OVP: Best Actress (2018)
The Nominees Were...
Yalitza Aparicio, Roma
Glenn Close, The Wife
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Lady Gaga, A Star is Born
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
My Thoughts: We talked on Monday about how Best Actor was possibly the worst lineup in Academy history. Best Actress, thankfully, gives us a solid grouping of women, albeit ones in completely different stages of their careers. We have here two women making a splash in their first lead roles albeit one as an aspiring preschool teacher who had never acted before, the other as a Golden-Globe winning superstar who had been a household name for the better part of a decade. You also had a character actress getting her first major chance at a breakout part (that would graduate her to proper headliner), the most important comedic actress of the past decade who was trying her hand at a dramatic part, and the one, indisputable classic movie star of the bunch, in the hunt for an Oscar on her seventh nomination.
We rarely start with AMPAS's choice, so let's mix it up & begin with Olivia Colman, the surprise victor on Oscar night. Colman's work here is fascinating, because it's surely the most engaged of the three leading ladies in The Favourite, if that makes sense. She has to play Queen Anne as a slightly ridiculous person, someone that has been so coddled her whole life (born the niece of the king, she had never known a day of financial hardship but was horribly broken up about her inability to have a child survive to adulthood), but someone that we can at once sympathize with & who can sneak up on us. Notice how deliciously Colman sinks into the rare moments where Anne wields her power, but always knows that it's there, ready for her to command if she so chooses...and the heartbreak in Anne being aware that her power will never truly bring her companionships & love, the things she most desires. It's a great balancing act from an actress who knew her time had come, and got the job done.
Yalitza Aparicio, like Colman, is the lead in a major Best Picture contender. Aparicio, though, doesn't have the decades of stage & screen experience Colman brings to her big moment, and it shows. Aparicio is good for what this part is-she's solid in the way that she can convey a studied meditation for director Cuaron to bring to the screen, but I left thinking that this wasn't all raw nerve in her performance. First-time performers frequently suffer from not building a strong enough base inward for us to attach to their characters (they're too surface-level), but Aparicio if anything is the opposite-she's too measured, too controlled in what she's doing, and it makes it difficult for the audience to see her as more than her character-I left not knowing who Cleo really was, and as she's the central focus, that's a problem.
Lady Gaga is the opposite problem-it's all surface-level work, and her newness as an actress shows in this part. Gaga is better in the first half than the second, but that second half is a cliff for me. She plays Ally like an empty vessel, not able to convey the bigger moments & faltering badly when A Star is Born stumbles into cliche when other (more experienced) actresses might have been able to keep the cliche fresh. Think of the wooden approach she takes to "it's a disease" when discussing Cooper's alcoholism, or the way she doesn't moderate her emotions to be believable as a character. The singing is great (she's a good singer, this is not up-for-debate), but unlike someone like Jennifer Hudson, who also got an Oscar nomination for her first major role, who suffers to elevate her star persona when she's acting but brings it hard when she's singing, Gaga can't do either in A Star is Born-other than "Shallow," I felt like this was a rough, one-dimensional portrayal.
The movie The Wife got a lot of flack in 2018 for being Oscar-bait, a way for Glenn Close to finally get an Oscar in a movie that very few people had seen. This wasn't fair (at least the last part-The Wife making $20 million hardly puts it in "lowest-grossing Best Actress nominee" territory), but the film itself isn't great, which is perhaps the reason Close lost. This is a pity because this is one of Glenn Close's best performances, in my opinion, and a respectable nominee for Best Actress. She doesn't give in to some of her more famous ticks (there's no grand scenery-ensaring moment from Close, a theater actress through-and-through), and she plays her character so well without us ever having to scrutinize what she's thinking (unless that's what she wants). Colman's win will age well, but anyone who thinks Close's wouldn't have didn't see this movie-she's excellent.
Melissa McCarthy is a great actress-I would've given her the Oscar in 2011, and she just misses my Best Actress cut in 2015. That said, it's beyond fun to see her in a stretch like Lee Israel. She doesn't get some of her warm-hearted tenderness that has made her a star, nor does she get to engage in a lot of physical comedy, her calling card. Instead, she plays Lee Israel as someone who is lonely, unapologetically lonely, but also as someone who is desperate to understand the next step in her life (when the world essentially doesn't want her anymore). It's a tough movie, a bitter one, but she doesn't sentimentalize, which is tricky, especially in the late courtroom scene where she has to admit to opening herself up without losing her specific character traits. A really classy choice by the Academy not to skip McCarthy for such an atypical, sometimes unlikable leading role.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes separate their nominations between Drama and Musical/Comedy, so we have ten women nominated for these awards. The Drama category went with Glenn Close (in something of a surprise considering Lady Gaga would've been more HFPA's style), besting not just Gaga but also McCarthy, Nicole Kidman (Destroyer), & Rosamund Pike (A Private War), while Comedy/Musical went for Colman over Emily Blunt (Mary Poppins Returns), Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade), Charlize Theron (Tully), & Constance Wu (Crazy Rich Asians). SAG went with Close as well, over Blunt, Colman, Gaga, & McCarthy, while BAFTA favored Colman against Close, Gaga, McCarthy, & Viola Davis (Widows). In terms of sixth place, I predicted Emily Blunt for the Top 5 at the time & still think she was close. She had the one-two punch of A Quiet Place and Mary Poppins, had dominated the precursors (she won supporting for A Quiet Place in a true hindsight shock), & at this point was overdue for some time with Oscar. I'm not sure what the holdup was here, honestly-at some point you have to assume AMPAS just doesn't like someone.
Actors I Would Have Nominated: Next week we're going to get into my final list so I'll resist again the need to provide some hints, but I will say that I understand most of Oscar's impulses here, and in particular while it's not forgivable, it's understandable in such a field why they put Stone & Weisz in supporting even though they should've had room here.
Oscar’s Choice: The precursors do point to a closer race than what we assumed at the time, but Olivia Colman pulled off the upset and took what might've been Glenn Close's best chance at an Oscar, though unlike what we thought at the time, it was not her last chance at a trophy.
My Choice: I decide these things in a vacuum, and in a vacuum, I'd give this to Olivia Colman, who gives the best performance of these five women. McCarthy follows, with Close, Aparicio, & Gaga behind. I will say, as a result, that this was one of the opportunities I had to give the trophy to Close (but I'm skipping it) as she's very good (she'd be in my Top 10 that year), and since I still have screenings left in 1987/88, I deny her this trophy (again, in a vacuum as that is the OVP's wont) not knowing if I might be in a similar camp to Oscar in never giving her a trophy as a result.
Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours! Are with both Oscar & myself in falling head-over-heels for Olivia Colman? Will Glenn Close ever get an Oscar? And what's the deal with Emily Blunt's strange Oscar drought? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Also in 2018: Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2018
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