Nicole Kidman Wins Best Actress, and Loses Her Beloved Mother, in One Overwhelming Moment

In Oscar terms, we’ve lived through a whole season in about a week—at least when it comes to the best actress race.

Between the Venice, Telluride, and Toronto Film Festivals, what once felt like a shapeless and wide-open lead actress field has come into abrupt, exciting focus. Credit Nicole Kidman’s thrilling but bittersweet Volpi Cup win in Venice this evening. Her performance in Babygirl, Halina Reijn’s acclaimed erotic drama, is among the very best of her screen career—fearless, vulnerable, and slyly comic at once. But she was unable to accept the award in person, as after just returning to Venice for the closing ceremony, she received some tragic personal news.

“Today I arrived in Venice to learn shortly thereafter that my beautiful, brave mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, has just passed,” Kidman wrote in a statement, which Reijn read while accepting the award on her behalf. “I’m in shock and I have to go to my family, but this award is for her. She shaped me, she guided me, and she made me. I’m beyond grateful that I get to say her name to all of you through Helena. The collision of art and life is heartbreaking, and my heart is broken.”

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As Kidman steps out of the public eye to be with her family, she’s likely to remain on many voters’ minds as the race continues. Let’s start with Telluride, where several potential players cemented their status as major contenders. There was Saoirse Ronan’s The Outrun, which played well enough in Sundance, and first-time campaigners Mikey Madison (Anora) and Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez), coming off of their movies’ Prize-winning launches in Cannes. The Colorado mountains offered each film a second wave of screenings, and goodness did both play spectacularly—as well as, if not better than the world premieres on the ground. Ronan was also honored with a Tribute Medallion, Telluride’s highest honor for actors, while I heard of hundreds being turned away from Anora and Emilia screenings due to demand. For those that did find a seat, the films and performances were received extremely well.

Over in Venice, beyond Kidman’s Babygirl, Angelina Jolie’s tour-de-force Maria launched. While the movie divided critics, her work at its center is undeniable, and the emotional biopic met a warmer reception overall in Telluride. With the Oscar winner out and about in Colorado, she’s clearly putting her might behind this one, and is not one to be counted out—especially with Netflix backing her campaign. (They’ve secured nominations in the category of late for Annette Bening and Ana de Armas, whose movies similarly received mixed reviews.) Here in Toronto, I also just caught another Venice premiere, Walter Salles’s terrific I’m Still Here, where Fernanda Torres is simply transcendent as Brazilian human rights activist Eunice Paiva. Sony Classics is handling that movie, The Outrun, and The Room Next Door—with a lovely Julianne Moore running in lead—so they have their hands full. But any discussion of this race without Torres is, to my mind, an incomplete one—and in an era of a globalizing Academy, merits serious consideration.

On Friday night, Toronto then introduced two intriguing, if less obvious, names to the mix. Screening opposite each other, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths and John Crowley’s We Live in Time offer diametrically opposed experiences—the former a prickly, intimate, uncompromising character study, and the latter a classically packaged tearjerker. Yet in the former, Marianne Jean-Baptiste is sensational, reuniting with the director behind the film that earned her an Oscar nomination, Secrets & Lies. Her role here is even richer, if a bit less broadly accessible. We Live in Time, meanwhile, certainly doesn’t have that problem—who doesn’t want to cry along to Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s tragic love story? But while Pugh gives yet another major, wrenching performance as a young woman facing the end of her life, A24 will have to work to position the film in a way where voters take it as more than a basic weepie.

There’s more going on here in Ontario too. You probably heard screeches of delight and horror in the wee hours of Friday morning, as the crowd for the electric Midnight opener The Substance poured onto King Street. Another Cannes holdover, that film is centered on the best performance of Demi Moore’s career, and rivets seemingly every audience put in front of it. Is it too gory, though, or simply too out-there? Possibly. And we’ll see what comes of the world premiere of Nightbitch tonight, starring Amy Adams. The comic trailer Searchlight put out implied the film may not be as much of an awards play as expected, but it feels foolish to doubt the multi-nominee Adams or director Marielle Heller, whose last two features led to Oscar noms for Tom Hanks and Melissa McCarthy, respectively.

The last thing these rival campaigns want, of course, is another strong possibility entering the fray. But in a field as dynamic as this one, blending legends at the top of their game with the year’s most exciting discoveries, the more the merrier. Let the games begin.

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