Michelle Williams is many months faraway from her newest Oscar nomination, for The Fabelmans, in addition to one in all her most up-to-date movies, Kelly Reichardt’s delightfully minor key Displaying Up. But she’s given what could be the autumn’s most talked-about efficiency because the narrator of Britney Spears’s memoir, The Girl in Me.
The e-book has been topping charts since its launch on October 24, but it surely’s clips from Williams’s audiobook narration that maintain going viral—capturing Justin Timberlake’s cringeworthy approach to Ginuwine, or Spears’s sister being a “total bitch.” The distinction of Spears’s conversational writing model and Williams’s fastidiously educated voice is humorous in 15-second clips, however utterly fascinating in longer stretches. It’s Spears’s story, after all, however Williams is respiration a unique type of life into it, one survivor of the child-star industrial complicated lending her voice to a different.
Williams has been nominated for an Oscar 5 instances, and whereas top folks proceed to root for her to lastly win, one other chance now looms: Might Michelle Williams win a Grammy for this? That’s how Viola Davis cemented her EGOT this yr, in any case, by successful a Grammy for narrating her personal audiobook. Williams already has an Emmy, for Fosse/Verdon, and a Tony nomination for Blackbird, so this could possibly be what actually will get her EGOT run going.
Williams should wait some time, nevertheless. This yr’s Grammy nominations shall be introduced on November 10, however the eligibility minimize off was September 15, which suggests The Girl in Me should wait till subsequent yr for consideration.
However the larger hurdle could be Grammy voters themselves. The class now often called finest audio e-book, narration and storytelling recording has developed many instances because it was established in 1959, beneath many various names however referred to as finest spoken phrase album from 1998 and 2022. That intentionally broad umbrella makes room for lots of unlikely opponents; the 1971 award went posthumously to Martin Luther King Jr., successful over fellow nominee Invoice Cosby, and in 2003 Maya Angelou triumphed over a recording of Tim Robbins studying The Nice Gatsby. Winners have included everybody from Orson Welles to Magic Johnson to Barack Obama. Greater than maybe some other class on the all the time chaotic Grammys, right here, something goes.
However in recent times, whereas the nominees have been everywhere in the map (Davis beat Lin-Manuel Miranda studying a YA e-book, for instance), the winners have trended pretty severely. Jimmy Carter gained his third Grammy on this class in 2019. Don Cheadle gained in 2022 for studying a e-book by John Lewis. Although celeb memoirs like Davis’s or Carrie Fisher’s (the 2018 winner) nonetheless triumph typically, being a former president or a really, very outdated celeb continues to be a reasonably unbeatable benefit.
Spears has her personal checkered historical past with the Grammys. She didn’t win a statuette till 2005, for finest dance recording for “Poisonous,” and famously misplaced the best-new-artist statuette in 2000 to Christina Aguilera. A complete lot has modified since then, from the make-up of Grammy voters to Spears’s profession, and the triumphant comeback narrative round her memoir may simply lengthen to the Grammys as effectively. However as a lot as Williams is prone to be essentially the most talked-about audiobook narrator of this yr (or subsequent), the Grammy won’t come as simply as we’d like.
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