15 Best Actress contenders for the 2024 Oscars

Steven Spielberg was the first director to bring Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple to the screen back in 1985. That film was nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, but didn’t win any. Now, nearly 40 years later, the Academy could make up for that oversight. A good place to start would be nominating The Color Purple’s Fantasia Barrino for Best Actress. Barrino stars as Celie, the role formerly played by Whoopi Goldberg, and she has a bigger challenge than Goldberg did. Barrino not only has to act but sing and dance as well, because this version is based on the Broadway musical that opened in 2005. Could Barrino be the next Jennifer Hudson, another American Idol alum who went on to win an Oscar for Dreamgirls?

The true story of long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64 gave Annette Bening a chance to disappear into a character like she’s never quite done before. Nyad doesn’t hold back on the darker aspects of its subject’s self-absorbed determination, and Bening doesn’t either. It’s not a glamorous role, but it is a meaty one. Bening’s co-star, Jodie Foster, is also getting some attention and could land a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role of Nyad’s best friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll.

In Memory, a romantic indie drama from Mexican director Michel Franco (After Lucia), Jessica Chastain plays a social worker and recovering alcoholic who finds herself drawn to a man (played by Peter Sarsgaard) suffering from dementia who may be connected to a traumatic incident from her past. Thanks to a waiver granted by the actors’ guild, Chastain was one of a handful of actors who actually got to promote her film at the Venice Film Festival and elsewhere. That may give her a bit of a head start heading into awards season, and with three Oscar nominations to her name and a win in 2022 for The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, she’s clearly in the Academy’s good graces.

TV fans know Jodie Comer best for her Emmy- and BAFTA-winning role as unhinged assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve. They also know what an electric performer she can be. With The Bikeriders, Comer has a chance to show off her bottomless well of charisma for a new audience. Taking inspiration from the documentary photo book of the same name, the film captures the Midwestern motorcycle culture of the late ’60s. Comer plays Kathy, the long-suffering wife of a biker (played by Austin Butler) who accepts no nonsense from her husband and his pals in the Vandals gang. Comer has already made a name for herself in the worlds of television and theater (she won a Tony last year for her performance in the one-woman play Prima Facie); it’s only a matter of time before she conquers the big screen as well.

We included Fair Play’s Alden Ehrenreich on our list of Best Actor contenders, so we would be remiss if we didn’t also mention his co-star Phoebe Dynevor as one to watch in the Best Actress category. As scene partners Ehrenreich and Dynevor give each other a lot to work with in this erotic thriller, covering the distance from sweet romance to bitter rivals with impressive fluidity. But when the film reaches its harrowing climax, it’s Dynevor’s commanding performance that launches it to another level entirely.

Origin hasn’t been on a lot of people’s radar yet, but it’s got a lot of potential to be a strong late entry this awards season. Writer-director Ava DuVernay took a creative approach to adapting the non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by centering it on author Isabel Wilkerson and her research as she worked on the book. Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson in this deeply resonant and emotional story that tackles the origins of racism and classism in our society, from India to Nazi Germany to the United States. Ellis-Taylor was previously nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2022 for King Richard, so her talent is still fresh on the minds of Academy voters and could carry her to a nomination for Best Actress, or even a win.

The accolades for Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro aren’t surprising, but the real revelation of Killers Of The Flower Moon is Lily Gladstone’s performance as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman whose family’s oil wealth makes her a target of greedy white men. The producers were so impressed with her and the positive response she’s received that they submitted Gladstone in the Best Actress category rather than Best Supporting. We’ll see if that decision pays off. If she does receive an Oscar nomination Gladstone will make history as the first Native American woman to do so.

Another strong contender for Best Actress, Sandra Hüller’s performance in Anatomy Of A Fall was the talk of the festival circuit this summer after the film won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Hüller plays a famous author put on trial for murder after her husband falls from their attic to his death. Part mystery, part legal drama, the title works both literally and metaphorically as a study of a failing marriage. Hüller’s chances could get a boost from another standout performance this year, in a supporting role in The Zone Of Interest. If she is nominated for Best Actress this year she’d be joining the likes of Penélope Cruz and last year’s winner Michelle Yeoh, both of whom were honored for their bilingual performances, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Everything Everywhere All At Once, respectively.

