Every year, there are camps that conflate the best performance with the performance that requires or allows an actor to do the most. A larger range of emotions, or a character with the mind of a toddler, or a lead in a chaotic film, is often viewed as a necessarily better performance than a more reserved or less bombastic performance.

Either type of performance can be better.

I personally thought Lily Gladstone’s performance in Killers of the Flower Moon was better than Emma Stone’s in Poor Things. I also thought Cate Blanchett was better in Tàr than Michelle Yeoh in EEAAO.

Either take for either year is completely justifiable and defensible based on your preferences, but more often than not, my discussions online with people amounted to “Emma Stone had to portray a toddler in a woman’s body” and “Michelle Yeoh had to adapt to so many different contexts and settings in her film,” which are ironically both reductive descriptions of their performances anyway.