With “Obsession” now over the $200 million box office milestone in America, and with Focus Features all but confirmed to have an awards season campaign in the works, Oscar speculation is no longer limited to whether Inde Navarrette can get a passion vote in. However, no matter how big Focus is dreaming now about “Obsession” getting other major Oscar nominations, a Navarrette nomination needs to be secured before anything else is possible – and to do that, Focus needs to settle an important question about her sooner rather than later.
Despite Navarrette being the unquestioned centerpiece of “Obsession” and its runaway success, that doesn’t mean it’s safe to assume her as a Best Actress nominee. In fact, there’s an equally logical case to be made that she belongs in Best Supporting Actress, which means Focus has a big decision on its hands on where to submit her.
According to AwardWatch’s Erik Anderson, Focus has already made that decision and is preparing to submit Navarrette in lead, though it hasn’t made any official announcement to the trades yet. Technically, it doesn’t really have to do so until around or after fall festivals, when most of the major “Lead or supporting?” decisions are announced to the public – and when studios know for sure which field is the most favorable path for a contender. In that regard, there’s still a lot of room to question which category would favor Navarrette most, whether Focus thinks it is settled by now.
From the beginning, Navarrette inspired comparisons to “Weapons” Amy Madigan, who, of course, won Best Supporting Actress months ago. Yet given her mere teases in the first two acts before completely taking over Act Three, there was never a doubt that Madigan was a supporting actress in that movie. In contrast, since Navarrette is in “Obsession” from beginning to end and devolves from the One Wish Willow wish for almost two acts straight, the easy assumption is that she is much more of a lead character.
Despite that, the circumstances of “Obsession” and the way its perspective is structured leave a lot greater doubt. From the very beginning, the movie’s p.o.v. is strictly on the leading male character, Bear, his obsession with Nikki, and his reactions to her changes following his fateful wish. By design, the movie stays exclusively on Bear’s p.o.v. and his comical freakouts from Nikki’s mental collapse, with no room to switch to Nikki’s p.o.v. even in the brief moments where her “real” self reemerges.
As much as “Obsession” is defined by and remembered for Nikki and Navarrette, its script and story structure are deliberately crafted to keep her from being the lead in her own story. That may be a purposeful choice by writer/director Curry Barker to empathize with how twisted, cowardly, and monstrous Bear’s perspective and “nice guy” persona really are. Or perhaps it is a fatal flaw that undermines both Nikki and how much “Obsession” really has to say about gender issues and the robbing of a woman’s autonomy, from a mid-20s male filmmaker no less.
Whether for dramatic effect or from more troubling blind spots, “Obsession” is less about Nikki herself and her violation than it is about Bear’s reactions, comedic/karmic payback, and his own personal horror over what he has wrought. In that context, since Bear is really the leading character robbing Nikki of a true perspective/point of view in more ways than one, then it makes the argument that Navarrette is actually a supporting actress instead of a lead/co-lead that much easier – and therefore she should be up for Best Supporting Actress consideration.
Once “Obsession” comes out on digital, supposedly on June 30th, Navarrette and Michael Johnston’s respective screen time will surely be tallied up and compared in no time, though it is hard to imagine Navarrette having the most overall screen time. Then again, since 2024 saw Kieran Culkin winning Best Supporting Actor after being in 65% of “A Real Pain,” and saw Zoe Saldana win Best Supporting Actress despite having the most screen time of anyone in “Emilia Pérez,” the standards of what a true lead and true supporting performance really are have become far blurrier these days.
However, these two cases do kind of make an argument for Navarrette being in Supporting, or at least help set a precedent for it. Suppose the main argument for Culkin being in Supporting was that he was never actually the leading p.o.v. character in “A Real Pain” – which he truly wasn’t, except for the first and last scenes of the film – then by that exact standard, Navarrette belongs in Supporting too because she is never the leading p.o.v. character until the very last minute. In addition, while Saldana was the lead for the first half of “Emilia Pérez,” she is very much a narrative and a POV. afterthought, pretty much as soon as her Oscar-winning performance of “El Mal” is over, midway through the movie.
If those two meet the criteria for supporting because they are either never leading characters or stop being leads halfway through, it is harder to argue that Navarrette should get different treatment for being a narrative/p.o.v. supporting character of her own. Some have already argued that Kathy Bates in “Misery” set a precedent the other way in 1990, since that movie was also from someone else’s p.o.v. the whole way through. But despite that, and despite Bates being as much an unknown in 1990 as Navarrette was before May 2026, she was upgraded into Best Actress and won anyway.