Another actress who might get a nomination for a bilingual performance this year is Greta Lee, who stars in the emotionally affecting drama Past Lives. Since the film premiered at Sundance last January, critics and audiences have been swooning over the indie darling. So much so that it’s still in the Oscars conversation 10 months later and has yet to be bumped off lists of the best films of 2023 by newer releases. A big part of that is Lee’s delicate and touching performance as Nora, a writer who reconnects with a childhood friend (Teo Yoo) she met before her family moved away from Korea. The film’s journey to the Oscars has drawn comparisons to last year’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, and if that holds true, we like Lee’s chances.

With such a strong field of performances this year, Helen Mirren may be a longshot for recognition for her role as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Golda, but it’s Helen Frickin’ Mirren in a wig-and-makeup biopic, and that kind of thing is generally like catnip to Academy voters. Plus, with current affairs being what they are, we can’t count out a nomination as a political statement. The film documents Meir’s actions during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It’s an uneven film that didn’t make much of a splash when it premiered in theaters this summer, but there’s no denying that Mirren is terrific in it.

Not since Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt won Best Actor and Best Actress for As Good as It Gets in 1997 has a single film been recognized in both leading acting categories, but it could happen this year based on the strength of the performances in Maestro. As the film’s director, co-writer, and star, Bradley Cooper has been the focus of a lot of the talk about this film, but as more critics have gotten a chance to see Maestro a popular takeaway has been that Mulligan shines just as brightly. As Felicia Montealegre, the wife of composer Leonard Bernstein, she is the emotional center of the film around which everything else revolves. Mulligan has two Oscar nominations already—for An Education in 2009 and for Promising Young Woman in 2020—and it’s safe to speculate that she’ll rack up another one this year.

In Todd Haynes’ black comedy melodrama May December, Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, an actress who takes the concept of research to extreme lengths. Portman’s character is cast in a film based on the true story of a woman who made tabloid headlines when she had an affair with a teenage boy. Things get intense when Elizabeth travels to Georgia to meet and study her character’s real-life inspiration (played by Julianne Moore). Portman hasn’t given such a layered and chilling performance since Black Swan, which won her an Oscar in 2011. Another point in her favor is Haynes’ solid track record when it comes to actresses in his films getting Oscar nods—Moore was nominated for Far From Heaven, Rooney Mara was nominated for Carol, and Cate Blanchett earned nods for Carol and I’m Not There.

It’s safe to say that Margot Robbie is a high-heeled shoe-in for a Best Actress nomination for her lead role in Barbie. She made us laugh, she made us cry, she made us question the patriarchy—it’s a perfect example of what happens when you match a character with exactly the right actor. Though she didn’t have to do much physically to transform herself into Stereotypical Barbie, there’s so much going on under the surface as she transitions from perfect plastic doll to only slightly less perfect human. While a nomination seems inevitable, we’ll have to see if she can make it past the Academy’s tendency to be biased against populist choices.

There would be a nice symmetry in seeing Cailee Spaeny receive a nomination for the title role in Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla after Austin Butler got so much hype at the Oscars last year for playing Elvis. Coppola takes a more minimalist approach, in contrast to the cacophony of Baz Luhrmann’s take on The King. She also shifts the focus away from Elvis to give us Priscilla’s point of view, a more private and darker portrait than we typically see. Spaeny takes the character from the blush of teenage love to the jaded weariness of a wife and mother trapped inside a gilded, plush-carpeted cage. It’s a subtle magic trick that happens right before our eyes.

As always, there are a lot of factors at play during awards season, and the strike certainly threw everything off for a while, but Emma Stone sure feels like the frontrunner for Best Actress this year. Poor Things hasn’t even been released in theaters yet, but the buzz for months now has been that the award is Stone’s to lose. In this dreamy take on Frankenstein from director Yorgos Lanthimos she plays Bella Baxter, a woman brought back from the dead who begins a journey of self-actualization, much to the chagrin of the men around her. Lanthimos and Stone previously worked together on The Favourite, which earned her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress. This year, she’s heading into awards season as a favorite of a different kind.