There is a pivotal scene in Greta Gerwig’s dust-pink “Barbie” that has come to outline the Oscar-nominated film — a disarmingly truthful monologue that’s not delivered by the movie’s many Barbies, nor its quite a few Kens. Instead, supporting actress Oscar nominee America Ferrera’s Gloria crisply sums up the film’s themes round a picture-perfect doll confronted by the real-world, patriarchy-fueled challenges of womanhood. “You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory,” she bursts out as a part of her longer speech on the unattainable expectations so many ladies navigate daily.

“It was very freeing as an actor to let the words lead me from take to take,” Ferrera tells Variety, about tapping into Gloria’s headspace. “Greta gave me so much freedom and a lot of time to explore different versions of the monologue. I had a lot of fun doing it and felt a real catharsis.” Ferrera needed Gloria to really feel alive with creativeness and journey, whereas ensuring her real-world anxieties and disappointments had been nonetheless on the core of her humanity. “For me, Gloria’s ability to abandon disbelief was rooted in her childhood experiences. She was longing for that freedom and possibility of child’s play. That longing made her more childlike to me, but also rooted her more deeply as a real person who knew what longing and loss felt like.”

Ferrera isn’t the one Oscar nominee enjoying a personality of advanced dichotomies. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ vividly Frankenstein-esque “Poor Things,” which unfolds like a unusual B-side to “Barbie,” actress nominee Emma Stone portrays Bella Baxter, who’s, for some time, like a child trapped in an grownup’s physique. Over the course of the film, she turns into a sexually hungry adolescent confronted by well mannered society’s
patriarchal guidelines. 

In “Oppenheimer,” supporting actor nominee Robert Downey Jr. is pushed by his concept of patriotism and his contrasting egotistical drive to undermine the scientists he feels wronged him, whereas in “American Fiction,” actor nominee Jeffrey Wright performs a severe writer who condemns the company exploitation of Black tradition that reduces it all the way down to offensive stereotypes for earnings. Partly as an experiment, he cooks up a pseudonymous alternate persona and publishes the very type of cliché-filled bestseller that he’s vital about. As Monk’s brother, supporting actor nominee Sterling Okay. Brown’s Cliff is somebody dwelling his reality as an out homosexual man for the primary time, closing the hole between his outward picture and his genuine identification after his divorce from his spouse. 

Supporting actor nominee Robert De Niro’s highly effective Oklahoma rancher William Hale additionally matches the invoice of a personality of utmost inner contrasts. In Martin Scorsese’s crime-thriller “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Hale pretends to be an ally to the Osage folks, whereas perpetrating and enabling their murders throughout the Twenties. “I don’t understand a lot about my character,” De Niro admitted on the movie’s press convention in Cannes. “Part of him is sincere. The other part, where he’s betraying them, there’s a feeling of entitlement,” he continued. “It’s the banality of evil.”

Evildoing takes an much more advanced flip in Christopher Nolan’s towering “Oppenheimer” — in it, actor nominee Cillian Murphy’s eponymous character is a person of science, one more and more burdened by his break up ethical conscience in constructing an atomic bomb. “I had to consider that these were the biggest moral dilemmas, the biggest moral paradoxes that potentially anyone in the history of man has faced,” Murphy tells Variety. “And then of course there are the more human dilemmas that he had to face in terms of his own life. That final interrogation at the end of the movie, with Jason Clarke playing [Roger] Robb, is one of my favorite sequences because that’s where we really get to see inside the soul of Oppenheimer. It was a true challenge, but one that I relished.”

Elsewhere, actor and actress nominees Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan play Leonard Bernstein and his spouse, Felicia Montealegre, the illustrious and devoted couple of Cooper’s “Maestro” who saved their ahead-of-its-time marital association — the sexually fluid Bernstein noticed different males, emotionally difficult his spouse over the course of the film — non-public. Dedicated to authentically exploring the wedding’s complexity, the co-stars and buddies bonded onscreen and off. The two even teamed as much as carry out as narrators onstage in a Philadelphia Orchestra manufacturing of Bernstein’s “Candide” operetta, with the “Maestro” music advisor Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting. “That was a major, major part of cracking how I could make a love story about these two and have it be honest,” says Cooper, noting that he and Mulligan bared their souls to 1 one other in dream workshops as a part of their course of.

With Montealegre, there may be “a sense of a bit of a life unlived,” Mulligan informed Variety. “There was an unknown element to what she could have been had she not met Lenny. She met him, and they became each other’s world. But that obviously put her career on the back burner.” She added: “It felt to me that the betrayal for her — and the sense of loss that she experiences — isn’t to do with his physical relationships with other people. I think it was the fact that he started looking to somebody else for the comfort and reassurance and support that he needed in his life. And that was what, ultimately, she found too difficult.”

In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Sandra Hüller performs a personality (additionally named Sandra) who turns into a suspect after her husband mysteriously dies from a fall. She insists on her innocence in courtroom. But did she kill him? That’s the unanswered duality in her efficiency. “I think I wanted to create somebody who would be capable of doing it. I wanted certain people to be a little bit afraid of her,” she revealed to Variety in regards to the ambiguity of her character. “Because why do we always have to be sweet and good victims and all these things? I had a little fun in leaving it in a dark.”

Ultimately, Hüller by no means actually made up her thoughts come what may about Sandra’s doable guilt. “Sometimes I wake up at night and think, ‘Oh, I missed something. Maybe she did it.’ But I don’t know.”