Greta Lee: The biggest snub of the 2024 Oscars
There was quite a fuss when the Academy Award nominations were announced this year, particularly surrounding the ‘Best Actress’ award, with many critics, actors and directors pointing out the glaring omission of Margot Robbie’s name on the list of the Oscars nominees.
Robbie’s effort in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was thought to have been worthy of at least a nod for the coveted prize, but regardless, there had actually been a bigger snub in the category all along, one that seemingly flew under the radar with the high-profile Robbie garnering the public’s attention yet again.
The truth is that Greta Lee’s name seemed to be shockingly missing from the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar nominees list, comprised of Emma Stone of Poor Things, Lily Gladstone of Killers of the Flower Moon, Annette Bening of Nyad, Maestro’s Carey Mulligan and Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Huller. That’s not to say that the just-mentioned are undeserving of their respective nods, but that Lee, who gave a mesmerising performance in Celine Song’s Past Lives, can consider herself hard done by.
Now, Past Lives was indeed nominated for both the ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Academy Awards, a testament to its brilliance as a work of cinema, but, even so, Song’s film would be little were it not for Lee’s performative excellence. The film is a poignant narrative about the threads of fate and the missed chances that play such significance in our lives and serves as an exploration of the eternal question, “What if?”.
Lee plays Na-young, opposite Teo Yoo’s Hae-sung, a pair of childhood friends who develop a juvenile romantic connection with one another. However, when Na-young emigrates to Canada with her family and changes her name to the westernised Nora, she leaves Hae-sung to wonder what might have been as he grows up ever distanced from his young friend.
Nora and Hae-sung’s connection seems to linger in their respective hearts throughout the proceeding years, though, and even after a brief online reconnection ends in ruin and heartache, the pair reconvene despite Nora’s marriage to New York City writer Arthur. It’s in these moments, in which the echoes of the past reverberate through the present that audiences witness the sheer brilliance and talent of Greta Lee.
Not only does she possess a deep understanding of the formalities of an East Asian upbringing, but she is also capable of displaying a profound Western intimacy with her American husband, navigating the complexities of Nora’s conflicted identity and emotionally turbulent heart. It appears that both Yoo and John Magaro, who plays Arthur, are able to cross through into the thresholds of acting chemistry, which proves that Lee is the real facet of brilliance behind Past Lives‘ overall quality.
Yet perhaps the most impressive of all of Lee’s on-screen moments in Past Lives is the film’s heart-breaking crescendo, with Nora standing at the crossroads of choice, torn between the alluring unknown of the past and the safety and surety of the present. Lee delivers Nora’s inner anguish with the nuance and power of a master actor, proving that she was worthy of a nomination for the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar.
As stated above, many argued that it was Margot Robbie who had been hard done by when it came to the ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award, but it’s rather more likely that Lee was the performer who was on the harsh end of the 2024 Oscars’ biggest snub. With only five actors capable of winning the highly-coveted award, there was always going to be a handful of those who unfortunately missed out, but Lee shouldn’t have been one of them.
Perhaps there was a sense within the Academy of Lee being relatively new to the scene when compared to the likes of Emma Stone and Carey Mulligan, while the opportunity to bring the Native American actor Lily Gladstone into the conversation might have been too good for the Academy, often criticised for their lack of diversity, to pass up on – of course, not taking anything away from Gladstone’s performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
While Lee has certainly missed out on the nod for ‘Best Actress’ this time around, she has undoubtedly contributed to Past Lives‘ ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ nominations, so she can consider herself a significant part of such achievements. If her performance in Song’s feature debut was anything to go by, then it shouldn’t be too long before we see Lee at the Oscars podium, correctly recognised for her talent.
