Sydney Sweeney tried to make her body unrecognizable to get an Oscar. It didn’t work.

Whether Sydney Sweeney wants an Oscar nomination because she is a true artiste or because it will enable her to sell more jeans is immaterial—Sydney Sweeney wants an Oscar nomination. What actress in her position wouldn’t? It’s the obvious next goal for a 28-year-old who is well on her way to becoming one of her generation’s most famous stars. Christy, a biopic in theaters this weekend about Christy Salters Martin, one of the most successful female professional boxers of all time, is Sweeney’s first major bid for the academy’s attention.

Like a boxer who comes out swinging, Christy isn’t shy about its Oscar-bait status: Playing a boxer in the first place is frequently a signal that an actor has their eyes on the prize. Since the fifth Academy Awards in 1931, when a gentleman named Wallace Beery won Best Actor for The Champ, there’s been a tradition of performers taking home awards for playing pugilists, more so than for any other type of athlete. (Perhaps Marlon Brando’s On the Waterfront Oscar should add to this count—boxing was the sport in which he “coulda been a contender.”) But Christy isn’t just a boxing story. It’s also a story about the domestic abuse and homophobia Martin faced—all the more grist for an actress looking for a role she can sink her teeth into.

The other especially awards-friendly thing about playing Martin is that it gives Sweeney a chance to transform herself. For Sweeney, a cute blonde in real life, her most well-known roles have run the gamut from cute blond high schooler in Euphoria to cute blond college student on vacation with her family in The White Lotus to cute blond destination wedding guest in Anyone but You. To play Martin, she reportedly gained 30 pounds and wore brown contact lenses and a dark wig for much of filming. Defying her seasonal color palette may not sound like a huge modification, until you also consider that Martin got her start in boxing during the late ’80s and early ’90s, a particularly tragic era for women’s hairstyles.

Sweeney’s commitment is commendable, but in the end I don’t know that all the effort put into changing her appearance was worth it. Watching her as Martin, I struggled to suspend disbelief and imagine I was watching a scrappy boxer with dated hair and clothes; I felt mostly that I was watching Sydney Sweeney in a series of laughable wigs, plus a mouth guard, headgear, and gloves.

As Sweeney’s star has risen, she’s had to contend with a lot of chatter about her looks, and her figure in particular. One wonders if part of why she wanted to play Martin was to get everyone to shut up about her body, and to show that she’s more than her physique. It worked, at least a little: On the red carpet and in other roles, Sweeney’s cleavage is often front and center, but Christy barely features it, almost making you forget that her boobs have become a national obsession. Still, despite all the muscle she put on, I kept noticing how petite Sweeney’s Martin looked. I was so sure that she was too scrawny to be a boxer that at one point I looked up her height to compare it with Martin’s, only to discover that Sweeney is 5-foot-3 to Martin’s 5-foot-4. Even so, it’s safe to say she doesn’t disappear into the role.

Martin could be a bully in the boxing ring, trash-talking her opponents and sticking her tongue out at them, and Sweeney executes this aspect of her persona well—my favorite part of the movie may have been the moment at a press conference when she calls a boxer she’s about to fight “honey” in the same breath that she vows to knock her out. That Martin could be so tough in public and yet in private be abused by her husband and coach, Jim Martin (played by Ben Foster), is theoretically an interesting dichotomy for the film to explore, but Christy doesn’t spend enough time on Martin’s interior life. Instead, you’re left wondering whether to root for a character who often acts like a jerk, whose more human side we barely get to know.

Sweeney’s own cockiness might have played a role here. She told GQ recently that she believes she has much in common with Martin: “She is fighting a fight in her home life, and she’s also fighting a fight in the public. And I think that, for me, I find myself in a lot of battles both in front and not in front of the world.” When Sweeney does something trollish like star in a jeans ad that invokes her cute blond “good genes” or date Scooter Braun, is that her being defiant, sticking her tongue out at all of us? And does she expect us to just accept that she has her private reasons for doing so, justifications that would illuminate everything if only we knew them?

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But whether Sweeney personally identified with the role seems secondary to what she definitely saw in it: an opportunity to be taken seriously. I wish she didn’t feel the pressure to prove her bona fides with such a stereotypically grim role. This is not to say that a more successful makeunder isn’t possible—in 2023’s Reality, Sweeney was able to make a subtle transformation into National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner via slightly messy hair and normie clothes, costuming choices that turn out to be much less distracting than wigs and pink satin boxing gear. But maybe straight drama isn’t her lane—my favorite role of hers thus far has been in the acerbic White Lotus, and though I thought Anyone but You was god-awful, her performance was certainly a hit. However far Christy goes this awards season—and it is not expected to go very far—my gut tells me that Sweeney will score that Oscar nomination eventually. Though I didn’t fully buy her Christy Martin, she has convinced me of at least one thing: She’s a fighter.

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