Ranking The Academy Award For Best Actress Winners' Performances From The Past Decade
3. Frances McDormand - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Way back in 1996, Frances McDormand won an Academy Award for her leading role in Fargo. She played a heavily pregnant, small-town police chief who was one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet.
Fast forward 21 years and McDormand would once again win an Academy Award for Best Actress, this time for a character who couldn't be more different than Marge Gunderson.
As Mildred Hayes, she was vicious, unrelenting and willing to tear anyone a new one for looking at her the wrong way. As a mother who had lost her daughter a year earlier in the most violent and heinous of circumstances, McDormand dominates the screen.
While she is challenged by all around her for erecting billboard signs criticising the police and their Chief (Woody Harrelson), she never yields and steamrolls her way through the movie with anger and bitter brutality.
But, as with any great performance, she is immensely layered and demonstrates her grief for her loss in the quietest of scenes which makes you feel her pain all the more.
McDormand won her Oscar along with a BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG Award. Her fellow nominees that year were very strong; the performances of Sally Hawkins and Saoirse Ronan for The Shape of Water and Lady Bird respectively must have ran McDormand close. Ultimately though, it went the right way.
Verdict: Deserved.