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Kate Winslet Is Getting Busy With Her One-Woman Oscar Campaign

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | November 21, 2024 |

Kate Winslet Leo diCaprio Getty 1.jpg
Header Image Source: Eric Charbonneau // Roadside Attractions via Getty Images

That’s right kids, it’s that time of year yet again: awards season. Technically, the hunt for Oscar glory is an endless battle with people in the film industry working year-round to make it happen, but the real action starts hotting up once the fall festival season is (mostly) over and the big contenders are being released. While a few films fell at the first hurdle and we await the inevitable This Had Oscar Buzz episodes on them (Megalopolis, Joker: Folie a Deux), there are still a lot of strong titles out there hoping to maintain their hype.

Current frontrunners for Oscar glory include Anora, Emilia Perez, Queer, Wicked, and Maria. The stars of these movies have been schmoozing up a storm at parties, appearing on glossy magazine covers, and doing sit-down interviews on their craft. Some categories are hotting up to be more competitive than others - this is another year where Best Actress seems to have a higher number of potential nominees than Best Actor, which is looking rather thin on the ground right now - but the fight isn’t over until it’s over. The underdog can still pull off the impossible. Get enough AMPAS members on your side and you can make dreams come true.

Enter Kate Winslet and Lee.

Winslet is no slouch when it comes to the Oscars. She won for The Reader and has six other nominations to her name. She’s also a five-time BAFTA winner, a two-time Emmy winner, a Grammy winner, and the star of my all-time favourite film (truly the most illustrious of awards.) She became the youngest performer to ever earn five Oscar nods, a feat she pulled off at 31.

Her film career hasn’t been as attention-grabbing over the past decade or so, unless you’re super into her work in the Divergent and Avatar sequels, and she has done her best work on TV. Last year, the film Lee premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. This biopic, directed by legendary cinematographer Ellen Kuras (she’s worked with the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and Mary Harron), follows the life of war photographer Lee Miller as she chronicled the Second World War for Vogue. 2023 was the strike festival, with the majority of performers not appearing in person to promote their works, so that didn’t help boost its fortunes, even though reviews were solid enough. It was released theatrically by Sky Cinema in the UK, which also wasn’t seen as a good sign for its fortunes. Roadside Attractions and Vertical acquired US distribution rights and dropped it in theatres in late September, where it didn’t make much of a splash. That’s not stopping Kate, though.

Winslet has been hosting and appearing at industry-specific screenings of Lee these past few weeks, getting her famous friends and fans to show up and spread the good word about her performance. Most notably, her Titanic co-star Frances Fisher has been raving about her, much in the same way she helped to shepherd Andrea Riseborough to her first Oscar nomination. She even got her other old Titanic buddy Leo DiCaprio to put the vape pen down long enough to make an appearance in her favour. If there’s an event going on or film festival to appear at, Winslet is there. She was at the Oscars’ Governors Ball and The Graham Norton Show alike. For Your Consideration: Kate Winslet.




If there’s one thing that Winslet is truly excellent at, aside from acting, it’s her no-filter ability to get her message across. She has been the biggest champion of Lee, having gone so far as to pay two weeks of production wages when funding ran low and to keep working with a back injury when she slipped during rehearsals. Her interviews are always guaranteed to include some great one-liners or details about how sh*tty and sexist the business is. She’s been famous for a long time and has struck that canny balance between gratitude and zero f*cks given. It makes for great copy.

Winslet also likes winning. She’s open about it. She knows exactly where she is on the EGOT scale. She knows how to campaign. Hell, she even guest-starred on a TV show as herself, where the entire joke was that she was gagging for an Oscar and eager to do whatever it took to win one. This is a performer with no qualms about working the greased pole, so to speak. Why play coy when your entire thing is being candid and no-bullsh*t? She’s eager and driven, and it certainly helped to get word out about Lee, which has performed strongly in UK cinemas and across Europe, based almost entirely on her name.

A lot of Oscar watchers have already drawn a connection between Winslet’s Lee campaign and the way that Andrea Riseborough managed to land a Best Actress nomination for To Leslie with a highly efficient grassroots campaign that proved divisive among many. Both have Frances Fisher cheering them on, obviously, but both are also examples of how a well-connected and talented individual can go far with fewer resources than the big studios, who often spend tens of millions of dollars on their campaigns. Like Riseborough, Winslet’s co-star in both Lee and The Regime, Winslet has worked with everyone and has a good reputation in the industry. I mean, look, she’s got Dwayne Johnson singing her praises on social media! The Rock likes Kate Winslet! That’s power.



The To Leslie grassroots blitz inspired much controversy, with many viewing it as Riseborough ‘stealing’ a space in the Best Actress category from the likes of Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler. The optics certainly weren’t great but it wasn’t so simple as swapping out one person for the other. Awards campaigns are lengthy, pricy, and typically thankless. Riseborough managed to ruthlessly get the job done without spending millions and that pissed off a lot of Oscar predicators. She broke the rules by not being part of the big game but she didn’t exactly change how campaigns work. It’s always been about schmoozing and optics, a popularity contest combined with a marathon where being visible matters more than the art. People like Riseborough, she made them pay attention to her work, and they said, ‘okay.’ But it also undeniably sucks for those actors who did everything ‘right’, played the game as demanded, and were still deemed insufficient by voters.

So, where does Kate Winslet and Lee fit into this? Frankly, I want more awards campaigns like this. I think the race is always more interesting when it’s wide open and when hidden gems get to shine amid the designated front-runners. We need more To Leslie strategies, not less. In the post-Weinstein age, I would hope there’d be more hunger for indie underdogs that aren’t part of a bully’s game. Plus, I always like it when actors are open about their desire to win an Oscar. Faux-humility is boring. Go claw your way to the top. It remains to be seen if Winslet can make her way into Best Actress, especially when the competition is so large (see Amy Adams, Demi Moore, Mikey Madison, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Angelina Jolie, Pamela Anderson, Nicole Kidman, Cynthia Erivo, Karla Sofía Gascón, Saoirse Ronan, and Tilda Swinton, just to name the ones off the top of my head!) Whatever the case, awards season needs more of this. I want a real fight, dammit!