• Rooster Cogburn must be a leftie this time out, because his patch covers his right eye! See! [American Thinker]
• Naturally, Thomas Friedman goes to bat for “Waiting for Superman.” [New York Times]
• Lane Brown points out a strong season of lead actress contenders on the horizon. [Vulture]
If we didn’t mention last week’s big casting news of Rooney Mara landing the role of Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s English-language remake of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” it’s because a) the story hardly wanted for coverage, and b) I don’t exactly share many people’s keen interest in Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling literary franchise. I find the books diverting but undistinguished airport fare, and the hit Swedish screen adaptation of “Tattoo” a one-note televisual slog.
That said, I’m fine with any phenomenon that compels mainstream audiences to read both books and subtitled movies — yet I draw the line when people start suggesting that the film should be in line for awards recognition. Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke, however, suggests that the film’s backers sense awards potential for the screen’s original Lisbeth, 30 year-old actress Noomi Rapace:
I’ve learned that Music Box Films is about to hire an Oscar publicist, probably Melody Korenbrot, to promote Noomi for a Best Actress nomination. That’s right, Best Actress. She’s already won the Swedish equivalency of that for the film. Her new agents at UTA and managers at Magnolia are comparing her to Marion Cotillard, who appeared in a small foreign film, came out of nowhere to be nominated and then win the Best Actress Academy Award, then landed big roles in major studio tentpoles.
The occasional indignity of being an Academy Award champ is that it gives obituaries an immediate short-cut through one’s career: a lifetime of distinguished work can be handily reduced to “culminated in an Oscar win for _________.”
Such is the case in many pieces on the passing of Patricia Neal yesterday, albeit justifiably supplemented with observations on her troubled personal life and remarkable recovery from multiple illnesses. Indeed, as a kid obsessed with all things Roald Dahl, I was, for many years, more familiar with the woman than the actress.
When discussing her film career, however, it’s hard not to zero straight in on her tremendous, Oscar-nabbing work in “Hud”: handily the most electric moment of an otherwise respectable career, yes, but also among the most essential, era-defining performances ever honored in the Best Actress category. (Yes, up there with greatest-win peers like Vivien Leigh and Hilary Swank, and perhaps something of an evolutionary link between them.)
Regular readers will know that there is no current film writer, great or small, whom I look up to more than Nick Davis — a Chicago-based English professor whose blogging balances rich academic perspective with truly heroic levels of Oscar geekdom.
These two elements combined to form a lifelong project in which Nick resolved to see and rank every one of the 408 performances nominated for Best Actress by the Academy — reviewing 45 of them along the way.
Insane? Of course. Difficult? Have you tried to locate a copy of, say, 1929’s “The Barker,” with its nominated performance by Betty Compson? (The guy had to go to the UCLA Film & TV Archive to track it down. That’s crazy dedication. Or just crazy.) But congratulations are in order, since Nick just completed this epic undertaking, saving Judy Garland’s iconic turn in “A Star is Born” for last.
• Pete Hammond says the Best Actress race is close, pats himself on the back for the fact that one of the countless early ideas he threw at the wall actually stuck. [Notes on a Season]
• Rachel Abramowitz notes Carey Mulligan’s rise to stardom via Julian Fellowes, well, via an assistant friend of an assistant to a casting director who knew Fellowes’s wife. You follow? [24 Frames]
• The 20 best Oscar night dresses of the last 20 years. [Entertainment Weekly]
Any discussion of this year’s Best Actress category can get so heated, so quickly, I almost hesitate to point you to this, but Nick Davis’s meticulous review of the five nominees is too good not to recommend. No critic I know analyzes performance with quite such consideration and generosity.
Here’s his case for why Gabourey Sidibe should (not will) take the gold on Sunday:
[T]he first sign that Sidibe was capable of more arrived in her bored but exasperated truth-telling to her school principal about how she got pregnant: “I had sex, Mrs. Lichtenstein,” she deadpans, illuminating Sidibe’s potential for combing out subtle gradations and conjuring real personality from within the character’s perma-gloom. The obstacle and the near-miracle of the performance from this point forward emerge from the fact that Sidibe has a fairly narrow emotional range in which to work (and she holds with conviction to that narrow range, refusing, for example, to be incongruously elated by the arrival of her child), and yet she nonetheless manages to broadcast when Precious is being mischievous, insolent, self-doubting, superior, distractable, suspicious, morbid, or unrelievedly depressed.
