Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me could possibly get Michelle Williams one step closer to EGOT status.
via People:
The 41-year-old “Toxic” singer’s bombshell memoir was released Tuesday, and Williams, 43, narrates the audiobook version, which makes her eligible for a Grammy Award nomination — and fans are already hoping she wins.
Williams’ recording of The Woman in Me meets the criteria for the Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording category at the Grammys, an award previously won by Viola Davis, Michelle Obama, Carrie Fisher, Joan Rivers and Stephen Colbert, among other performers.
In the audiobook, Spears provides a spoken-word introduction before Williams reads the rest. It’s unclear if Spears would also be eligible to win a Grammy for her contribution.
Following the book’s release earlier this week, some listeners quickly took to social media and expressed hope for Williams to earn the Recording Academy’s praise for her performance. “We better get Michelle Williams a Grammy for #TheWomanInMe because she is KILLING this read,” wrote one X (formerly Twitter) user.
“Give Michelle Williams a Grammy, she did such a good job with the Britney Memoir,” wrote another fan.
The Brokeback Mountain star — who currently has an Emmy but will need a Grammy, Oscar and Tony to reach EGOT status — also went viral earlier this week for her reading of a passage where Spears writes about watching Justin Timberlake try to impress Ginuwine in New York City sometime in the early 2000s.
In the process of narrating the chapter, Williams did an impression of Timberlake that left fans buzzing.
“His band *NSYNC was back then what people called ‘so pimp.’ They were white boys but they loved hip-hop. To me, that’s what separated them from the Backstreet Boys, who seemed very consciously to position themselves as a white group,” Spears wrote. “*NSYNC hung out with Black artists. Sometimes I thought they tried too hard to fit in.”
“One day J and I were in New York, going to parts of town I had never been to before. Walking our way was a guy with a huge, blinged-out medallion. He was flanked by two giant security guards,” she added, before Williams leaned into the interpretation.
“J got all excited and said so loud, ‘Oh yeah, fo’ shiz fo’ shiz, Ginuwine, what’s up homie?’ After Ginuwine walked away, Felicia [Spears’ assistant] did an impression of J … J wasn’t even embarrassed. He just took it and looked at her like, ‘OK, f— you Fe.’”
When the five-time Oscar-nominated actress was announced as the narrator of Spears’ book earlier this month, the “…Baby One More Time” singer issued a statement to PEOPLE about the choice.
“This book has been a labor of love and all the emotions that come with it,” said Spears at the time. “Reliving everything has been exciting, heart-wrenching, and emotional, to say the least. For those reasons, I will only be reading a small part of my audiobook.”
Spears adds, “I am so grateful to the amazing Michelle Williams for reading the rest of it.”
“I stand with Britney,” Williams said in a statement of her support for the Grammy-winning singer.
We have nothing against Michelle, but wouldn’t Michelle getting a Grammy technically be just one more person benefiting from Britney’s name? Hopefully Britney would get one too.
