OVP: Best Actress (1999)
The Nominees Were...
Annette Bening, American Beauty
Janet McTeer, Tumbleweeds
Julianne Moore, The End of the Affair
Meryl Streep, Music of the Heart
Hilary Swank, Boys Don't Cry
My Thoughts: In our final 1999 acting race, we move into Best Actress. Going back this far, it's fun to see where the actresses' careers went. Two performers were on their first nominations here, and would only get nominated one more time (to date)-one won both, the other lost both. We have two actresses who were in their prime at the time, having never won, and again-one of them went on to win a "career achievement" style statue, while the other has not won yet. And in the middle of it all is the actress who basically defines the Academy Awards, one who was getting maybe her least interesting nomination, or at least her worst-regarded.
That actress is Meryl Streep. This is such a strange role on-paper to get an Oscar nomination. Originally intended for Madonna, and directed by horror icon Wes Craven, it's hardly the type of pitch that ends with an Oscar nomination, and let's be honest-if it was anyone other than Streep it surely wouldn't have. The movie is too saccharine, frequently too reliant on familiar story beats. I think Streep is better than that, but I also am not impressed by physicality; much was made about her ability to learn the violin to play in the movie, but that's musical talent-not necessarily acting. Her accent work is acting, and impressive, but she can't really make this movie any good, and if you're in the Best Actress field...shouldn't you be able to do more than "better than the movie" when the movie is a snooze?
The same can be said for Tumbleweeds, a better film but one that I think kind of misses the mark in terms of the lead performance. McTeer is such an open performer-there's a charm and sex appeal in her Mary Jo that makes it impossible for characters (and the audience) not to open up to her. But I needed more from this performance-technical skill isn't all there is, we also want motive, and I do think McTeer has a sense of where this character is (metaphorically) going. It's hard to know how much of this is the screenwriter's fault in writing such a specific character with no direction (in a road trip movie, no less), but it's definitely an issue for McTeer's work compared to some of these performers.
Look at someone like Hilary Swank, after all, who does have a sense of her performer in a movie that (while good) is pretty bleak. Swank fills Brandon Teena with such humanity in the role. I like that even some of Brandon's mistakes feel real, which is hard to do in a movie, and that's because Swank is giving such hope to her character, trying to fill them with a sense of life after denying who they were for such a long time. Swank fills the movie with more feeling than (if we're being honest) the script is giving her, and so this is rising above the movie, but it's a better movie than McTeer or Streep are using as their platform.
It's worth remembering this is Best Actress, not Best Picture (we give to the best performance, not to the performance in the movie I liked the best), but if we were focusing on the movie I like the best, it'd undoubtedly be American Beauty, and Bening is one of its best parts. The best stuff in Bening's work here is that she plays her character as so guarded. Watching this as an adult, and with a more modern lens, you can see that she's added a cautious feminism to a character that easily could be a harpy (that's largely how she's written). Look at how she's largely moved beyond her husband, moved beyond her family even...she's a realtor so to invest in that metaphor, they were a starter home, she's ready for her dream home. She understands the film's comedy, but more so she understands its tragedy, giving the movie's best(?) performance.
We'll finish with Julianne Moore's turn in The End of the Affair, that time in her career where she was regularly playing cloistered women in period movies. The movie is very much my speed (I love me a doomed romance), but it doesn't really know how to explore its topic, particularly its sexuality (for a movie that's quite carnal in its approach, all of the sex is limited to the first fifteen minutes). Moore is unable to get beyond this (and neither is Fiennes, which makes you confident it's the writers doing this given they're two of our best actors), giving us a finite scope into Sarah, never really discovering her balance in the picture. It's worth noting for Moore in 1999 that this was almost certainly a cumulative award (she was also doing noted work in four other movies-Cookie's Fortune, Magnolia, An Ideal Husband, & A Map of the World), but we have a strict OVP rule where we only judge the film in front of us, not the collective works that might've contributed to a nomination, and in this case, that just doesn't cut it.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes give us both Musical/Comedy and Drama, so we have ten names to start with. Drama went with Swank, besting Bening, Moore, Streep, & Sigourney Weaver (A Map of the World), while McTeer took the comedy prize, topping Julianne Moore (An Ideal Husband), Julia Roberts (Notting Hill), Sharon Stone (The Muse...and yes is the Sharon Stone luxury watch scandal at the Globes), and Reese Witherspoon (Election). The SAG Awards went with the exact same lineup as Oscar, with Bening winning, while BAFTA also picked Bening, though she beat Moore (End of the Affair), Emily Watson (Angela's Ashes), & Linda Bassett (East is East) for the nomination. In sixth here, I think we're looking at either Weaver or Witherspoon. Weaver is more in the Academy's wheelhouse (sturdy performance in a stiff issues picture from a former favorite), while Witherspoon got an actual nomination for her film (Election was up for writing). I think Weaver makes more sense, especially given she hadn't been nominated in a decade at the time & Witherspoon's picture was a bit edgy for Oscar, but I could believe either.
Actors I Would Have Nominated: Oscar is quite populist, but does have a snobby streak when it comes to genre pictures, and that includes romantic-comedies. We have talked very little about Notting Hill, a film that has its faults, but I love so wholeheartedly I don't really care, and the thing I'm most confident in is Julia Roberts' pitch-perfect Hollywood actress. She's playing a version of herself, but it's so filled with heart, hope, and prickliness from being bruised constantly that if it is herself...you just want to root for her harder. A year before she won the Oscar, I would've had this as a lead-up to Erin Brockovich.
Oscar’s Choice: In what was a coin flip race at the time (I think some people have rewritten this to not be as close as it was), Swank won over Bening, costing the latter her best shot at an Academy Award to date.
My Choice: Those are the two names to consider, and while I partially want to give it to Bening (she has yet to win an OVP and only has one guaranteed nomination left), OVP rules say I can't take outside factors into account, and Swank is slightly better. Behind these two, I would go (in order): McTeer, Moore, and then Streep.
Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours! Are you sticking with Oscar & I for Hilary Swank, or do you prefer one of the other ladies of the category? Do you feel it's okay to acknowledge that Moore almost certainly got this nomination for five films instead of one...and how many other performances like that have happened through the years and are now lost to lack of historical context? And was it Witherspoon or Weaver that nearly missed this race? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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