And The Award for Best Actress Goes To...

Variety journalist Daniel D’Addario on his debut novel “The Talent,” taking readers behind the scenes of awards season, and this year’s Oscars scandal.

From the outside, the life of an Oscar nominee seems impossibly glamorous: a whirlwind of parties, fashion and red-carpet events in which the star is fêted and adored. But in reality, it can often be an exhausting, months-long gauntlet in which every interaction, interview and clothing choice is scrutinized.

And that goes doubly so if you’re hoping to win for best actress.

If you’ve ever wondered what it is like to be up for an Academy Award, the closest most of us will get is Daniel D’Addario’s debut novel The Talent, out this month. As the chief correspondent at Variety, D’Addario smartly deploys his experience covering awards season into a novel that gives readers a fascinating, intimate and darkly funny window into the private worlds of several actresses desperate to win Hollywood’s most coveted prize.

What D’Addario could have never predicted is how the headlines coming out of this year’s best actress Oscars race is even stranger than fiction, most notably Emilia Perez star Karla Sofía Gascón’s controversial tweets that all but erased her awards chances.

D’Addario chatted with Ministry about the real-life inspiration for his fictional best actress race, as well as this year’s topsy-turvy best actress category.

This interview was conducted in the first week of February, and has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Was there a specific moment that inspired the idea for The Talent, or has it been something you've been thinking about writing for awhile?

There are questions that I have thought about for years watching awards narratives play out. And I thought a novel would be an interesting way to address them because you can plunge into someone’s mind, which I don’t get to do in my journalism work. It lets me explore these questions that are inherent to the Oscars but are also bigger than the Oscars.

In life, there are people who seem fated to win all the time, and people who never do. And I got to thinking about what it would feel like to push oneself through [awards season] with this seemingly foreordained knowledge that you’re not going to win.

What kind of emotional resources does it take [to do that], and what does it take out of a person to go through that? And then if there is someone who always loses, that means there has to be someone who always wins. Is there a pressure that comes from having to keep topping yourself? Is that painful in its own way?

I have to imagine that serving as a moderator for the “Actor on Actor” interview series has given you an interesting and intimate perspective of what actors go through on the campaign trail during awards season.

I’ve been very fortunate, between writing profiles and moderating Actor on Actors for several years, to have seen and spoken to and worked with actors as well as members of their teams. An observation I would share, as personable as actors are, as exciting as it is to be honored for your work, as extraordinary an opportunity it can be for an actor, it is work.

It is challenging to be the best version of one’s self for the cameras over a long period of time. I know that people might not feel bad for them, but something I hope people take away from [The Talent] is that it truly is a campaign. And a lot of actors I’ve seen in the midst of this are legitimately worn out and tired.

This book is meant to get at that sense of a sustained awards campaign, and keeping one’s own sense of self while being another version of one’s self to try to impress voters and keep up the narrative.

One thing this book does really well is reflect the new kinds of promo actors must do on the campaign trail. It's not just gladhanding at film festivals, but now filming different kinds of videos for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, which involve a performance of self that will last much longer than the standard magazine profile.

There are many more moving pieces to campaigns than there were ten years ago. For instance, last weekend I saw on social media that a magazine had actors in contention recite the lyrics to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.” They take part in photo shoots whose concepts aren’t necessarily their own but something the publication had in mind. All of this is fine, it’s above board. But it is funny that when viral moments seem to spring up, it’s like degrees and degrees removed from where we started, which is the film.

I think that the best-case scenario is that actors have fun with it and make it fun for the audience at home. Those are the people who tend to do well during awards season, whether it’s literally winning or boosting their Q rating. Yet it’s fair to say that it gets fairly removed [from the movies they’re in contention for].

Something I try to portray in the novel is that at a certain point, these people become all-purpose entertainers for the wider world and are no longer talking about their movies at all. Some of the characters in my book lose their sense of self and their bearings.

