Oscar Podcast #70: The Best Actress Breakdown with guest Isabel Custodio

This 70th AwardsWatch Oscar podcast I am joined by someone I've followed and enjoyed listening to for a long time, Isabel Custodio. You may know her better as be kind rewind from her fantastic YouTube videos that deconstruct the Best Actress Oscar races over the last 90 years. Always succinct and thoughtful; thorough and completely engaging, Isabel's passion for the Oscars, and especially, the history of actresses, is a natural fit for the AW podcast and I am so happy she was able to come aboard in a year with such a bandwidth of roles, performances and women heading up female-fronted films and controlling the narrative in them. 

The podcast opens with Isabel talking a bit about why she loves the Oscars and actresses so much and how it got her into creating her wonderful videos. 

As we start to dig into this year's race we quickly settle on the prevailing belief that the top 3 of Glenn Close (The Wife), Lady Gaga (A Star Is Born) and Olivia Colman (The Favourite) are as closed to locked in as can be and that it's nearly a dozen others fighting for the 4-5 spots. 

While we both think those two spots look the most likely for Viola Davis (Widows), Yalitza Aparicio (ROMA) and Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), each also comes with enough drawbacks that make room for a Felicity Jones (On the Basis of Sex), Nicole Kidman (Destroyer), Emily Blunt (Mary Poppins Returns) or KiKi Layne (If Beale Street Could Talk), just to name a few. 

We also dive into actress wins of the past and and offer some thoughts on the concept of a musical biopic vs a musical with regards to the Golden Globes.

Isabel and I offer our predictions as well as our hopefuls to get in in such a competitive year.

This podcast runs 1h 49m 30s.

Opening: "Look at me" clip from The Favourite, The Wife clip, "One Reason" clip from A Star Is Born

Closing: "New York City By Day" by Thomas Newman from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of Desperately Seeking Susan