The 2026 Oscar nominations for Best Actress are missing Amanda Seyfried

Despite giving a full-bodied performance as a witchy woman in musical, a major contender for Best Actress was unfairly snubbed by the Academy this morning. I’m not talking about Cynthia Erivo, mind; Wicked: For Good had its big-category chances at the 2026 Oscars seriously wounded months ago, when reviews emerged indicating that the filmmakers had not, in fact, pulled off the miracle of making a satisfying film out of the stage musical’s inferior second act. In a less competitive year, Erivo might have squeaked in anyway; it certainly wasn’t her fault that For Good didn’t work. But this was a year competitive enough to squeeze out a much stronger contender: Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee.

If you haven’t seen or heard of The Testament of Ann Lee, that’s probably because it was playing in a single-digit number of theaters until last weekend, when it expanded to a few dozen. Searchlight Pictures (owned by Disney) released the film on Christmas (and screened it for plenty of critics and awards’ groups all autumn), but held off on expanding it until this coming weekend, anticipating that it would benefit greatly from an Oscar nomination bump. Now that a major awards embrace hasn’t happened, the movie’s already-tricky commercial prospects are diminished. But that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from seeing it on the big screen, where the movie’s hypnotic historical sweep will feel especially immersive.

The Testament of Ann Lee feels a bit like a distaff companion to last year’s The Brutalist – appropriately enough, considering that it’s from the same screenwriting team of partners Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet. Fastvold directed Ann Lee, just as Corbet took the reins on The Brutalist, and apparently the film’s genesis came party from their fascination with Shaker furniture they encountered during the making of that film (where architect Adrien Brody begins his life in the U.S. at a Philadelphia furniture store). Ann Lee is not so much about furniture, which came later in the Shaker timeline (though the movie does show some of their craftsmanship), but rather how the Shakers as a movement spun off from the Quakers and set out for 18th century America, where Ann (Seyfried) becomes their devout leader (and eventually messiah), preaching abstinence from sex of any kind and worshiping through ecstatic song and dance. This is how The Testament of Ann Lee also becomes a musical of sorts, with the writhing intensity of the Shakers’ worship becoming de facto production-number hymns.

Seyfried has musical experience in the Mamma Mia! movies and Les Miserables, but she finds something rawer and unexpectedly moving in Ann Lee, who in the movie’s devastating montage telling, suffers the loss of four children before any of them make it out of infancy. (In some cases, they don’t make it through childbirth.) That experience clearly informs her strict anti-fornication rule, which obviously limits both the appeal and the growth of the Shaker religion. But within that personal pathology, Seyfried finds a form of ecstatic truth; though the belief system may feel esoteric to us, the performance sells Ann’s conviction. Despite the showiness of the musical moments, and even an approach that can sometimes leave Ann seeming a bit opaque in her didacticism, it never feels like Seyfried herself is carrying on. She manages the feat of creating a character where you understand why less understanding people thought of her religion as witchy and uncanny while also admiring the witchiness of her conviction.

2025 was a banner year for Seyfried. Seven Veils, her strange and compelling movie reunion with Atom Egoyan, came out last spring, highlighting how her resistance of A-list status could be a feature, not a bug. Then she turned around and made an A-list-level hit anyway with The Housemaid, which may wind up as the second-biggest December release after the Avatar sequel. It would have made sense to cap this all off with an Oscar nomination for one of her best performances, even if she has specifically said that winning would not be of great importance to her personally. (Though she did also clarify that being nominated helps a career and would be “great.”)

It’s not as if the five performances that did make it into the Best Actress category are truly lesser than Seyfried’s. Yet Seyfried’s work has stuck with me in a way that almost none of her competitors have. Emma Stone is always great, but her work in Bugonia is neither as open-hearted as her performance in Poor Things nor as memorably cutting as The Favourite. Similarly, Renate Reinsve does such exemplary work in The Worst Person in the World that Sentimental Value can’t help but feel a little more narrow by comparison. Chase Infiniti has dynamite charisma in One Battle After Another, but it’s arguably closer to a supporting role compared to the characters who are in both sections of the movie’s split timeline, while Seyfried is barely out of frame for much of Ann Lee.

The nominated performance that feels closest to Seyfried’s is the favorite to win, Jessie Buckley in Hamnet; they’re both rustic period pieces where a woman is confronted with the cold realities of losing a child (and also casually suspected of witchcraft before that happens). Despite that common ground, competitive comparison between the two doesn’t really make sense. But it is probably telling that Buckley’s performance requires a lot of suffering before a redemptive (and, for me, absolutely transporting) final sequence, while Seyfried’s work asks questions about where that suffering goes and how it shapes us. In that sense, she’s closer to the Paul Mescal character in Hamnet, only she’s making religion rather than art – which, in the movie’s lovely yet forceful touch, is rendered as what reads like artistic performance.  

Again, that’s not a knock on any of these nominees – just a confirmation that Seyfried has become one our most interesting actors, particularly regarding the tricky art of characters engaging in public performance. That’s part of her Housemaid duties, too, nimbly switching which side of a possible gaslighting she may be on, and it was a part of her nominated work in Mank, where she was playing a real-life actress. Sometimes the Academy likes those kinds of meta-movie twists on their preferred art form, but Seyfried, for the moment, might have gotten too intense, too strange, and too good for a simple trophy.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.