There are so many moving parts in awards season, it could be easy to lose one’s self in the performance and seem game for anything. The novel is meant to feel like there are waves of momentum that kind of carry you along, just as there are in a real Oscars race.

I read your Jan. 31 Variety piece about Karla Sofía Gascón and how her Twitter scandal has taken her from a frontrunner to an “awards-season star whose existence makes one wish the Oscars weren’t even happening.” It must be surreal to write a novel about the behind-the-scenes drama in a best actress category and then have all of this happen.

The old cliche is truth is stranger than fiction. If I submitted to my agent and my editor everything that happened this year, this would be seen as fantastical and beyond belief. We can’t publish this! This is too strange.

And here are with everything that has happened, not just with Karla Sofia Gascon, but also Fernanda Torres being a welcome surprise nominee with legions of fans in Brazil rooting her on, Demi Moore’s comeback story, the Wicked press tour, Mikey Madison being this discovery. All of these narratives are colliding, and they have more heat and intensity and novelty than years in the recent past.

Overall, it’s a welcome distraction and funny and surreal to be putting out a book about the best actress race against the backdrop of this best actress race.

One of the things I enjoy most about novel writing is writing fake pop culture, which you do throughout this novel, and do so well. Did you enjoy making up the fake movie titles and roles, and did you have a particular favorite?

It was the most fun part of writing the book. To me, the gold standard in this regard is Seinfeld, where every time they see a movie, it’s like “yup, that is the movie they would see!” And conversely, I’ve read novels where someone is watching a show or movie and it sets my teeth on edge when it doesn’t seem right.

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How to Write Fake Pop Culture (and Make it Seem Real)

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My favorite, perhaps because of everything that happens subsequently, was The Diva. In part because when I started writing it, that I didn’t know that there was going to be a Maria Callas movie with Angelina Jolie and it was going to be an entrant into the Oscars race.¹

Part of what’s funny about it in this fictional movie, the great acting challenge is opera singing, and [best actress nominee] Jenny betrays her own principles and doesn’t even try and lip syncs. I thought that said a lot about what she was willing to give up, in terms of her personal pride and wanting to do a good job, in order to get the prize. What was your favorite?

I have to say it was The Diva. Even though she’s happy to be in the awards race again, you can sense her embarrassment of being up for an award for a film that was so cheaply made. She’s both happy and ashamed to be there for a movie that doesn’t represent her well.

It doesn’t represent her well, and she didn’t work hard or push herself. This is not a comment about the real Callas movie, but you definitely do see examples of people winning awards for what is obviously not their best work.

There is a scene with an actress recording her reaction to the Oscar nominations, and it’s so painful because the reader knows she will not get one. It also reminded me of Jennifer Lopez showing her disappointment over not receiving a nod for Hustlers in her Netflix doc.

The character we’re talking about comes from a different era of celebrity, and she’s taken aback by what is expected of her, and what a younger generation of media workers thinks of as totally normal and an expected part of promoting yourself. It would be fair for them to wonder “why are you asking me to do all of this?” It used to be enough to do a couple of interviews but largely succeed or fail based on the merits of the work.

It’s also fair to observe that social media has completely scrambled the expectations of a new generation of filmgoers and movie fans, and your expectation is that you are living your version of a reality show. Negotiating that reality is a challenge all of the actors had to face.

The Talent is about how badly these five women who want something only one of them can have. How did you decide the outcome of the awards race? Did you always know who would win the big award, or did you figure it out while writing?

When I was conceiving it and outlining it, I had three options in mind: the actual winner that ends up being in the book, another individual, or what I called in my mind the “Emma Cline in The Guest” mode, with my novel ending with the envelope opening, and you sitting with yourself about who you wanted to win and what you thought happened, and me not telling you.

And I realized that worked very well in The Guest, it would not work well for this, since there is an implicit promise that you are going to find out. Once I got past that idea, I was between two people, decided on one and wrote with that outcome in mind.

