Oscar Seasoning: The Nicole Kidman Gap

One of the nerviest actresses in Hollywood has a surprisingly bland Oscar run.

It was pretty clear, many weeks before the announcement, that Nicole Kidman would never receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her work in Babygirl. Halina Reijn’s flinty and keen-eyed erotic drama is not typical awards season fare, and in a year where the leading actress category is overwhelmed with possible nominees, many sacrifices were made (no Angelina, no Amy, no Marianne.) It’s not as though Kidman has been blanked this season. She received a Golden Globe nomination and also took home an award at the Venice Film Festival. Those in the know appreciate Kidman’s work in Babygirl, but it’s also 100% the kind of thing that the Academy is allergic to. When they want to celebrate Kidman, they turn to the safer films, the ones that are far less representative of her talent and ambition.

(Image via A24.)

In Babygirl, Kidman plays Romy, a high-flying CEO of a tech company who seems to have the perfect life. Yet her dissatisfaction with her sex life and her hot husband’s inability to satisfy her kinky desires sees her fall on her knees for a dirtbag intern who plays the master to her submissive. She’s a steely woman who radiates control, but her passion to be put in her place by her lover leaves her dizzy and in a personal and professional mess.

It’s one of my favourite films of 2024 and one of my favourite performances from an actress I love. Kidman is excellent at playing ice queens whose seemingly impenetrable barriers crumble in drastic fashion. I’ve talked before about how Kidman is one of the nerviest actresses currently working in mainstream American cinema. She’s a true risk-taker. Her filmography is full of fascinating, prickly, and truly unique work that most actors of her stature would balk at. There are a number of films where she should have been an awards season frontrunner but more conservative industry figures avoided them like the plague. When it comes to Kidman and the Oscars, in particular, there’s a huge gap between her true capabilities and the work that mainstream Hollywood has embraced as “prestigious.”

Is there anything more indicative of the Academy’s timidity than how it treats Kidman? She has five Oscar nominations and one win over the course of 25 years. She took home Best Actress for her performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours and received noms for Moulin Rouge!, Rabbit Hole, Lion, and Being the Ricardos. It's not that any of these performances are bad (although I wasn't a fan of her version of Lucille Ball, as reimagined by Aaron Sorkin), but they feel like Kidman-lite. It’s mostly Oscar bait Nicole, and as any awards season expert can tell you, Oscar bait is seldom unexpected or daring.

(Image via Millennium Films.)

There are obvious exceptions. It’s still pretty striking how Isabelle Huppert landed her only Oscar nomination for Elle, a tonal tightrope act that balances dark comedy, feminist satire, and rape revenge fantasy. The past couple of years of Best Actress wins, with Michelle Yeoh and Emma Stone, have been decidedly un-Oscary fare that skewed speculative over realist. Still, the nominations speak for themselves and actresses remain boxed into simpler types that the industry both prefers for women and restricts them to. Even in strong years for acting choices, it still feels like the Lead and Supporting Actress line-ups feature a lot of "supportive spouse" roles with no meat on their bones.

With Kidman, we have her consciously melodramatic turn in Moulin Rouge!, which is a blast of a performance and one of the most un-Oscary nominations in her filmography. Then there’s The Hours, where it’s arguable if she’s even the lead out of the three actresses at the heart of the narrative but it was a showy transformation into a real-life person, complete with the most talked-about prosthetic nose in the biz. She’s very good as Virginia Woolf and it is certainly transformative, although the notorious nose was divisive (it often looks weirdly green in some scenes.) Post-divorce, she was no longer Mrs. Cruise and that Oscar win felt like the industry finally crowning her as a true star independent of her ex. Remember, for most of the ‘90s, even when she was giving amazing performances in films like To Die For and The Portrait of a Lady, Hollywood seemed unsure of what to do with her beyond see her as a Wife.

It would take 18 years for her to get another nomination, with most of her weirder and more daring roles being overlooked (hi, Birth truthers.) Rabbit Hole is a frequently ignored feature of Kidman's filmography. It's a serious family drama about grieving a child that's based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, but it's also directed by the deeply un-mainstream John Cameron Mitchell and rejects a lot of the "death drama" tropes. For one thing, it's extremely funny, but naturally so. Kidman is very understated in Rabbit Hole, which led many to believe she might not make it into Best Actress in the year of Black Swan's Natalie Portman. But she did. For my money, it's her best nomination and the one that feels closest to Kidman-esque.

(Image via The Weinstein Company - I know, I know.)

Then Kidman got nominated in 2016 for Lion, where she's... the mum. She has an awful wig and one great monologue but it's a nothing part in a film where Dev Patel is the undisputed star (but still supporting for category fraud.) Like literally every actress over the age of 23, Kidman has played her fair share of supporting wives and mothers, and Lion is the peak of that. Again, she's not bad in it. But it's more representative of the lack of industry growth for actresses than the seeming greatness of the role or actress. To the surprise of nobody that year, Viola Davis won for Fences, even though it's a leading performance.

Kidman's most recent nomination, from 2021, was her second biopic performance. In Being the Ricardos, Kidman plays the iconic Lucille Ball in an Aaron Sorkin production that is largely an excuse for him to lecture everyone on how TV works. Kidman is very adept at Sorkin-ese but she was all wrong for Ball. She lacked the elasticity of Ball's physicality. The voice was off. Her comic timing didn't fit. We needed a Kathryn Hahn here, not a Nicole. Kidman can be very funny but usually with drier or darker humour, like in To Die For. I don’t usually care if an actor doesn’t 100% sound or look like the real person they’re playing. I think biopic acting can be staid and feel more like an actor showing off the homework they did than creating a fully-formed human being. With Kidman, if she was just playing a driven ‘50s comedienne, it’d be easier to swallow. But as Lucille Ball? It didn’t work. Still, it was Kidman playing a cultural icon and that year there were three women nominated for biopics (and she lost to one of them – Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye.)

What would a more accurately Kidman-esque nominations bracket look like? I’d put in To Die For and Portrait of a Lady, which remain two of her best works. Lars Von Trier's Dogville is controversial for all of the obvious Trier-related reasons but Kidman is undeniably stellar in it. Birth sees her play around with ideas of grief and doubt that are challenging to consume. She's at her most heated in The Paperboy, a movie where her peeing on Zac Efron's leg is one of the more normal things she does. I'm stunned she isn't a regular in the Yorgos Lanthinos ensemble following The Killing of a Sacred Deer, where she is icy and expertly handles the Greek director's sterile surrealism. And, of course, Babygirl, which feels like a climax to the Kidman-esque as it bumps up against her public image as an ice queen.

(She’s also great in season two of Top of the Lake!)

In fairness, said image has long been cultivated by Kidman, particularly in her prestige TV roles where she dominates the “rich lady in domestic peril” genre. I even wrote about it for TheWrap when I reviewed The Perfect Couple!

It’s not just Kidman, but many actresses suffer from this fate. There are signs of incremental improvement. This is a year where the frontrunner for Best Actress is a body horror satire full of prosthetics, blood fountains, and chicken drumsticks being pulled from people’s navels. It’s the antithesis of an Oscar movie, and Demi Moore’s performance is the kind of thing that only a few months ago we were assured was just “too much” for the Academy. So, the answer is clear: Nicole Kidman needs to do a hard-R body horror film. David Cronenberg, where are you?!