Here’s why Cate Blanchett will win Oscar #3 for ‘Tar’

This year’s acting races have been delightfully unpredictable. No actor has managed to sweep the major precursor awards. Now, this may make Oscar prognostication more difficult for pundits, but all the more exciting for it. One race that is coming more and more down to the wire as we approach Sunday’s ceremony is Best Actress.

Frontrunners Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh both were victorious at the Golden Globes in their respective categories and shared the overwhelming majority of regional critics prizes. After gaining momentum the past two months with Critics Choice and BAFTA, Blanchett looked to be the sure winner by many. However, after the guilds chimed in and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” began its surge, Yeoh made a comeback with a win at SAG scalp, which completely turned the tables on the trajectory of this race.

While nearly all of our 26 experts sided with Blanchett heading into SAG, now only seven predict her to take the Oscar statuette this Sunday; the other 19 have Yeoh. This is a rather extreme switch in consensus and it should be made clear that this Best Actress race is still very much up in the air.

Here’s why I think Blanchett still has the upper hand.

In recent years the SAG ensemble prize has proven to be a singularly influential precursor for underdog Best Picture winners like “CODA”, “Parasite” and “Crash.” But that’s less and less the case with the individual acting awards. This can largely be attributed to the merging of SAG and AFTRA in 2012.  The voter membership increased nearly 50% and no longer consisted of solely actors, but also journalists, radio hosts, internet influencers and other media professionals.

This has had an influence on the singular predictive nature of the SAG awards with regard to the Oscars. These days, a lesser proportion of the membership overlaps with AMPAS, and with the increase in demographic and occupation, the resulting winners are, therefore, more populist leaning. This can mean checking off actors names due to their reputation, along with also checking off actors from more popular, culturally relevant films in the eyes of the public.

Yeoh had both those factors working for her. “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is a populist phenom. The genre-bending indie-blockbuster made history with its box office gross. It became one of the first mainstream films to successfully and empathetically explore Gen Z nihilism. It is making leaps and bounds for artists of colour in Hollywood, particularly asian actors.

Yeoh is an icon of cinema for her work over the years, particularly in action films. In 2008, she was named the greatest action heroine of all time by Rotten Tomatoes. In 2022, Time named her Icon of the Year and among the top 100 most influential people. Therefore, Yeoh’s best actress win at SAG shouldn’t have been a surprise. And it was part of an unprecedented sweeping quartet of SAG awards for “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. The film took home Best Ensemble, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan) and Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis).

“Tar”, on the other hand, is a high brow prestige picture chronicling the chaotic downfall of revered fictitious female composer that was a box office disappointment. It only received the single SAG nomination for Blanchett’s performance. So it makes sense why Yeoh won out over Blanchett here. SAG was Michelle Yeoh’s hunting ground.

But there’s a different criteria when it comes to those vying for the golden Oscar statuette. Simply put, “Tar” has snob appeal. And it showed with its astounding over performance at Oscar nominations reaping expected bids for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay as well as Best Cinematography (11th in our combined odds) and Best Film Editing (9th in our combined odds) categories. There is wide support for “Tar” in the eyes of the academy. 

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