This year, the highest honors in film are centering women’s inner lives.
What you probably already know: This year’s Oscar nominations are stacked with big, muscular films and prestige directors. But look closely at the Best Actress race, and a quieter throughline emerges: stories about women carrying the emotional weight of families, grief, and care have worked their way into the center of the frame.
Jessie Buckley in Hamnet is a mother whose life is reshaped by the loss of a child, a storyline that’s not a footnote to Shakespeare’s genius, but the heart of the story. She’s a woman whose bottomless grief anchors the film’s meaning, as NPR’s Justin Chang notes.
In Sentimental Value, Renate Reinsve navigates a fraught relationship with a father whose ambition eclipsed his role at home, in a film that treats family history like — as Manohla Dargis from The New York Times puts it — a house you can’t quite move out of.
Why it matters: For decades, women’s interior lives: grief, burnout, ambivalence about caregiving — were often relegated to subplots or small, indie films. This year, those experiences are being positioned as prestige cinema. That shift reflects a broader cultural reckoning: the realization that what happens inside homes, hospitals, and family relationships isn’t unique, or even private, drama. The emotional labor women perform, like holding families together, absorbing loss, managing care in systems that rarely support it, is finally being treated as worthy of the biggest stages.
What it means: These nominations suggest a growing appetite for complexity over comfort. Buckley howls at the sky in grief. Byrne is prickly, imperfect, and painfully recognizable in her demand for real assistance instead of platitudes. Reinsve is neither hero nor villain, just a daughter shaped by absence. Together, they push back on the idea that women on screen must be inspirational, likable, or have storylines that are neatly resolved. They’re complicated, and the audience is being asked to sit with that.
What happens now? If awards season is a cultural signal, the message is pretty clear: stories about caregiving, family rupture and women’s emotional lives are no longer considered niche. The question is whether this momentum extends beyond acting trophies into who gets to write, direct, and greenlight the next wave of films. Recognition is powerful, and infrastructure is everything. This year’s nominations hint that the private worlds women navigate every day are finally being recognized as public stories worth telling.