Still, Bates was the breakout of a film based on a Stephen King novel, helmed by then-recurring Oscar darling Rob Reiner and starring veteran James Caan as the leading man/victim. “Obsession” isn’t based on a novel by a literary legend or anyone else, isn’t written or directed by someone with Reiner’s stature, and features an entire cast of leading characters played by actors who were unknowns before this summer. As such, without her project having those kinds of extra advantages with the Academy, it may make Navarrette a harder sell as a Best Actress nominee or frontrunner – at least compared to the often easier to navigate Best Supporting Actress category.
To be fair, no one knows right now how hard or crowded the Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress fields will become, and which one will be easier or harder for Navarrette to compete in. After all, no one projected Jessie Buckley would completely sweep the 2025 Best Actress race at this time last year, and no one suspected Madigan, Teyana Taylor, or Wunmi Mosaku would even be on the radar as Best Supporting Actress nominees, let alone as frontrunners, 12 months ago.
This is another reason why Focus may not need to finalize any call about Navarrette until after the fall festivals, once there’s real certainty over who the early frontrunners and bubble contenders are in both fields. If it turns out Best Actress looks too crowded, or that Best Supporting Actress is as wide open as last year was, they may decide then that Navarrette will have it easier in Supporting. After that, she could easily sweep through critics season as Madigan did, then use that early edge and legitimacy to make history at the televised/industry awards as Madigan did.
Of course, without the long career and decades-long connections Madigan had as advantages, Navarrette may have a much harder time as the season progresses. Being a relative newcomer didn’t stop Mikey Madison from winning Best Actress in 2024 over Demi Moore, yet she had the advantage of being in the eventual Best Picture winner. Best Supporting Actress has seen the likes of Octavia Spencer, Lupita Nyong’o, Alicia Vikander, Yuh-jung Youn, and Ariana DeBose win when they were relative newcomers in years past, and both Vikander and Madigan didn’t even need their films to get into Best Picture.
If “Obsession” has any case for a Best Picture nomination, it not only needs to be Focus’s No. 1 awards season film by the end of fall, but also for Navarrette to sail along to her own nomination, no matter what category she’s in. This isn’t like the case of “One Battle After Another” and Chase Infiniti last year, where Warner Bros. made the gamble of submitting her for Best Actress instead of Best Supporting Actress and saw her miss, yet the film remained mortally locked as a Best Picture frontrunner and eventual winner no matter what. If Focus does submit Navarrette for Best Actress and she turns out to miss as Infiniti did, it is much harder, if not impossible, to imagine “Obsession” getting into Best Picture, or getting any other major nomination, if it can’t even get her in for starters.
An added wrinkle might come from the Golden Globes, since a case could be made for Focus to submit the blackly comedic “Obsession“ in the comedy categories instead of drama. Given how Moore launched her Oscar run as a Best Comedy Actress winner for “The Substance“ two years ago, the precedent is there for a horror movie actress like Navarrette to win that category too and take off from there. But if they submit her for lead in that awards ceremony right off the bat, it’ll make it harder to go back and put her in Best Supporting Actress for the Oscars if they want to go that way later.
For that matter, there’s no guarantee the more foreign-based Golden Globes voters will vote for someone from a less “artsy“ horror film like “Obsession“ anyway. This may be an obstacle throughout the season, no matter what, as “Obsession“ is a far bigger box office hit than “The Substance“ or even “Weapons,“ but is even less like the kinds of horror-based films – with less of the kinds of stars and filmmakers from those movies – that have become award winners lately.
Therefore, whether Navarrette is a Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress contender, she might have an uphill battle either way. Yet that makes it more important to decide which one she is and stick with it right away, so that she has one less problem to worry about – even if the rest of us may argue about the solution.
Every single year, there are debates and heated backlash over whether a given Oscar contender should be Lead or Supporting, what the standards should be for both, and sometimes whether a winner commits outright category fraud. With Navarrette and “Obsession,“ those arguments are well poised to start far ahead of schedule – so in that fashion, they really have become legitimate Oscar contenders like any other already.
Have you seen “Obsession” yet? If so, what do you think of it? Do you think Focus should campaign Inde Navarrette in lead or supporting? Do you even see the film as an Oscar contender? If so, which categories do you believe it will be nominated for? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account.
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