Too often over the past decade, the acting races at the Academy Awards have seemed sewn up from the earliest days of festival season. Think of Renée Zellweger’s long walk to an Oscar for Judy or Will Smith’s for King Richard. Even when those wire-to-wire betting favorites faltered, it happened without warning, so that no late drama was injected into the campaigns. Remember that Olivia Colman’s upset over Glenn Close in 2019 was a welcome surprise after months of certainty that we’d all have to rent The Wife on demand, and that, two years ago, everyone was positive Chadwick Boseman would win a posthumous Best Actor for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The producers of that year’s Oscars telecast took the unprecedented step of slotting that category at the end of the night, after Best Picture; Boseman ended up losing to Anthony Hopkins, who wasn’t in attendance.
This year’s lead categories—especially Actor—are a refreshing pivot away from apparent inevitability. At various points over the past six months, Austin Butler (Elvis), Brendan Fraser (The Whale), and Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin) have each been considered the favorite, and all three remain distinct possibilities. And though Cate Blanchett has long been earmarked as the Best Actress winner for her performance in Tár, Michelle Yeoh appears to be closing the gap as Everything Everywhere All at Once surges. Still, Best Supporting Actor, where Everything’s Ke Huy Quan has become a prohibitive favorite, is over.
That leaves Best Supporting Actress, which looks likely to go to Angela Bassett for playing Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Despite being a tremendous actress with an extensive résumé, Bassett hasn’t been nominated since losing in the lead category to Holly Hunter for The Piano in 1993. That was the year Bassett starred as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It. (An aside: Black women have won a total of 10 acting Oscars in 94 years, evidence of the dearth of opportunities the industry has afforded to Black actors and filmmakers, and the lack of promotional and awards attention they have long received.) In 2022, Bassett was commanding as Ramonda: She brings gravity even to the green-screen soup that Wakanda Forever becomes in its middle act. The film sorely misses her when she leaves.
While Bassett would be a deserving winner—and while her Supporting win is not as assured as Quan’s—she’s not quite the strongest candidate in that category. (At the SAG Awards on Sunday night, Jamie Lee Curtis won in a sizable upset against the same field she’ll face at the Dolby Theatre in March.) The Banshees of Inisherin is on its most immediate level a film about men: their ambitions, their stupidities, their inability to speak to one another. And it’s been recognized for it, with Farrell’s nomination in Best Actor joined by Brendan Gleeson’s and Barry Keoghan’s in Supporting. But the best performance in Banshees—the one that heightens its comedy, deepens its tragedy, and tests the literal and existential limits of its setting—is Kerry Condon’s. The Irish actress has been collaborating with writer-director Martin McDonagh since 2001, when she landed a lead role in his play The Lieutenant of Inishmore at age 18; the rhythms of his script are most vividly conveyed through her. Here she does career-best work as Siobhán, the self-possessed sister to Farrell’s Pádraic and one of the more quietly tortured characters to appear on screens this year.
Set on a fictional island off the coast of Ireland in the spring of 1923, Banshees follows Pádraic after his nightly drinking buddy, Colm (Gleeson), informs him he’d no longer like to be friends. Colm’s rationale is that the “aimless chatting” he does with Pádraic, whom he now says he’s always found dull, is keeping him from composing music that will outlive him—keeping him, in other words, from doing something that matters. Especially after McDonagh’s embarrassing attempt to wrap his arms around American policing with 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Banshees is delightfully narrow. Though the Irish Civil War rages on the mainland, that feels more like a metaphor for the conflict between friends, rather than the other way around.
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From the movie’s opening moments, Siobhán has the clearest understanding of that conflict’s stakes. She’s the one who says, at the first sign Colm might be avoiding her brother, “Maybe he just doesn’t like you no more.” When she says this, she’s smiling, prodding him. But soon she recognizes just how much this might crush Pádraic. When the siblings offer a meal and a bed to Dominic (Keoghan), the young man Siobhán had just assured Pádraic was considered the dullest on the isle, and Dominic uses the word “touché”—which Pádraic clearly doesn’t know—she shoots an alarmed glance at him before catching and correcting herself. Later, she’s summoned to the pub to de-escalate a fight between her brother and Colm, who’s scoffing at the idea that relationships can bring the same meaning to life as artistic immortality. Arriving late and unseen, Siobhán hears Pádraic say, “My sister, she’s nice. I’ll remember her. Forever I’ll remember her.” Condon’s reaction shot shows at once the deep love Siobhán has for Pádraic and the terror she feels over what might become of him emotionally.
Her alarm quickly grows more external—and is revealed to have a more personal dimension. Though Pádraic has noted that his sister likes to read, we’re surprised to learn that she’s applied and received an offer to work at a library on the mainland. Siobhán feels stifled in tiny Inisherin; early in the film, she asks her brother if he ever gets lonely, only for him to brush aside the question, closing the door to their home, leaving Siobhán to stare into a mirror. McDonagh is not a subtle filmmaker, but Condon is a subtle actress: that yearning for a more fulfilling life and the sorrow she feels at the thought of leaving Pádraic run parallel through every scene Condon plays from that point forward. Even the one time she explodes—just before the half-hour mark, when she confronts Colm at the pub—there are two, three emotions fighting for real estate on her face. The spat ends with Colm saying he’s looking for “a bit of peace.” “You can understand that,” he asks. “Can’t ya?” That question is delivered over a reverse shot of Condon’s face: wide-eyed and agitated, yet in quiet agreement.
That her relationship with Pádraic could keep Siobhán on the island speaks to one of the most refreshing things about Banshees: its willingness to show a deep, platonic love between adult men and women. Of course, it uses the workaround of making them siblings (and skirts any incestuous undertones—this isn’t Game of Thrones or a Dana Spiotta book). Still, a sincere bond outside the confines of a heterosexual relationship is rare enough to be novel; Condon and Farrell bring integrity to the relationship, as when she keeps her one barb about his intelligence just out of earshot, or when he, frustrated with her over her insistence on inviting over an unwelcome guest, nevertheless sighs and says, “This is your house, too.” That line is so earnest, in fact, that it catches her off guard. In that moment Condon plays first the shock of being treated so gently, and then the ensuing dread that this is the home she’s chosen at the expense of the ones she’s imagined.
All told, Banshees received nine nominations in eight categories. It could win in a handful of those, including Actor and Original Screenplay, where it’s in a near toss-up with Everything Everywhere All at Once. And if Everything does falter in Best Picture, Banshees is perhaps the most likely spoiler. (Given the longstanding warmth toward McDonagh in the Academy, and given Banshees’ lack of divisiveness, it’s sure to appear high on many preferential ballots.) If Condon does pull the upset over Bassett, you should scramble to find whatever last-minute action you can on Best Picture; even if she doesn’t, you should revisit the work she does here, which could end up living in the collective memory as a historic Oscars miss.
Paul Thompson is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.