Cate Blanchett
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 06: Cate Blanchett attends Louis Vuitton and W Magazine’s awards season dinner on January 06, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for W Magazine)

Cate Blanchett is being celebrated at the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles this evening for her role as a complicated and deeply flawed genius composer in new film TÁR, out in Australian cinemas on January 26.

Blanchett, 53, won the Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Motion Picture but as actor Henry Golding read out her name, he was prompted to let the audience know that Blanchett was unable to attend the ceremony as she was working on another project in the UK. TÁR is also nominated for Best Drama Motion Picture and Best Screenplay of a Motion Picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Na6gA1RehsU

For the uninitiated, TÁR tells the story of the incredibly layered, world-renowned conductor Lydia Tár. A maestro of orchestral assortments, we meet Lydia via long, drawn-out scenes mere weeks before she is to record the symphony that will elevate her already illustrious career. But it’s the happenings in the conductor’s periphery – her wandering eye which puts pressure on her relationship with her wife, her stepdaughter who is being bullied, and her ex-assistant accusing her misconduct – that sees Lydia unravel into a dramatically unchecked individual. While Lydia’s comeuppance remains unclear, Blanchett’s performance, particularly in the last scenes of the film, is pure power.

“It’s a film that has a conductor at its centre but it’s not a film about the classical music world,” Blanchett told the audience at an advanced screening in Sydney in December. “You don’t need to know any terminology at all – just allow that to wash over you. Don’t try and make sense of it!”

On learning German for the role, of which she delivers ever so fluently, Blanchett says it was just one new skill she had to learn to get inside Lydia’s tangled mind. “I’ve always loved the German accent, I learnt a bit of it in school,” she says. “But these are the things I had to do to get to the stuff. I was so daunted by [the role] to be perfectly frank.”

While we were very much looking forward to another sophisticated sartorial moment from Blanchett, congratulations are no doubt still in order.

TÁR is out in Australian cinemas on January 26. And you simply must see it!