Best Actress
Winner: Kristen Stewart, “Spencer”
In “Spencer,” Kristen Stewart delivers undeniably the most talked about performance of the year, and it’s not difficult to see why. Stewart’s Diana is dynamic, at times a near photorealistic rendering of the people’s princess, and at other points she’s slightly off-kilter. This slight incongruity is not a detriment to her performance, but rather one of its many compelling facets. K-Stew is Diana laid bare: unobscured by the press and disentangled from her own performance, a version infrequently glanced by the public during her lifetime.
Director Pablo Larraín veers sharply off the road with his figuration of a quasi-horror mise en scene that despoils Diana in a way not unlike the monarchy’s plunder of resources. As her psyche erodes, she is reduced to a mere relic of the Diana of the popular imagination, standing in stark opposition to the resplendent Chanel garb that adorns her.
Accordingly, Stewart’s delivery is incisive and terse, emblematic of her resolute resistance to the royal family. “Beauty is useless, beauty is clothing,” she spits in protest of her heavily regimented outfit plan. Her performance is also corporeal, punctuated by sprints across dewy fields, gasps burdened by the weight of a strand of pearls (the same ones Charles also gifted Camilla) and gags — also the pearl’s doing.
Casting Stewart as Diana is certainly a bold move, but one that is in many ways the perfect choice for a 2021 resuscitation of a familiar tale — Stewart’s languid malleability the ideal vessel for contemporary discussions of celebrity, public performance and power.
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