As for those of you who care only about the battle between Hollywood’s current two favorite leading ladies, he falls on the side of Streep. Wonderful stuff; read the rest here.
This year’s Best Actress race is easily the most debated of the major categories. Though one can’t help but wonder why that is, as the writing has seemingly been on the wall for a number of weeks now, stretching back to before the nominations were announced.
It was also one of the easiest fields to call, pre-nominations, as both lead acting categories had actually coagulated somewhat. The SAG slate was mirrored by the acting branch of the Academy, offering a nice mixture of young starlets and veteran standbys. The winner in the field, however, might be somewhere in the middle of that cross-section.
The nominees are:
Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side”
Helen Mirren, “The Last Station”
Carey Mulligan, “An Education”
Gabourey Sidibe, “Precious”
Meryl Streep, “Julie & Julia”
• John Lopez digs into the preferential voting system in intense depth. Maybe nothing you haven’t already read. And I’m kind of over it. [Little Gold Men]
• Charlie Wilson — yes, that one — has left us to our own wars. [Variety]
• Penelope Cruz says “thanks, no thanks” to Lars Von Trier, opts for “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.” That’s how you follow up two Oscar nods in a row, I tell ya. [Hollywood Reporter]
Remember when Oscar pundits were calling this year’s Best Actress race a coin-toss between Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep? It was a dispiritingly long time ago. With the unexpected explosion of “The Blind Side” arose an industry narrative about the unprecedented box-office muscle of middle-aged female stars, and awards season adjusted accordingly — making this one of the rare Oscars years where ingenues find themselves on the outside looking in.
Not that Mulligan has too much to be upset about: an Oscar nod for one’s first leading role is nothing to sneeze at, and with prominent and/or prestige projects like “Never Let Me Go” and “Wall Street 2” on her 2010 slate, the “next big thing” talk can continue unabated. (And without the pressure that accompanies an Oscar win, at that.)
The latest contributor to this conversation is Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes (“Gosford Park”), who cheers the actress’s Oscar nomination with a rather touching personal tribute in the Daily Telegraph. (If the near-miss of Emily Blunt for the Fellowes-scripted “The Young Victoria” dampened his mood, he doesn’t mention it.)
Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri has written a nice piece on the circumstances that have led to Sandra Bullock becoming the year’s unlikeliest Oscar contender, citing Bullock’s 2009 achievements as a “primer” for comic actors seeking serious Oscar consideration. And the key, it seems, is not taking the word “serious” too much to heart.
Last month, I wondered why Bullock was gathering Oscar traction this year for a relatively unprestigious film, when a credible dramatic turn in 2005’s Best Picture winner garnered her no awards attention whatsoever.
But while against-type casting can often reap Oscar benefits, Ebiri argues that actors like Bullock fare better when they don’t veer too far from their established screen persona. Her “Blind Side” character, he claims, does just the right level of tweaking:
Leigh Anne Tuohy may be a real person, but she’s not the kind of historical or ripped-from-the-headlines figure that usually attracts awards … After misfires like In Love and War, Bullock learned that maybe she wasn’t cut out to play these kinds of parts. So, in The Blind Side, she takes a character who displays some of the all-American spunk and energy of her own onscreen persona and gives it a more serious twist. She doesn’t try to “lose herself” in the part; moviegoers can recognize the Sandra Bullock they know and love in Leigh Anne.
To call Abbie Cornish’s astute, china-delicate performance in “Bright Star” a “breakthrough,” as so many critics this year have done, is to do something of a disservice to her similarly remarkable work in a pair of underseen Australian titles.
No informed viewer should be taken off-guard by the tart questioning and quiet sensuality she brings to the role of Fanny Brawne, the teenaged lover of famed Romantic poet John Keats, in Jane Campion’s period biopic.
What’s surprising is that, after winning a bevy of Australian awards at the age of 22 for Cate Shortland’s 2004 coming-of-age drama “Somersault,” and following it up with a searing turn opposite the late Heath Ledger in Neil Armfield’s harrowing junkie romance “Candy,” it’s taken three years for another starring role to come her way.
In that time, Cornish dipped her toe into international waters with supporting roles in ill-fated vehicles like “A Good Year,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” and “Stop-Loss” – though if those lean years were troubling to the Next Big Thing monitors, they weren’t to Cornish, who had “Bright Star” on her radar all along.
