As we approach the 2015 Academy Awards, enthused fans have picked their favorites to win each respective category. At the top of the Best Actress category is Julianne Moore for her portrayal of a professor who has been diagnosed with a rare case of early onset Alzheimer’s disorder in the movie Still Alice. This is Moore’s first nomination for Best Actress; she has been nominated only once before for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

The movie opens with Alice (Moore) lecturing about the effective tools used in linguistics for people to communicate to one another; in her lecture, Alice foreshadows her eventual cognitive reduction with subtle, awkward pauses. It is these subtleties that put Moore at the forefront of peoples’ ballots for Best Actress!

Warning: this movie is a tear jerker, which is to be expected of a movie that centers on the painful realities of people who are diagnosed with this disease. Ultimately, the film does a respectful, tasteful job at displaying some of the more unapproachable nuances such as the disease’s crippling effect on someone trying to remember where the bathroom is in her own house. And that really speaks about the driving force behind Still Alice: even though Alice is crippled by her disorder, she is still human and, more essentially, still the person that she created from a lifetime of work.

Moore retains the human qualities of a person who suffers from this disease. This is important for people to consider as too many times than not, people seem to lump those who suffer from a disease as being just a product of his or her disease, instead of being a person first.

Overall, this film has a powerful message to send, which Moore delivers perfectly.