For our eleventh Rundown article, we look at the companion to yesterday’s category. After the jump, you’ll find our winner and runner-up predictions for Best Actress as well as general commentary about the race. Next week, we’ll start off on Monday with two categories whose existence defines the quality of most pictures and are among the oldest categories in Oscar history.

Best Actress

Winner Predictions

• Jessica Chastain – Zero Dark Thirty
• Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook (O) (O)
• Emmanuelle Riva – Amour (O)
• Quvenzhané Wallis – Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Naomi Watts – The Impossible

Runner-Up Predictions

• Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook (O)
• Emmanuelle Riva – Amour (R) [New] (R) [New]

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Wesley Lovell: If you would have told me that Best Actress would be this competitive a year ago, I would have laughed. Now, we have three actresses running nearly neck-and-neck picking up several awards each. The one award that will matter most is the Screen Actors Guild prize, given this year to Jennifer Lawrence. Although it has been inaccurate in the past, Sandra Bullock’s first major kudo came from SAG. Lawrence has gotten several before and with such a heavy output, she is a hard-working actress that people seem to genuinely love. Emmanuelle Riva won Best Actress at the BAFTA, which might encourage some to toss their vote to the veteran actress, but can she become the oldest Best Actress winner ever, beating out Jessica Tandy? I don’t know for sure, but Jessica Chastain could also benefit from voters not being able to decide between all three and splitting their votes in an asymmetrical fashion, pushing Chastain over the top after her excellent debut year last year.
Peter J. Patrick: Conventional wisdom says this will go to one of Hollywood’s new golden girls, Jennifer Lawrence or Jessica Chastain but both are in films that large groups dislike as much as others love them, besides which they both seem likely to have long careers ahead of them. I think Oscar will follow BAFTA and give the award to French acting legend Emmanuelle Riva on her 86th birthday.
Tripp Burton: Jennifer Lawrence is one of the biggest names in Hollywood these days: she is the youngest person ever with 2 Best Actress nominations, she was in one of the year’s biggest commercial hits followed by one of the year’s biggest commercial hits and has picked up several awards through the season for this performance. It would seem like this is her time to pick up an Oscar, and would seem to be the person Hollywood most wants to see on that stage. If she doesn’t win, though, it would probably be because a real love of Amour gets leading legend Emmanuelle Riva to the stage.

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