OVP: Best Lead Actress (2010)
The Nominees Were...
Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
My Thoughts: Wow-looking at this lineup, I'm kind of in awe of what a terrific list of performances Oscar managed to assemble. Most of the time I have to weigh the good with the bad when I'm looking at a lineup, trying to figure out how I'm going to balance and whether I'll end on a high or a low note, but here, the notes just keep getting higher.
Take, for example, Natalie Portman, the person who somehow emerged as the frontrunner after she scored a couple of precursors (up until that point, I think you could have made a legitimate argument in favor of Portman, Lawrence, or Bening being the one who stampeded to the trophy). Black Swan lives and dies on her shoulders, and she's given a difficult task, for a couple of reasons. First, she has to endure, physically, the role put in front of her, which is no easy task. Ballet, especially for someone who hasn't spent their life devoted to it, is not an easy thing to just pick up. Secondly, and far more difficult, she has to find the weird center of this character.
Nina is a woman (more accurately girl, toward the end of the movie) who has excelled to a certain extent, and has never understood taking her own chances. She's been controlled by teachers, her mother, her own psychotic pressures, and as she is forced to deal with this being her "chance," and not just leading up to this moment. Portman has to find a way to keep her from falling over the precipice and yet still making us wonder if she's already gone over, into the darkness of the black swan. The way she lilts her voice, higher and more girly as the film progresses, and the way that she slowly slips from reality into this other demon, it's breathtaking work from an actress that has always had great potential, but aside from Closer, hasn't always had the opportunities to share it.
Michelle Williams is one of those great joys of the past decade on-screen. I'm still quite stunned, after spouting off the rambling, self-obsessed dialogue of Kevin Williamson for so many years, that there was a great actor in its midst, but she has proven time and again that this is of course the case. As an actress, Cindy may be the most difficult role I've seen her play, and is probably the most difficult of these five nominated performances. The trick is figuring out how to make her seem both vulnerable and caged-in by her own sense of self-doubt. Cindy is not someone that falls in love, in true love, easily and when she does, she finds it all consuming. Williams has to play her as someone who makes Dean her entire world, that she signs on completely to him being her life, and then, in the present sequences, she has to show not only that her feelings have changed, but how disappointed that makes her. Williams understands the character and the emotions that come with loving someone, and then falling out of love with them-those feelings don't necessarily go away, they are just overpowered by a newer sense of where your life is headed. The moments where it seems Cindy is considering retaking Dean back, that leaving him would be the worst decision, is where Williams shines the brightest.
We've had physically-demanding and emotionally-demanding, but there are demands that certain characters bring that few others could achieve. Annette Bening also gets a bit of a tightrope act-she has to find a character that is both lovable (we have to believe that Julianne has fallen in love with her and stayed in love with her) and has her own baggage to weigh on the relationship. Part of what makes Bening so great in this movie is the way she can center the character between being unlikable and still identifiable. Think of the way she unfolds in that great dinner scene-talking about Joni Mitchell, she's the sort of person that at a party you try to avoid because they'll make things uncomfortable, but feel bad about because she's truly a good person. She's the friend you love on occasion and drives you bonkers on others. She finds the humanity that's at the core of her character, and brings it out, the good and the bad. In a category where it's generally considered important to be likable, it's nice to know that Oscar can also recognize a difficult character and the wonderful work this actress brings to it.
Nicole Kidman has spent a career out of finding the unlikable characters and bringing humanity to them. I don't always have opportunity to discuss Nicole, as she's ignored by Oscar just as often as she is cited by him, but what makes her such a terrific actress is that she throws herself at the mercy of the director's vision. She's willing to play cold, heartless, tender, broken, all if it aids the story without a hint of vanity, which is impressive for an actress as gorgeous as she is. Her Becca has to be incredibly vulnerable, and occasionally cutting, and she doesn't worry about going there.
I have oftentimes wondered how this play worked on-stage. Cynthia Nixon and Nicole Kidman are both excellent actresses, but they don't excel in the same ways at all. Nixon is born for the stage, with her superb delivery and ability to pointedly fill a room with her voice. Kidman is more about introversion. I know she's done theater, but the cinema is really where her powers lie-with the slightest flick of her voice, of her face, she can send the audience into her emotional pathway.
The best example of that for Kidman in Rabbit Hole is the way she handles her three primary on-screen partners. There's her husband, whom she holds at a cold distance, wondering why he seems to have moved on from the death of their son and wondering why he hasn't reacted in the same way as she. There's her mother, whom she resents for getting a longer life with her dead child, and hates for comparing her pain of losing a drug-addled grown man to that of losing her six-year-old boy. And then there's the young man who accidentally killed her son, and the way that she really opens up to him. He's the only person who is still mourning in the same way she is, and she continues to want him in her life even though he brought about the pain she suffers. Kidman gets to the heart of these relationships, and lets her movements and actions reflect the thoughts she's thinking but not saying to these people in her life.
