Olivia Wilde’s Best Actress Oscar buzz for The Invite—now streaming on HBO Max—is more than deserved.
As Angela, a stay-at-home wife desperate to impress her upstairs neighbors with a perfect dinner party, she’s equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. Her eyes shimmer with tears, liable to spill over at any hint of emotion—tears of gratitude when her neighbor Hawk (Edward Norton) compliments her apartment renovations, or tears of mortification when Hawk’s partner Pina (Penelope Cruz) reveals she does not eat meat, cheese, sugar, or basically any of the food Angela prepared. Wilde’s physical comedy in the role is unmatched, from casually taking a burnt souffle from the oven only to dump it straight in the garbage (a clip that went viral on Twitter), to gagging on shot of tequila. Wilde doesn’t just deserve a Best Actress nomination—she deserves to win.
And she also deserves a nomination (and maybe even win!) for Best Directing for The Invite at the 2027 Oscars. The Invite—written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, as an English-language remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs—is Wilde’s third film as a director, following 2019’s Booksmart and 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling. Booksmart, a critically-acclaimed comedy with signature style, established Wilde as a director with a vision. Don’t Worry Darling, a critical flop plagued by on-set controversy and salacious celebrity gossip, hampered her momentum.
But now, with The Invite—adored by both critics and audiences—Wilde has come back on the filmmaking scene with a vengeance, proving herself to be one of the most compelling working directors in Hollywood. She deserves her flowers for that, even if we have to bully the Academy into giving them to her.
When it comes time for the Academy to nominate four men and one woman for the category of Best Director at the Oscars, I often think back to a quote from Marielle Heller, director of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which earned acting Oscar nominations for its two leads (Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant) in 2019. But Heller herself was snubbed for Best Director—as is too often the case for women behind the camera.
“I got separated from my film, which I worked so hard on,” Heller told IndieWire in 2019. “If I had gone into this awards campaign going, ‘I made this movie. I did this. I created these performances, I created this chemistry, I brought them together, I cast Richard E. Grant, I cast Melissa McCarthy. I brought them together. I did this. I found all of these things. This was what I did, this was what I did, this was what I did,’ maybe I wouldn’t have been separated from the story of movie in the way that I have been. But how would I have slept at night?”
The braggadocios attitude Heller describes there is exactly what so many male “auteur” director’s have done—permanently stick their names to their movies (Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners).
But it’s not just these individual directors doing that work of tying their names to a film. These days, media and audiences do it for them—and fail to do the same for women directors. (Remember “Barbenheimer?” Nolan won Best Director for Oppenheimer, while Greta Gerwig wasn’t even nominated as a director for Barbie.)
We cannot allow Wilde to get separated from The Invite as a director in the same vein. Wilde is not going around saying that she created this movie, that she cast Seth Rogen and Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, that she brought them together, that she made a single interior location feels alive for two hours, that she found the perfect beats in the edit, or that she chose the perfect shots to emphasize the awkwardness of the night. But she did do all of those things. So we need to say it for her.
Yes, Olivia Wilde’s performance in The Invite is Oscar-worthy. Her directing is Oscar-worthy, too. Let’s keep yelling at the Academy until they listen.
