In 2019, Florence Pugh became a star. Though she had some independent film cred from 2016’s Lady Macbeth, Florence Pugh’s 2019 movies are so impressive that the Academy Awards will make a huge mistake if they let it go unrecognized, and she is a viable candidate as both Best Actress for Midsommar and Best Supporting Actress for Little Women (2019).
As 2020's awards season develops, Pugh’s snub looks more and more likely. Both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild ignored her; only the British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTA) granted her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So what is the case for her candidacy?
Pugh’s 2019 began with the WWE dramedy, Fighting with My Family. Sporting dyed black hair and a wrestler’s tone and build, Pugh embodied Saraya Knight who performs in WWE under the ring name Paige. While this film is not a serious awards contender, what it demonstrates is Pugh’s impressive range. She’s believable in the wrestling sequences, and she brings realism to the character’s lower-class upbringing. But playing a Norwich wrestler was just the beginning; her other two roles were in dramatically different settings and times.
In Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Pugh leads the young cast in a psychologically gripping horror film. Following a group of sociology students to a Swedish commune, the film’s plot twists through the students’ suspicions about the commune’s motives and practices. Thematically, the film examines codependent relationships, grief, and an individual’s place within a societal framework. The demands on Pugh’s talents are extraordinary: she has to play a character stuck in a toxic relationship without losing the audience’s sympathy; she has to reach levels of grief and emotional devastation that are beyond any other expression on film this year; and she has to sell the film’s ending with only a smile. She should be a front-runner for Best Actress this year, yet - as with Toni Collette's equally impressive turn in Aster's Hereditary - the film has been shut out of awards-contention by the Golden Globes, SAGs, and BAFTAs.
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is the polar opposite of Midsommar. Its tone is light, giving the feeling of a welcoming family. It’s set around the end of the Civil War in the U.S. and requires Pugh to play a precocious young girl, struggling to find her place in her family and in a larger patriarchal society. It’s a long arc for Pugh’s Amy March: she begins the character’s journey whining about an injured hand with the most pathetic cries, but by the end, Amy gives a tough, determined defense about why marriage is, in fact, always an economic proposition for a woman in society. Such huge arcs are rare in modern film, and yet Pugh, and indeed the rest of Little Women’s cast, is up for the challenge. BAFTA was the only organization to recognize her part with a Best Supporting Actress nomination, and her British nationality likely played a key part in that.
Cast as Yelena Belova in Marvel’s upcoming Black Widow, Florence Pugh will soon become a household name, but if the Academy wants to continue to be an arbiter of artistic excellence, then her excellent work, starting as a wrestler and ending as a 19th Century aspiring artist with a stop at psychological horror along the way, should be in the conversation when the Oscar 2020 nominations are announced on January 13.