Finally, we have Jennifer Lawrence. I remember loving Lawrence on the red carpet of the Oscars that year, and wondering if she was going to make it in Hollywood (clearly that fear was assuaged). As she was so beautiful but gave such a haunted, grounded performance I wondered if she was prepared for the Twilights and Harry Potters that seem to be thrown at actors in their young twenties (clearly The Hunger Games also proved she's up for that challenge).
Ree Dolly, her first major, weighty role, shows she's very instinctual as an actor. She understands the hard life that her character has played. Some actors would have made her a bit more naive, a bit more stunned at what was unfolding, but you never see that in her Ree. She's scared, of course, but she doesn't show it. She, like her uncle Teardrop and a number of her relatives in the film, is a survivor, and that baser need to live through anything carries her through the heart of darkness to try and find her father. I love the way she knows exactly how much more she can open up with her uncle, how she can play him a little bit bigger than she can anyone else. I also love the way she half-expects to die, how she knows that even if she's got death staring her right in the face, the worst thing she can do is blink. You can tell when an actor lands their first great performance, as you can't picture them playing anything else, and that's the way I felt about Lawrence in this movie. And of course, what a superb actor does is take their next great work, and then prove you wrong over-and-over. Which, I suspect is what Lawrence is going to do in the upcoming decades.
Take, for example, Natalie Portman, the person who somehow emerged as the frontrunner after she scored a couple of precursors (up until that point, I think you could have made a legitimate argument in favor of Portman, Lawrence, or Bening being the one who stampeded to the trophy). Black Swan lives and dies on her shoulders, and she's given a difficult task, for a couple of reasons. First, she has to endure, physically, the role put in front of her, which is no easy task. Ballet, especially for someone who hasn't spent their life devoted to it, is not an easy thing to just pick up. Secondly, and far more difficult, she has to find the weird center of this character.
Nina is a woman (more accurately girl, toward the end of the movie) who has excelled to a certain extent, and has never understood taking her own chances. She's been controlled by teachers, her mother, her own psychotic pressures, and as she is forced to deal with this being her "chance," and not just leading up to this moment. Portman has to find a way to keep her from falling over the precipice and yet still making us wonder if she's already gone over, into the darkness of the black swan. The way she lilts her voice, higher and more girly as the film progresses, and the way that she slowly slips from reality into this other demon, it's breathtaking work from an actress that has always had great potential, but aside from Closer, hasn't always had the opportunities to share it.
Michelle Williams is one of those great joys of the past decade on-screen. I'm still quite stunned, after spouting off the rambling, self-obsessed dialogue of Kevin Williamson for so many years, that there was a great actor in its midst, but she has proven time and again that this is of course the case. As an actress, Cindy may be the most difficult role I've seen her play, and is probably the most difficult of these five nominated performances. The trick is figuring out how to make her seem both vulnerable and caged-in by her own sense of self-doubt. Cindy is not someone that falls in love, in true love, easily and when she does, she finds it all consuming. Williams has to play her as someone who makes Dean her entire world, that she signs on completely to him being her life, and then, in the present sequences, she has to show not only that her feelings have changed, but how disappointed that makes her. Williams understands the character and the emotions that come with loving someone, and then falling out of love with them-those feelings don't necessarily go away, they are just overpowered by a newer sense of where your life is headed. The moments where it seems Cindy is considering retaking Dean back, that leaving him would be the worst decision, is where Williams shines the brightest.
We've had physically-demanding and emotionally-demanding, but there are demands that certain characters bring that few others could achieve. Annette Bening also gets a bit of a tightrope act-she has to find a character that is both lovable (we have to believe that Julianne has fallen in love with her and stayed in love with her) and has her own baggage to weigh on the relationship. Part of what makes Bening so great in this movie is the way she can center the character between being unlikable and still identifiable. Think of the way she unfolds in that great dinner scene-talking about Joni Mitchell, she's the sort of person that at a party you try to avoid because they'll make things uncomfortable, but feel bad about because she's truly a good person. She's the friend you love on occasion and drives you bonkers on others. She finds the humanity that's at the core of her character, and brings it out, the good and the bad. In a category where it's generally considered important to be likable, it's nice to know that Oscar can also recognize a difficult character and the wonderful work this actress brings to it.
Nicole Kidman has spent a career out of finding the unlikable characters and bringing humanity to them. I don't always have opportunity to discuss Nicole, as she's ignored by Oscar just as often as she is cited by him, but what makes her such a terrific actress is that she throws herself at the mercy of the director's vision. She's willing to play cold, heartless, tender, broken, all if it aids the story without a hint of vanity, which is impressive for an actress as gorgeous as she is. Her Becca has to be incredibly vulnerable, and occasionally cutting, and she doesn't worry about going there.
I have oftentimes wondered how this play worked on-stage. Cynthia Nixon and Nicole Kidman are both excellent actresses, but they don't excel in the same ways at all. Nixon is born for the stage, with her superb delivery and ability to pointedly fill a room with her voice. Kidman is more about introversion. I know she's done theater, but the cinema is really where her powers lie-with the slightest flick of her voice, of her face, she can send the audience into her emotional pathway.
