'The messier, the better': The righteously angry women who dominate this year's Oscars

Allison Janney is known for playing the C.J. Creggs, the authoritative figures, the glue that holds everything together. With her Oscar-nominated performance as hostile stage mom LaVona Golden in "I, Tonya," she ripped that image to shreds.

"I like characters who challenge me, who surprise you and who are not all just one thing," she said in a recent interview. "They're complex and dangerous and wonderful and awful - the messier, the better."

Fierce women such as LaVona dominate this year's array of Oscar nominees, diverging from the gentle figures of past awards seasons. Sure, actresses have won for playing abusive characters, such as Kathy Bates's Annie Wilkes in "Misery," but winners are more often honorable, such as Viola Davis' long-suffering wife in "Fences," or heart-rending, such as Julianne Moore's Alzheimer's-afflicted professor in "Still Alice."

Many of the characters in this year's nominations don't just defy the long-held notion that women must always be sympathetic or redeemable to captivate audiences - they're also driven by anger. And that anger feels especially potent in a year bookended by the Women's March and the #MeToo "Silence Breakers" being named Time's Person of the Year.

The phenomenon echoes the peak TV era's abundance of antiheroes, a term that recalls Walter White cooking meth on "Breaking Bad" or Tony Soprano putting out hits on "The Sopranos." Women infiltrated that boys club on television - Edie Falco's character on "Nurse Jackie" and Keri Russell's on "The Americans" come to mind - and, this year gave a host of their big-screen counterparts the same chance.

No one embodies the antihero persona quite like Mildred Hayes, the vengeful firebrand whom best actress nominee Frances McDormand plays in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." Months after her teenage daughter is raped and murdered, Mildred wages war with the local police department after its failure to thoroughly investigate the incident. She spirals, hurting innocent people and even committing arson.

"From page one, she's in a place of no return," writer-director Martin McDonagh told The Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan in November. "She's either going to die or she's going to solve this case. It's take-no-prisoners. The emotional collateral damage is something we talked about."

Mildred's imperfections rage on screen, compelling viewers to rubberneck as we do with most calamities. Though her actions can be inexcusable, it's refreshing to see her take matters into her own hands. She's militant in her efforts to bar others from shaping her path - an uncommon characteristic for a female protagonist, let alone a mother.

She operates in the same morally gray area that screenwriter Steven Rogers explored with "I, Tonya," which depicts Tonya Harding's tangential relationship to the 1994 attack on Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan.

"Tonya is a polarizing character," he said in a recent interview. "The story we got (at the time) was not a nuanced version. I wanted to say, these people are human, not stereotypes. I wasn't trying to give anyone a Hollywood ending."

The film mostly blames Tonya's tendency to lash out on the physical and emotional abuse from her then-husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and her expletive-spewing mother. But it still emphasizes her aggressive nature as she fights to rebut her unbecoming reputation. She yells profanity at a judge who criticizes her outfit and later nearly takes out her coach with a skate.

LaVona would deny that she ever did more to Tonya than "hit her once with a hairbrush," said Janney, who theorized that the resentful mother had a rough childhood herself. We witness horrific behavior from each woman - LaVona memorably throws a paring knife at her daughter - but can't look away. They command attention.

"Obviously this is a very damaged relationship, but those are the most timeless and fascinating ones to explore in the worlds of fiction, literature and film," Janney said. "There never ceases to be interesting conflict there. It was hard to imagine being that kind of mother and treating your daughter like that."

Many characters who appear in the lead and supporting actress categories are to some extent defined by their motherhood. Those played by Janney and McDormand - the likely winners for best supporting actress and actress - share a fierceness with the detestable mother played by Mo'Nique in "Precious." All three are a far cry from more traditional depictions of supportive mothers like Sandra Bullock's in "The Blind Side," Patricia Arquette's in "Boyhood" or Brie Larson's in "Room."

But both ends of the spectrum are necessary, according to Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood initiative for greater gender diversity in the industry. (So is racial diversity, a quality absent in many of this year's nominated films.)

"What we're all trying to say is that there are women who are happy, women who are sad, women who are multifaceted, women who are angry and who are vengeful," she said.

The mother-daughter relationship between Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan's characters in "Lady Bird," quietly revolutionary in its candid depiction, falls somewhere in the middle. Supporting actress nominee Metcalf plays Marion McPherson, a character whose fierceness stems from anguish over her teenage daughter's well-being. Marion's remarks often come off as tactless, especially when she and Lady Bird (Ronan) butt heads.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig scatters tense moments throughout the film, such as when Marion criticizes her daughter while they try to find her a prom dress at a local thrift store. They bicker while wading through racks, and Lady Bird yells at her mother, "Why can't you say I look nice?" Marion counters, "OK, I'm sorry. I was telling you the truth. Do you want me to lie?"

Marion's uncompromising comments parallel the one-liners of snarky sister Cyril Woodcock (Lesley Manville, nominated for supporting actress) in "Phantom Thread."

"Don't pick a fight with me - you won't come out alive," Cyril says to her brother while sipping tea. "I'll go right through and you'll end up on the floor."

It wouldn't have been surprising to hear those same words uttered by poker princess Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) in "Molly's Game," nominated for adapted screenplay. A drug addict and criminal, Molly develops a brash, increasingly combative personality while running underground high-stakes poker games. But as with characters like Marion and Mildred, this aggression is rooted in admirable values, according to writer-director Aaron Sorkin, who met with the real-life Bloom while working on the script.

"What was apparent in the first meeting was that she was very smart, very strong, with a wry, sly sense of humor and built out of integrity," he told The Post in December. "I left that first meeting ... knowing that the thing I was supposed to be writing at the time, I'm not writing anymore. I'm writing this."

And, though disagreeable, even characters like LaVona resonated with viewers.

"A lot of people come up to me and say it reminded them of their mother," Janney said. "I was floored by that, to imagine that LaVona is a mother that's out there."