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When I predicted some of the biggest narratives coming to Oscar season a few weeks ago, I mentioned that though the best actress lineup may seem thin now, there was always reason to hope for some new movies to come along and shake things up.
Unfortunately, now the opposite has happened. This week, Neon pushed the release of A Place in Hell, starring Michelle Williams and Daisy Edgar-Jones, from Christmas Day to April of next year.
The film, directed by Fair Play’s Chloe Domont, was one of the bizarrely few titles in the race this year directed by or about women. It also seemed like it could very well finally be an Oscar win for Williams, a five-time nominee who — as you may have heard on this week’s podcast — is a very good bet to win at some point in the next decade. A weak best actress field felt like the ideal circumstance for Williams to cross the finish line — so why wouldn’t Neon take advantage?
Releasing A Place in Hell in April doesn’t mean this can’t all happen in 2028. As we are constantly discussing on the podcast, a spring release — like Sinners, Everything Everywhere All at Once and now Project Hail Mary — can be a great launchpad for a movie poised to go the distance, and rumor has it that A Place in Hell has played well with early audiences. Neon also has its hands more than full this fall, having just added Luca Guadagnino’s AI movie, Artificial, to its already packed slate (Fjord, All of a Sudden, Paper Tiger and Clarissa), so it could be logical to clear space for a movie that’s strong enough to stand on its own next year.
But seriously: Who is going to win best actress this year? Former winner and American treasure Julianne Moore seems to have a place carved out in the five thanks to the strong trailer for A24’s The Debut, now likely to premiere at Telluride (at least based on its Toronto International Film Festival international premiere designation). International stars Sandra Hüller (Fatherland), Léa Seydoux (Gentle Monster) and Renate Reinsve (Fjord) all possess strong Cannes titles, while Penélope Cruz (Bunker) and Cynthia Erivo (Prima Facie) are major stars with festival premieres on the horizon.
But the actress gaining the most steam in the conversations I’ve had is Inde Navarrette, the breakout star of the year’s breakout hit, Obsession. I’m hearing that Focus has a robust awards campaign planned for the film, which debuted at TIFF last year, and Navarrette and wunderkind writer-director Curry Barker both feel like the kind of discoveries awards voters will be clamoring to meet on the campaign trail.
The betting markets are all the way in on Navarrette — Bill Simmons is in her corner, too — and though I feel a bit more cautious at the moment, you also have to ask yourself: Why not her? This is a post-Aunt Gladys world, and as Anora’s Mikey Madison proved in 2024, Oscar voters also still love an ingénue. Even in an Oscar race that looks to be stuffed full of blockbusters, Obsession will be the success story everyone wants to talk about. I can’t wait to see how far the team at Focus can take it.
HBO’s Drama Whisperer
When Salli Richardson-Whitfield looks at the scripts for a season of television she’ll be directing, she always knows exactly which episode she wants: the hard one.
Take the Task episode that earned her an Emmy nomination this year, with the lengthy sentence-case title, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a river.” The penultimate episode of the season, it kicks off with a tense shootout in the forest, includes the deaths of multiple main characters and ends with a revelation that perfectly sets up the season finale.
It might be one of the most complex hours of television of the past year — except, maybe, for the Gilded Age season three finale, which begins with a tense surgery scene and ends with two lavish balls. Salli Richardson-Whitfield, of course, directed that one too, and this year became the first Black woman to ever have two directing Emmy nominations in the same year.
“I think for any director, we want to do the big things,” Richardson-Whitfield says. “We want to do the fun episode. If it doesn’t feel scary, then why am I doing it? I want to be outside my comfort zone because I know that I’m going to learn from there, and I believe that I will rise to the occasion.”
Richardson-Whitfield, 58, has already pulled off the kind of career transition that would scare off anyone else. She started as an actress, with major roles in Antwone Fisher and I Am Legend, before stepping behind the camera for the first time on the Syfy series Eureka. It was Ava DuVernay, her director on the 2010 indie I Will Follow, who first suggested Richardson-Whitfield was thinking like a director, paying attention to the logistics of a set in a way many actors do not.
“Once I directed my first and second time, I realized I did have an eye,” Richardson-Whitfield says. “I knew exactly what I wanted to see, what that frame should be.” On The Gilded Age in particular, she says, her attention to detail is well-known. “If the curtain doesn’t match that curtain and if that bowl isn’t in the center or that chair is off, I will see it. I just realized very early on that I understood the assignment of what directing was supposed to be.”
Though she does still act — she even appears in one episode of Task — Richardson-Whitfield is primarily behind the camera these days, with a first-look deal at HBO that allows her to develop her own projects in addition to directing episodes of some of the network’s standout shows. After taking a break from The Gilded Age in its second season to work on HBO’s Winning Time (for which she earned her first Emmy nomination for directing in 2024), Richardson-Whitfield returned to the show’s New York set for season three, even as Task was still in production in Pennsylvania.
“I left while still shooting Task and had to shoot a few scenes of Gilded,” Richardson-Whitfield explains, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who has figured out much bigger logistical headaches. “I read the scenes that day, directed the scenes in Gilded, and then went back to Task to finish shooting, and then came back to Gilded.”
When I ask if that kind of juggle is her preferred way of working, Richardson-Whitfield explains that she was an athlete in high school. “I am that person, like, ‘I can do this. Game on,’’’ she says. “I like adversity, and I like the challenge of it.”
You might actually be able to see the influence of Task in The Gilded Age, even though the shows are so stylistically different. At the start of the finale episode, Morgan Spector’s tycoon character George Russell has been shot in the stomach, and undergoes emergency surgery in his parlor with the help of his wife (Carrie Coon), his neighbor (Louisa Jacobson) and the surgeon (Jordan Donica) who happened to be across the street. It’s a tense, stressful scene, much more visceral than the show’s usual drama about opera houses and party invitations.
“It made sense in prepping it,” Richardson-Whitfield says of the handheld camera used in that scene, a major departure from the usual sweeping camera movements of The Gilded Age. “You do all these different styles, and you can always bring that into any genre you’re doing.”
That Gilded Age scene also shares some of the intense intimacy that makes Task so striking, like when the shootout sequence pauses for an emotional confrontation that leads to the — spoiler alert! — fatal stabbing of Tom Pelphrey’s Robbie. “That could be just two guys fighting,” Richardson-Whitfield says. “But I was like, ‘No, we need to get really tight and get inside the narrative of this. Get in their face and their eyes. What are they feeling?’ That’s why it’s a good fight scene, because now we understand what these two people are feeling within the fight.”
Richardson-Whitfield comes to set with her massive storyboards — yes, even in the Pennsylvania forest where the Task shootout takes place — and says that for all the times she had moments of self-doubt as an actress, she never has them as a director. “I think really the crew is with you as long as they know you have a plan of action,” she tells me. “I have no fear in directing for some reason. I think it’s why I’ve been able to go from show to show to show and still have the same quality of work — because I know what I know. And I know when someone else has a good input, and we all come together and we make some good work.”
