A funny thing happened on the way to the Oscars, Sicario got completely forgotten. Besides legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, who has been nominated 12 times, the film was largely ignored. Blunt has become one of my favorite actresses working today. She’s highly versatile and comes off very natural. In Sicario, she plays an FBI agent that gets caught up in a drug war between the Mexican cartel and a shady US government task force. Macer’s bewilderment matches our own as she descends deeper and deeper into a world she doesn’t understand. Blunt’s mix of terror and confusion is played perfectly.

Brie Larson has been working for a while now, but she really burst on the scene this year. She played Amy Schumer’s sister in the surprise summer hit Trainwreck and now she's the odds on favorite to take home the Oscar for Best Actress. Larson plays a young mother that is being held captive in a small shed. Even in this terrible world, she fills her son's life with happiness, despite spending every moment of everyday living in fear. Watching Larson’s character struggle with life after being freed is even more heart-breaking. She has every reason in the world to be happy, including a young son who now has a whole world to explore, but her life is still filled with sadness. It really is a fantastic performance in one of the best films of the year.

It’s official.  David O. Russell should never make another film without Jennifer Lawrence. They might just be one of the best actress/director relationships in film history. The same can be said for Lawrence, her best performances have come in O. Russell films American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook. Joy can now be added to that list where Lawrence plays real-life inventor of the miracle mop Joy Mangano. The film is a rags-to-riches success story about a woman striving for the American Dream. Joy is a better film than most critics gave it credit for, but I’m not sure it would be half as compelling if the film featured anybody but Jennifer Lawrence as the lead. She’s the kind of actress that truly elevates the material.

Galaxy, meet Daisy Ridley. It’s amazing how a person can be plucked from obscurity and put into the biggest film of the decade. Ridley literally only had a few English TV credits to her name before being discovered. The amazing part is that she’s a natural. Ridley’s performance in Star Wars: The Force Awakens is more important than one might imagine. As a female, she has captured the imaginations of little girls everywhere. For years, boys had Star Wars characters they could pretend to be and now girls have a role model of their own.  Ridley’s character is beautiful, smart and most of all, she doesn’t need a man (or droid... or alien) to come to her rescue.

The name of the film is Mad Max, but don’t be fooled, Charlize Theron is just as much of the main character as Tom Hardy. Like Daisy Ridley in The Force Awakens, Theron’s Furiosa is a strong female character that you just don’t see very often in blockbuster films. In Fury Road, Theron has thrown away any shred of vanity, which is nothing new for her since she won an Oscar for Monster, where she was unrecognizable as a serial killer. In Fury Road, her head is shaved down to a fine stubble and she often can be seen sporting a fine smear of black across her face. Like you would expect from a character name Furiosa, Theron exhibits a primal, vicious rage. That being said, there’s also a small hint of a woman that used to be gentle, but has been ruined by some kind of unimaginable trauma, not to mention a harsh world that seems impossible to survive as a kind, gentle person.