series.

And for all my issues with this installment Foster was by far the best thing about it. Like all previous installments Night Country was unable to pick a lane between whether it wanted to be a straight procedural or whether something otherworldly was involved. But even at its most woo-woo, Foster’s incredible work as Chief Danvers was everything it promised to be and more. Trying to deal with the murders of a group of scientists that might well be tied to an activist’s disappearance, dealing with every possible incarnation of insanity both in the investigation and the town on the Arctic Circle she lived in, the viewer clung to Danvers as a rock in a shifting mess.

Foster brought elements of so many of her iconic characters — most notably Clarice Starling — but as in every one of her portrayals, there was always something different to it. I might have issues with the series being nominated for Best Drama but I have none with Foster and if she wins I will be among those who applaud the hardest.

Brie Larson, Lessons in Chemistry

In what is both her first role in television and her first major acting performances outside of Captain Marvel, Brie Larson demonstrates that, like so many other great performers before and since, the MCU was restraining her gifts. Elizabeth Zott is just as revolutionary a heroine as Carol Danvers was but she faces obstacles in her life that are far more dangerous than any alien — the sexism and bias of the 1940s and 1950s.

Trying her best to find a way forward when life does nothing but pile on horror after horror — suffering a vicious sexual assault and being asked to apologize to the man who assaulted her, never being accepted for her groundbreaking work in chemistry, being blamed for the death of the man she loved as a flaw in her work — all of these would be enough to bury a stronger woman. But nevertheless, Zott persists and endures.

This is a role far more layered and difficult to play than Larson has had in more than a decade and she demonstrates all the skills we saw when she spent her life being the most controversial hero in the MCU to this point. She has already been nominated for every major award for her work and is one of the heavy favorites. If Larson to win, I’d say she’s earned it not just for her work here but for coming out the side of so much controversy for playing a fictional character and reminded us what a great actress she is.

Julianne Moore, Mary & George

I didn’t realize that two of my perspective nominees in this category had in fact co-starred in The Kids are All Right until I made my list. They’re also by far the long shots among the six nominees. But I know very well both deserve a nomination in this category infinitely more than Kate Winslet does for The Regime.

Moore’s work is the more obvious contrast because her performance as Mary Villiers, the ruthless British noblewoman who will do anything to climb to power in British society, is everything that Kate Winslet’s Chancellor. Winslet’s character is fragile and easily kowtowed too by everything; Moore’s is brutal from the moment we meet her far more ruthless then the Chancellor ever could be. Mary Villiers will do anything to survive in society — murder, screw, steal — only along Anna she’s not only willing to get her hands dirty, she expects she has to a matter of course every step of the way. She is willing to manipulate the world around her, including her own son, in order to assure her place in society. And like Anna she manages to survive everything that happens but there’s barely a trace of remorse in anything that happens. If Mary Villiers had been Chancellor, no one would have dared stand against her.

Moore’s major problem is her series is on Starz, a network that has never in its long history been able to break into the Emmys. But this is one of the most brutally brilliant performances I saw this year and in comparison to Winslet’s work, well, there’s no comparison. Mary Villiers is cut from stronger stuff than Anna ever could be.

Juno Temple, Fargo

Juno Temple seems to have been the only performer in Ted Lasso not to walk away with any kind of prize during its run, though to be fair when one of your co-nominees is Hannah Waddingham, it’s inevitable you’ll be overshadowed and given the level of competition the last three years, it has been an honor just to be nominated. Now she takes on the role of Dot, a Minnesota housewife that is the complete reverse of Keeley Hawes: a woman looks delicate on the outside but who time and again shows the kind of power in her.

We see it not just in the traps that she leaves for so many of the brutes who try to abduct her for the ex-husband she ran away from nine years ago, but in the way she stands up to the ruthless mother-in-law when she tries to convince her to disappear. We see it in the way she is clearly loves her daughter and her husband with a purity of devotion that the viewer of Fargo usually considers a cover, but in Dot’s case it’s the only genuine thing about her. And we see at the end of the series when she faces down a five hundred year old soul eater and chooses not a path of violence, but to make breakfast for him.

Temple has already been nominated for a Golden Globe and SAG award in this category but will be facing off against a more formidable array of talent then she ever did in Supporting Actress in a Comedy. Her chances of winning here are remote, but so is walking away intact from everything that happens in the average season of Fargo and she managed that.

Naomi Watts, Capote Vs. The Swans

Of all the incredible actresses at the center of this series, Baitz wisely chooses to put Babe Paley’s relationship with Capote at the center of the series. It’s a brilliant choice not only because of the truth of the story but it gives another of the most undervalued performers in history a chance to shine.

Ever since she first dropped into the national consciousness as the amnesiac at the center of Mullholland Drive, Naomi Watts has been one of the quiet brilliant performers at the center of film and television. She’s been frequently appearing throughout some of the best Peak TV, the baffled wife at the center of the revival of Twin Peaks, Gretchen Carlson on The Loudest Voice, two brief Netflix TV series that gathered critical acclaim but not much viewership. Now as the wife of Bill Paley, she becomes by far the most tragic figure at the center of Capote’s world, a woman whose husband is constantly and flagrantly cheating on her, a mother who has failed her children, a woman who is dying of cancer. The break with Capote by far hurts her the most and it’s the loss of her friendship that, one could argue, essentially destroys Capote to the point that he is dead long before he dies. In the penultimate episode we see two fantasies of her, one in the last moments before she dies and again in the last moments before Truman does. In a series full of cynicism, Watts character and role has by far the most humanity.

The field Watts is in is likely to be in will include the Hollywood version of the Swans — some of the most famous performers of a certain age working today. Watts will be one of the few without an Oscar to her credit, but she reminds us again why she is just as great as them.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, A Gentleman In Moscow

I’ve made little secret how much I thought of Showtime’s A Gentleman in Moscow and I could have advocated easily either for the series or its lead Ewan McGregor to be nominated as part of this group. However, if a Showtime series is to be nominated it needs to be Fellow Travelers and McGregor has received recognition from the Emmys before (albeit not for the Limited Series I would have chosen) So I have decided to advocate for his wife’s work in the show instead. And there is much to love about Winstead’s performance — nearly as much as the actress herself.

As I have mentioned before Winstead has been one of the great unsung performers of Peak TV, from her work in Brain Dead to her stint in Ashoka but as Anna, the actress who finds herself reluctantly falling in love with Count Rostov she takes on a new level. As the kind of women whose thinking towards society can stun even Alexander they spend nearly thirty years living through the worst of times in every way yet somehow finding a path to love, no matter how much it comes as a shock to both. The ending that she and Alexander might well just be imaginary but it is fitting.

I could, if I chose, advocate for other deserving performers such as Jessica Lange or Awkwafina, both of whom dazzled in TV Movies that are likely to contend for the top prize. But I’m drawn by the work of Winstead. And the viewer will be too.

Tomorrow I move on to Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series/ TV Movie. Here I plan to deviate from the norm quite a bit.