Every year, when the Academy Awards nominations are announced, it is a lens through which to view how far women have progressed (or regressed) in the notoriously male-dominated Hollywood industry.

The most talented actresses have to face ageism and redundancy, with just a handful like Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon being able to buck the demand for youth and sex appeal.

This year’s Best Actress nominees have been picked from the list of high-concept films or intimate dramas. The action genre usually has little for women to do in the lead space.

Topping the list of nominees this year, already having won the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for her performance, is Jessie Buckley, as Agnes Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s haunting adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel, Hamnet. She is the wife of William Shakespeare in the period movie, who has to cope with the illness and death of her son, Hamnet, and the devastating grief that follows. The highlight of the film is a ten-minute unbroken shot of Agnes walking through her garden after the funeral—a sequence that has been hailed as the most “soul-crushing” moment of the year.

To prepare for the role, Buckley reportedly spent three months living in a rural English cottage, learning 16th-century herbalism and beekeeping, as Agnes is depicted as a folk healer in the film. In Nadia Khomami’s profile of her in The Guardian, Buckley said something profound: “[Agnes] was the full story of what I understand a woman to be… And their capacity as women, and as mothers, and as lovers, and as people who have a........

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