Ariana Grande has worked for this moment her whole life. But will it be enough to win her an Oscar?

“I feel so carbonated by gratitude and–”

“Carbonated by gratitude?” Nicole Kidman laughed as she interrupted Ariana Grande. Did Grande just make that up? “I suppose,” the 32-year-old singer, songwriter and actor responded, according to a transcript published in Interview magazine this week.

Such esoteric turns of phrase are common among Wicked fans – which Grande has been since age 10 – who are well versed in the glossary of Ozian terms (“obsessulated”, “clock tick”). Such vernacular bleeding into Grande’s real-life conversations almost two years after filming wrapped suggests her transformation into Galinda “Glinda” Upland was more than physical.

Grande’s dedication to her character has certainly paid off at the box office. Wicked: Part One, which premiered in Sydney last November, took home $US759 million ($1.1 billion) internationally. Last weekend, Wicked: For Good shattered Part One’s record-breaking global opening figures by $US58.8 million ($90.5 million), making it the biggest debut for a Broadway adaptation in Hollywood’s history.

“Loving something dearly and becoming it are two very different things,” Grande later wrote in thanks to her 373 million Instagram followers. “Becoming your Glinda the Good and being asked to join this most wonderful group of human beings on a most creatively and emotionally fulfilling journey was the greatest gift of my life.”

Will that be enough to satisfy the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 10,000 voting members?

Grande, pictured here in Sydney, Australia, at the global premiere of Wicked: Part One in November 2024, has spent four years officially taking care of the character. But she spent the whole 18 years before being cast preparing for it.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

Charlize Theron (Monster). Robert De Niro (Raging Bull). Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club). Matthew McConaughey (ibid). All actors who underwent a significant physical transformation for their Oscar-winning roles. The first sign Sydney Sweeney was, before her recent controversies, gunning for a statuette for Christy was not necessarily the fact that she gained 15 kilograms for the role, but the lengthy W magazine profile, published in June, showing she was eager to talk about it.

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What would have enhanced Sweeney’s campaign is something Grande has spent years sharpening: living and breathing every moment as her character.

“She had a high bar because you have to leapfrog over the image of Ariana Grande,” Wicked director Jon M. Chu told Forbes of casting Grande.

“I didn’t know if she could do that, but every time she came in, it was not recognisable as Ariana Grande, the person you know. It was Glinda – she like lived this character.”

Going full method, though some consider it controversial – “You only ever see people doing method when they’re playing an asshole,” Robert Pattinson once claimed on Variety’s “Actors on Actors”, something Daniel Day-Lewis takes issue with – is more than an acting technique. It’s “Oscar bait”. Just ask Hilary Swank, who won Best Actress both times she was nominated because of it (Boys Don’t Cry, Million Dollar Baby).

Grande’s approach to her five Wicked auditions made Chu feel like he had met “the real Glinda” for the first time.

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On the surface, training started six months beforehand, with daily acting and voice lessons between The Voice (US) commitments. (Although Grande, who was a coach on the show in 2021, has a four-octave vocal range that extends to a whistle register, she needed to master an operatic style for Glinda, particularly for No One Mourns the Wicked.)

Chu may have been worried Grande’s fans wouldn’t be able to see Glinda past the pop superstar - but some would argue they can’t see Grande without glimpsing Glinda.

The Wizard of Oz has been Grande’s favourite film since she was four. In 2003, Grande played Dorothy Gale in a community theatre show in Florida, and met Kristin Chenoweth backstage after watching the original Wicked Broadway production.

Grande with her late grandmother, Marjorie Grande, and Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda on Broadway. Here, they are pictured backstage at Wicked in 2003.Credit: Instagram/Kristin Chenoweth

When her grandfather died 11 years later, Grande sang Somewhere Over The Rainbow at his funeral. She sang it again in 2017 to close the One Love Manchester benefit concert, held two weeks after 22 people died in a bombing at her concert. And again to open the 2025 Oscars.

Universal Pictures first announced a Wicked film adaptation was in the works in 2012. Grande – who, a year prior, tweeted Glinda was her “#DreamRole” – spent the nine years it was stuck in development hell “hunting” power producer Marc Platt for the chance to audition.

