1990's:
 

1990 - Kathy Bates won Best Actress for Misery, a movie where she plays a psychotic woman who switches from sweet solicitude to savage scorn in the blink of an eye.

1991 – Jodi Foster wins Best Actress for Silence of the Lambs for her role as Clarice Starling, an untried young female FBI trainee who appeals to the monster Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins).  She experiences  a lot of unwarranted sexual pressure and attention from most of the men in this movie.

1993 – Holly Hunter won Best Actress for The Piano (written and directed by Jane Campion).  In this movie, Hunter shows the audience that there is eroticism in the slowness and restraint of the forming of a sexual relationship.  The power that her character Ada gains by pretending to care nothing for Baines (Harvey Keitel).  Hunter’s character is not a victim, but a woman who reads a situation and responds to it.

1997 – Helen Hunt won Best Actress for As Good as It Gets.

1998 – Gwyneth Paltrow wins Best Actress for Shakespeare in Love, where she plays Viola De Lesseps, a strong willed Elizabethan rich man’s daughter who prefers Shakespeare to Marlowe.  She defies traditional gender roles in this movie by dressing in drag to audition for one of Shakespeare’s plays.

1999 – Annette Bening (Carolyn Burnham) starred in American Beauty alongside Kevin Spacey as her husband, Lester Burnham.  In this movie, she is so perfect that her garden shears coordinate with her footwear.  She plays Mantoramian music at every agonizing family dinner to juxtapose the angry, silent family with the lush and reassuring music.  Carolyn is also cheating on Lester.  Lester finally meets the catalyst for change he so desperately needs in a teenage cheerleader played by Mena Suvari (Angela).

1993 – Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia – film which features gay man with AIDS as the hero.