Cast your mind back to the winner of Best Actress at the last three Academy Awards. This year, Olivia Colman gave her humble acceptance speech after playing Queen Anne in The Favourite. In 2018, Frances McDormand charged the stage for her performance as a vengeful mother in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and before that a twinkle toed Emma Stone received a golden statue for playing an aspiring actress in La La Land.
As Ramona, the ringleader of a gaudy gang of stripper criminals in Lorene Scafaria’s slick con movie Hustlers, Jennifer Lopez is all three of the above: matriarch, mother, performer.
If that’s not enough, she’s Russell Crowe in Gladiator. “Are you not entertained?” she asks wordlessly with just a wiggle of her hip. She’s Michael Douglas in Wall Street, bringing Constance Wu’s female Bud Fox into the fold. She’s Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, an athlete on her way out of the game.
This is a physically and emotionally demanding role, and she clears every hurdle without a sequin out of place.
As Ramona isn’t the protagonist of Hustlers, there’s a chance that Lopez’s performance may fall under Best Supporting Actress come nomination day. But there’s no denying that from the moment she glides on stage to a shower of paper bills, this is an Oscar calibre role.
Lopez’s career may be mottled with flops - the “turkey time” scene from Gigli instantly springs to mind, probably because it hasn’t left since 2003 - but she has always had Oscar potential, right from Stephen Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight back in 1998.
For Ramona, she trained for months to pull off that show-stopping opening number, which sees her spin and pivot on a pole to Fiona Apple’s Criminal. She summons genuine warmth for a hardened entrepreneur driven by money. She delivers monologues with Scorsese-level finesse. This is a physically and emotionally demanding role, and she clears every hurdle without a sequin out of place.
Her chances are boosted by a potentially game-changing Academy Awards in 2020. Sure, The Irishman and Ford v Ferrari are likely to storm the field, and maybe a curveball like Jojo Rabbit or Joker will come through off the back of their festival success.
But this year the Academy ensured that of its 842 new voters, 50% were female — women like Lady Gaga, Roma’s Marina de Tavira and Letitia Wright, female cinematographers, writers and directors who know what it’s like to struggle in an industry that was never built to work in your favour.
Now they get to have a say in who walks away with a prize that changes whole careers, and there’s a strong chance their favour will fall with a straight-talking female underdog.
Other rumoured contenders for Best Supporting Actress include Anette Bening for The Report, Laura Dern for Marriage Story and Ford v Ferrari’s Caitriona Balfe, each performing weightily in awards-tailored dramas.
Lopez gets to breeze in on a comedy high note with something starrier, but by no means frothier. If the Academy can keep up with her, this could be a game changer for both the actress and the Oscars alike.