I found it interesting that one thing the five actors have in common is their wariness and sometimes outright disdain of journalists. And how except for a powerful magazine editor, they are all nearly all faceless and nameless. What was it like to write about entertainment journalists from the perspective of an actor?

I have so much experience of the actor/journalist dynamic from the perspective of a journalist, that it was kind of funny for me to imagine, “Okay what are the people I’m interviewing thinking while I’m interviewing them?” What is the experience of being interviewed like for them?

As much as [the characters] are disdainful of journalists, we see examples of journalism produced in this book, and it’s not very good! And that’s by design. The actors have a very healthy awareness of being carefully watched by someone whose interest might trying to catch them in an indiscreet moment.

I think they are appropriately feels watchful of the journalists they encounter, and it was fun to play out those dynamics considering how much of my professional life I spend doing interviews. This was my opportunity to let my imagination go a little more wild.

There are several kinds of award show archetypes and rivalries in The Talent: the acting legend vs the ingénue, the child star who wants to be taken seriously, the actor seeking a comeback, etc. What do you think about readers trying to match your characters with potential real-life contemporaries?

There can be fun to be had in trying to match it up. My friends having been doing that over text [message] since the galleys have been out. For me as a writer, nothing is intended to be one to one. If you read it that way, that is this the real-life woman or this woman, and this is a comment on their relationship, that is not my intention. There are combinations, there are sheer inventions from my mind, there is stuff that I’ve noticed from people that no one would probably ever guess.

I would encourage the parlor game. But just know that it may be more complicated than you think.

You can buy The Talent here. For more about Daniel, visit his website.

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The Ministry recommends… (Oscars edition 🎞️)

Kirthana: There is a wealth of YouTube clips from Oscars past, and one of my all-time favorites is Fred Astaire dancing at the 1970 Oscars. It’s an endearing mishmash of two different eras: the Golden Age of Hollywood’s most iconic dancer hoofing it to seventies-era funk. Astaire was in seventies when this was filmed, but he has the energy of someone decades his junior. It’s one of the final times Astaire danced on stage, and he made it count.

Saul: It is tragic, but dismayingly unsurprising, that one of the five nominees for Best Documentary at this year’s Oscars—a sharply observed movie about one of the most profound and contested international issues of the moment—has no American distributor. The fate of No Other Land reflects both the diminished status of the documentary, and the fear too many distributors have regarding releasing a movie about Palestinian suffering in the West Bank—even one with two Israeli co-directors. I was lucky enough to see it during its run at New York’s Film Forum, and the movie, epic in scope if only 92 minutes long, simply does what documentaries at their best can do: bear witness to experiences too complex or too slow-burning to properly be told elsewhere.

Thea: If you’re looking for a Friday mid-afternoon boost, may I recommend re-watching Ryan Gosling’s performance of “I’m Just Ken”? Goodness is it pure joy — from the nod to Marilyn Monroe’s Gentleman Prefer Blondes to Gosling’s full-throated commitment to Ken to Greta Gerwig, Barbie’s director, gleefully singing along. Oh, and a brief reunion between Emma Stone and Gosling to boot! I have complicated feelings about Barbie but my feelings for this song and performance are a steadfast 10/10.

Erin: In 1996, a FedEx truck ran over Sharon Stone’s custom Vera Wang dress the day before she was to wear it at the Oscars. As a result, Stone showed up to the red carpet sporting a simple black GAP turtleneck, a long black Armani velvet jacket, a Valentino skirt and a white flower brooch. She was, hands down, the most stylish person there, proving that you don’t need to wear one designer from head to toe in order to make a bold statement. Stone’s high-low sartorial choice, borne of DIY ingenuity, was the best to ever do it.

What’s your favorite Oscars moment, and what are you looking forward to from this year’s show? Let us know and comment below!

1. In 2024, Angelina Jolie starred in the Maria Callas biopic Maria, which put her in conversation for this year’s best actress Oscars race but did not yield a nomination.