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“I have never wanted something as badly as I did this,” Grande told Zach Sang in February 2024. “I had no expectations, I was just thankful to go in at all, I was so excited to have the opportunity to audition.”

It was the “best day of [her] life” when she found out she would be playing Glinda, and she bleached her hair (and eyebrows) for the role – a huge commitment after Grande’s catastrophic hair damage from four years of bleaching and dyeing it red for Nickelodeon’s Victorious.

For three years, Grande was visibly Glinda-fied. But it was only in November that she revealed the extent of her internal metamorphosis, helped by using the Stella Adler technique to scrupulously devise the character’s childhood, inner life and traumas.

Elphaba Thropp (portrayed by Cynthia Erivo in the films) was also a dream role for Grande, who is pictured here in glitter-green lipstick performing The Wizard and I for a 2018 televised Wicked Halloween special.Credit: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Grande, pictured here performing Defying Gravity with Erivo at the 2025 Oscars, spent three years with bleach-blonde hair and eyebrows. (If you look closely, you can see an actual ruby red slipper, like Dorothy Gale’s, on the back of her shiny Schiaparelli Haute Couture gown).Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Universal Pictures’ Wicked: For Good Oscars campaign has been going for almost two years, kicking off with Erivo and Grande’s appearance at the 2024 ceremony. They dressed in green and pink, and presented the Best Original Song and Best Original Score awards.Credit: Chris Pizzello

“I just wanted to design this person inside and out, even if none of it was necessary for a scene, so that I could reference it for myself and leave my own stuff at home,” Grande told the New York Times. “So every time something had to trigger Glinda, it was a Glinda trigger that I used, not an Ariana one.”

Early on, according to the publication, she told Chu: “I feel closer to Galinda [Glinda’s original name] than maybe even Ariana Grande. I understand that struggle between trying to give people light and trying to understand where my light comes from myself.”

But it wasn’t enough to earn her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Actor Award (formerly Screen Actors Guild), nor a Critics Choice Award, all of which she was nominated for, last awards season.

It’s not as if the critics – who lauded Grande’s comedic timing and emotional depth in Part One and For Good – don’t like movie-musicals.

Grande lost all of those gongs to Zoe Saldaña’s performance in cursed crime musical Emilia Pérez. Other recent Oscar winners in the category include Ariana DeBose for West Side Story, and Anne Hathaway for Les Misérables (another notable physical transformation).

What they do dislike is when something feels cheap. Margot Robbie’s Barbie (2023), based on the toy, was a prime example of this. Greta Gerwig was notably snubbed with no Best Director Oscar nomination despite captaining the biggest film of the year (the Golden Globes made a new Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award to offset the fact Barbie was not going to win Best Picture).

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Some argue Barbie fell victim to the fact it was released in a year with strong competition (Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things). Others say it was old-fashioned sexism. Whether For Good, based on a musical that was based on novel that was a revisionist version of The Wizard of Oz, fits into either category will be decided in March’s awards season post-mortem.

Universal Pictures, however, may have cruelled its chances this week with the revelation “things” were “underway” to continue Wicked’s franchise on-screen. But there is no doubt the studio has been doing everything else in its power to brand For Good as a serious 2026 contender since the Oscars campaign kicked off at the 2024 ceremony.

This press tour had considerably fewer tears and fingernail holding, and Chu has been available for, seemingly, more substantial sit-downs about the trials and tribulations of filmmaking than ever.

It also helps that Grande’s For Good performance was the most complex take on Glinda – a privileged, popular aspiring sorceress who only becomes an ally to the fascist resistance when she personally gets something out of it – we have seen in Wicked’s history, so much so that For Good was described by Vulture as “Ariana Grande’s movie” despite Cynthia Erivo shining as the main protagonist.

If Grande, who is credited under her birth name (Ariana Grande-Butera) rather than her stage name to honour her 10-year-old self, comes home empty-handed in three months, perhaps a consolation is that she achieved her ambitions simply by being cast.

“It was the greatest gift of my life being cast in this. It’s something that I wanted more than anything in the world,” Grande told Deadline after news broke of her first Oscar nomination.

“I’m grateful every single day for [Glinda]. I’ve learned so much from her. I’ve healed through her, and she’ll be with me forever.”

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