Best Actress cliffhanger: Will we have another tie at this year’s Oscars?

Jacob Sarkisian
·4 min read
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Best Actress has come down to the two-horse race we always thought it would do as we enter Oscars weekend. “Poor Things” star Emma Stone took home the Best Comedy Actress Golden Globe as well as the Critics Choice and BAFTA awards for Best Actress. Meanwhile, “Killers of the Flower Moon” performer Lily Gladstone landed the Best Drama Actress Golden Globe and snagged the SAG award for Best Actress. That has left us Oscarologists split. Gladstone is slightly ahead in our Oscars odds chart for Best Actress but, truthfully, it could go either way.

Or could it go the same way?

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Could Stone and Gladstone produce a delightful shock and share the Best Actress Oscar in a tie? Wouldn’t that be fun? Stone and Gladstone both seem like they’d be overjoyed if that were to happen, and so would we be. Best Actress has ended in a tie before. The 1969 Oscars saw Katharine Hepburn (“The Lion in Winter”) and Barbra Streisand (“Funny Girl”) both win Best Actress in a tie. The SAGs weren’t around back then but both women had split the precursors in a similar way. Hepburn won the BAFTA and Best Drama Actress Globe while Streisand had taken home the Best Comedy Actress Globe. This is the only tie we’ve had in this category but there have been five other ties in Oscars history.

Wallace Beery (“The Champ”) and Fredric March (“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) won Best Actor in 1932. In 1950, Best Documentary Short was awarded to both “A Chance to Live” and “So Much for So Little.” Then, Hepburn and Streisand’s famous draw occurred in 1969 before “Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got” and “Down and Out in America” both won Best Documentary in 1987.

Eight years later, in 1995, “Trevor” and “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life” both took home the Best Live Action Short Film Oscar. That latter short was notably won by later “Doctor Who” actor Peter Capaldi (alongside Ruth Kenley-Letts). The most recent tie came in 2013 when Best Sound Editing was awarded to “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Skyfall.”

There have been a couple of occasions where a draw didn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibilities. Daniel Day-Lewis (“Gangs of New York”) and Jack Nicholson (“About Schmidt”) split the precursor awards in 2003 and could have, in theory, tied the Oscar. In fact, they actually tied the Best Actor award at the Critics Choice Awards that year, so it really could have happened. Instead, Adrien Brody (“The Pianist”) took advantage of the vote split and won the Oscar.

And in 2014, Jennifer Lawrence (“American Hustle”) and Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) split the Best Supporting Actress precursors between them before Nyong’o edged the Oscar on the night.

Last year, “Tár” actress Cate Blanchett was in a two-way battle with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star Michelle Yeoh for Best Actress. Yeoh snuck the Oscar win.

Stone and Gladstone have provided us with another closely fought battle this year, which is a welcome respite from the predictability of the other three acting races. If Gladstone prevails, she’ll be the second Best Actress champ in a row to win on their first nomination after Yeoh. If Stone won, it would be her second Best Actress trophy after she won in 2017 for “La La Land.” She was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2015 for “Birdman” and in 2019 for “The Favourite.” This year, she’s also nominated for Best Picture for “Poor Things” as a producer alongside Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, and director Yorgos Lanthimos.

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