Continuing my personal list of Oscar nominations with a look at the Best Actress race.

Jessie Buckley – I’m Thinking of Ending Things

I believe Buckley should have received a Best Actress nod for her work in 2018’s Wild Rose, and she’s just as good here. She is clearly a major talent on the rise. In Charlie Kaufman’s depressing puzzle box of a movie, Buckley has the challenge of playing a projection. But she infuses the character with so much warmth and intelligence that she feels like a flesh and blood human being. So much so that the film noticeably sags when her character drops out of the narrative toward the end. Buckley is one of those actors who will always be the most magnetic presence in anything she does.

Carrie Coon – The Nest

Speaking of magnetic presences… I have adored Carrie Coon since I saw her mesmerizing work in The Leftovers. She dazzled once again in Season 3 of Fargo, and was memorable in small film roles in Gone Girl and The Post. With the 80s-set family drama The Nest, she is finally given a big-screen lead role the chew on, and my god does she ever deliver. Whether reducing her husband (Jude Law) to a pile of ashes with a withering stare or releasing her frustration by dancing alone in a nightclub, Coon is so real and so fierce she practically burns through the screen.

Han Ye-Ri – Minari

So often the less showy roles in a movie are ignored come awards time. This year, I’ve been happy to see Steven Yeun celebrated for his quiet work in Minari, alongside the more obvious (but equally deserving) Youn Yuh-jung. But I wish Han Ye-Ri, who plays mother, wife and daughter Monica, was getting the same recognition. This is as much her movie as Yeun’s, as her connections to every other character run even deeper. She brings grace and strength to the role of a woman fighting to keep her family together in a strange new world. She deserves this nod if only for the scene where she tearfully smells the spices her mother brought from Korea, conveying so much while doing so little.

Frances McDormand – Nomadland

Only Daniel Day Lewis and Katherine Hepburn have won three or more Oscars for lead roles. If Frances McDormand joins them this year, it’s hard to think of an actor more worthy of the honor. In Nomadland, she plays an alternate universe version of herself, inhabiting the role so completely you never believe her Fern is actually a rich movie star slumming it for her art. Her performance is almost entirely internal, and she is at her most moving when simply listening to the stories of the real nomads around her and embodying the empathy and openness at the heart of Chloe Zhao’s beautiful film.

Elisabeth Moss – The Invisible Man

Anybody who thought Elisabeth Moss wouldn’t be able to shake off the role of Mad Men‘s Peggy Olson has been proven wrong repeatedly over the past several years. On the contrary, she appears able to disappear into any role she’s given. In The Invisible Man, Moss takes a standard B-movie template and classes the joint up with a top-notch performance. She portrays an emotionally unraveling victim of domestic violence and gaslighting who has the inner strength to fight off both internal and external demons.

And the winner is… Carrie Coon.