“I was sent the script for the film about two-and-a-half years ago, and I fell in love then and there,” the 27 year-old actress tells me over the phone, gentle Australian twang very much intact. She’s in Los Angeles to pick up her younger sister, before returning to the Vancouver set of Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch.”
The progression of “The Blind Side” from sleeper success to bona fide box-office phenomenon has cemented Sandra Bullock’s place in the Best Actress discussion. I don’t know if she’ll actually get a nomination — at this early stage, I’m guessing not — but in a tight race for the fifth spot, she’s currently one of the feistiest outside contenders.
Having not seen “The Blind Side” yet, I can’t say whether I’m okay with this or not. (She’ll have to be very good to justifiably deprive Abbie Cornish of a nod, that much I know.) But as more pundits speculate that Bullock might be in line for one of those “paid her dues” nominations the Academy sometimes hands popular entertainers for attempting more gravitas than usual, I find myself wondering: why now?
Where was this groundswell of support for Bullock four years ago, when she gave a strong, against-type performance in a film the Academy plainly loved?
“My God, they’ve thrown in everything but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Quoted by writer Anthony Holden in his gossipy history “The Oscars,” this was one publicist’s dismayed response to the 1990 Academy Award nominations, which included such unusual concessions to popular (as opposed to critical) opinion as a Best Picture nomination for “Ghost” and a Best Actress nod for Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.”
I remember this year well – I was eight years old, and it was the first Oscar race I followed in detail from burbling Christmas hype to the ceremony itself, digging up and scrapbooking all the press and TV coverage I could find.
And from what I recall of my fledgling research, the unnamed publicist above wasn’t alone in her discontent. In particular, the “Ghost” nomination attracted levels of critical scorn even higher than those usually reserved for the Oscars – the common line being that the Academy had sold out to commerce rather than art, and that the sky would be falling at any given moment.
Does this situation sound at all familiar?
It should do. Though it was a response to an outcome rather than a possibility, the kvetching over the 1990 nods more than slightly resembles the panic that set in among certain pundits and fans alike (including, admittedly, yours truly) when the switch to 10 Best Picture nominees was announced in June.
Leave it to a woman to understand the virtues of leading ladies on screen this year.
Yesterday we linked to Steven Zeitchik’s join-the-misguided-masses piece on the “thin” Best Actress race. I just got into this debate Monday night with another proponent of the theory (who has been similarly rebuffed here in the past).
The point I keep coming to is that, yeah, if everything is seen through the prism of what makes an Oscar contender (which is, frankly, such a manipulative pursuit it shouldn’t be the gauge), then yeah, maybe a case can be made for a “weak” year for lead actresses. But that does not necessarily translate to a dearth of quality work that isn’t destined to be recognized during the awards season.
Of course I’ve made this point emphatically and in black and white before. But it’s oh so nice to read Women & Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein catching the point as well.
Some of you have already mentioned this in another thread, but The Weinstein Company, in their apparent wisdom, have decided to campaign “Inglourious Basterds” star Mélanie Laurent for Best Actress.
Far be it from me to question the judgment of one of the greatest strategists in Oscar history, but … what?
Laurent was, admittedly, a very dark horse in the supporting category, but as far as I can see, promoting her to lead reduces her nomination chances to nil — unless voters take the category decision into their own hands, as they did with Kate Winslet this year.
Perhaps Weinstein is simply buying into the popular myth that Best Actress is a weakly contested category this year. But with only one slot seemingly up for grabs, and her compatriot (and fellow Weinstein Company property) Marion Cotillard muscling in on the race, the odds are firmly stacked against Laurent getting it.
Amid the surfeit of underdog titles vying for Oscar glory, a special prize for maximum cojones should go to the producers of indie Brit drama “London River,” who are mounting a campaign for Brenda Blethyn’s superb lead performance — despite the obstacle of the film lacking a US distributor.
The film (which was disqualified as Algeria’s Oscar entry due to excessive English dialogue) has just begun a week-long qualifying run in L.A., and if you happen to be around, you owe it to yourself to give it a look.
As I wrote in my June review of the film from the Edinburgh fest, it’s a quiet, humane piece dealing with the still-sensitive subject of the London terrorist attacks of July 2005. Despite this political currency, the film doesn’t draw overt attention to itself — but it affords Blethyn her finest showcase since “Secrets and Lies,” tempering the familiar rhythms of distraught-parent drama with less flattering streaks of prejudice and self-absorption.