The best example of that for Kidman in Rabbit Hole is the way she handles her three primary on-screen partners. There's her husband, whom she holds at a cold distance, wondering why he seems to have moved on from the death of their son and wondering why he hasn't reacted in the same way as she. There's her mother, whom she resents for getting a longer life with her dead child, and hates for comparing her pain of losing a drug-addled grown man to that of losing her six-year-old boy. And then there's the young man who accidentally killed her son, and the way that she really opens up to him. He's the only person who is still mourning in the same way she is, and she continues to want him in her life even though he brought about the pain she suffers. Kidman gets to the heart of these relationships, and lets her movements and actions reflect the thoughts she's thinking but not saying to these people in her life.
Finally, we have Jennifer Lawrence. I remember loving Lawrence on the red carpet of the Oscars that year, and wondering if she was going to make it in Hollywood (clearly that fear was assuaged). As she was so beautiful but gave such a haunted, grounded performance I wondered if she was prepared for the Twilights and Harry Potters that seem to be thrown at actors in their young twenties (clearly The Hunger Games also proved she's up for that challenge).
Ree Dolly, her first major, weighty role, shows she's very instinctual as an actor. She understands the hard life that her character has played. Some actors would have made her a bit more naive, a bit more stunned at what was unfolding, but you never see that in her Ree. She's scared, of course, but she doesn't show it. She, like her uncle Teardrop and a number of her relatives in the film, is a survivor, and that baser need to live through anything carries her through the heart of darkness to try and find her father. I love the way she knows exactly how much more she can open up with her uncle, how she can play him a little bit bigger than she can anyone else. I also love the way she half-expects to die, how she knows that even if she's got death staring her right in the face, the worst thing she can do is blink. You can tell when an actor lands their first great performance, as you can't picture them playing anything else, and that's the way I felt about Lawrence in this movie. And of course, what a superb actor does is take their next great work, and then prove you wrong over-and-over. Which, I suspect is what Lawrence is going to do in the upcoming decades.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes found room for all five of the women in their lineups where ten actresses can fit, but since The Kids Are All Right was in the Comedy lineup, they made way for Halle Berry in Frankie and Alice in the Drama lineup (question: was this film ever actually released? I know nothing about this movie, I think it was only released in an incredibly limited qualifier run, and despite a huge name in Berry, has never been released on Netflix). For the Comedy lineup, you also had Emma Stone in Easy A, Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs, Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right, and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist. Portman and Bening won the Globes. The Screen Actors Guild Awards wanted to go for round three of the legendary Bening/Swank Oscar feud, giving a nomination to Hilary Swank in Conviction and skipping over Michelle Williams (I have to believe that had Swank made it in over Williams at the Oscars, as I do feel she was in sixth place, that this would have only helped Bening since the media would have focused on this so ferociously, though SAG did go with Portman instead of Bening). Like Get Low, this is another major contender that I didn't have time for because it never actually made it to the Kodak, so please share in the comments if it's worth the investigation. And the BAFTA Awards, always doing their own thing, only had room for Portman (their victor) and Bening, instead citing Julianne Moore, Haille Steinfeld (correctly in the lead category), and Noomi Rapace for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Rapace was definitely in the race for Oscar, a nomination that would have killed Rooney Mara's chances a year later and likely would have gotten Tilda Swinton a second nomination. Ahh, the butterfly effect of just missing at the Oscars.
Performances I Would Have Nominated: I am deeply conflicted over my fifth place slot. When this lineup came out, I was really torn between honoring Lawrence, Emma Stone, and Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go as my final nominee, and while I went with Mulligan, three years later I still have trouble figuring out which one should have been there. This is my long-winded way of saying I think that this is one of the best lineups Oscar has ever produced in this category. I'd like to have seen Berry, Rapace, and Swank before making this statement, but I think they may well have picked the five best eligible performances of the year when they assembled this lineup.
Oscar's Choice: Portman made good on her promise over a decade earlier as a young actress to watch, and picked up the trophy, with Annette Bening getting yet another silver (in four nominations, once could strongly argue that she's been in second place four times).
My Choice: With a lineup this strong, you kind of want to give it to them all, but that's of course not allowed. My heart at the time said Kidman, and I'm sticking with that-she brings a level to her character that doesn't quite hit with the others. After writing things up, though, I've swayed myself a bit (writing your opinions down makes you further evaluate them and your actual beliefs become clearer), and I'm going with Williams, Portman, Bening, and Lawrence for the rest of the line.
What about you-do you think Portman was the correct choice for Oscar, or were you more drawn to one of the other excellent ladies? When (if ever) do you think Michelle Williams or Annette Bening will win their trophies? Should I be seeing Hilary Swank's or Noomi Rapace's work, or are these fine to skip? And seriously, what is the deal with Frankie and Alice and how does one get to view it?
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