OVP: Actress (2022)

OVP: Best Actress (2022)

The Nominees Were...

Ana de Armas, Blonde

Cate Blanchett, Tar

Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie

Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans

Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once

My Thoughts: We talked earlier this week about the online nature of the Best Supporting Actress race, and the way that the contest felt like it was being parceled through in a bizarre way (links to all past contests at the bottom of this article).  This goes doubly for the Best Actress race.  Conversations about race (when two Black women who had done well in precursors failed to show up), category fraud (with many people viscerally, confusingly angry about Michelle Williams submitting here, rather than in Supporting Actress where she surely would've won), and the bootstraps campaign by Andrea Riseborough that won her a nomination thanks in large part to her friends (such as Frances Fisher) running an online campaign that won her a surprise nomination (which some wanted rescinded) dominated the race, making this one of the uglier contests ever for Best Actress.  I'll talk about the controversies in a second, but a friendly reminder-we judge based solely on the performances at-hand with these write-ups, and not based on any personal feelings (good or bad) about the performers or how they got their nominations.

We'll start with Riseborough, an actress who broke through after years of strong supporting work.  I talked about her nomination here if you want my full thoughts (it's a good, if in-depth, article, so I suggest you check it out if you haven't already), but in short-I think what she did was inventive, and a loophole she found in the Academy bylaws, and I believe people online treated her like garbage for no reason (it's not her fault that she got this nomination).  The nomination itself was cool, and so unexpected in an Oscar race that rarely can pull off something genuinely surprising.  Her performance, I was in the middle on.  To Leslie is not a great movie, using a lot of cliches about a poor woman who struggles with poverty & addiction, and while Riseborough is better than the movie, she's still hampered with a tale that you can see over-and-over again.  When you're playing a cliche, even if you're playing it well, you're not going to have much invention.

We'll get the other big controversy of the nominated five out of the way with Michelle Williams.  I feel people totally overreacted here, and their anger was more so that they couldn't predict Williams as a lock (there is this weird aversion to competitive races for Oscars Twitter that I find dumb since the single best thing about awards shows are the upsets).  I think Williams is marvelous in The Fabelmans, giving us a complicated look at a woman who loves her kids...but realizes that she loves her life more, and she wants to find a way to live it even if it means that she will disappoint the idyllic nature of her children's upbringing.  That great monologue at the end, saying "you don't owe anyone your life" is beautifully-written & acted, and to me it kind of spells out that Williams is a very plausible lead, and I am proud of her both for saying that out loud (we need someone to defend against category fraud) & then for actually getting the (deserved) nomination.  She'll show up in my nominations as well next week, and it'll be in lead.

Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win Best Actress earlier this year (only the second woman of color), and she did so in a film that in many ways is a nod to her long career in action films (it's rare an actress works in genre all the time and gets honored in said genre...after all Julia Roberts didn't get her statue for rom-coms & Jamie Lee Curtis's statue isn't for horror).  Yeoh is excellent here.  Like all of the actors in the film, I think she has to land too many endings for the film, but she fares the best, making sure her Evelyn is a journey, giving us prickly sides to the character while also showing the love she has for her family, even if it's not something she's comfortable showing in an unencumbered way.  It's a great performance, and a worthy one for Oscar.

Her chief competition was Cate Blanchett, whose work in Tar is extraordinary.  This is the sort of towering achievement that defines a career, like Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood or Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice.  Every second, Blanchett is giving us a different lens into her titular Lydia, like a diamond you're exploring the angles, but the further you look at it, her Lydia isn't a gem at all but something common like glass, built on mirages and pretensions and abuses-of-power.  The downfall in this movie is remarkable because Blanchett gives Lydia such indiscernible confidence that you almost believe she's a genius about to meet her maker...when in reality she's the embodiment of the Peter Principle, a pseudo-intellectual elevated to the point where she's beyond reproach at that level.

Ana de Armas is the second actress to be nominated for playing Marilyn Monroe (an actress, it's worth noting, Oscar never noticed in her own life).  Blonde, coming from a director I usually drool over (I loved The Assassination of Jesse James and Killing Them Softly) is basically a student film, and is too convoluted to make any narrative sense.  The phrase "she's better than the film" is usually uttered by critics praising de Armas here, but...is she?  She gets a rough script, but her Marilyn isn't grounded.  There are moments that she's excellent (thinking of the scene where she's openly weeping, and then smiles into a cartoon that basically becomes the real-life Monroe, it's eerily perfect), but those are littered with bad touches & inconsistencies (remember her being confused by an egg?).  Is her Marilyn an idiot or just incapable of stopping the act?  There's no hint in her work.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes separate their nominations between Drama and Musical/Comedy, so we have ten women nominated for these awards.  For Drama we've got Blanchett winning against de Armas, Williams, Viola Davis (The Woman King), & Olivia Colman (Empire of Light) while Musical/Comedy gave their win to Yeoh atop Lesley Manville (Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris), Margot Robbie (Babylon), Anya Taylor-Joy (The Menu), & Emma Thompson (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande).  SAG gave their statue to Yeoh, here beating Blanchett, Davis, de Armas, & Danielle Deadwyler (Till), while BAFTA wanted Blanchett, beating Davis, Deadwyler, de Armas, Thompson, & Yeoh.  In sixth place...your guess is as good as mine.  There's a lot of precursor love for Davis & Deadwyler, and Deadwyler was the performer I guessed wrong, so it's probably her (I think Davis was one of those "early season love due to her celebrity, can't sustain long enough to get to Oscar" contenders), though given both were weak enough to lose to Riseborough, I wouldn't be stunned if it was Robbie, Manville, or even someone like Jennifer Lawrence (Causeway) given this race was so dominated by Blanchett/Yeoh, as passion projects were able to take one of the remaining slots.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Few actresses have had a rougher go with their career than Tang Wei, blackballed from acting for years for her (magnificent) work in the NC-17 rated Lust, Caution, she has been steadily building to another performance worthy of that film, and this year she got it as the femme fatale in Decision to Leave.

Oscar’s Choice: Going into the night, the race between Yeoh & Blanchett felt close, but by the time the envelope was open and we were in the middle of our first real sweep in over a decade, it was clear Yeoh had won that statue weeks earlier.

My Choice: As I said above, these awards are given in a vacuum, I don't think about if someone already has some statues or not, because I want the experiment to be fair.  With that in mind, there's no doubt to  me that Blanchett gave the best performance here, possibly the best performance of her career.  Yeoh is very good, and a worthy silver, but Blanchett's the best nominated performance in any category in 2022.  Behind them we have Williams, Riseborough, & de Armas, in that order.

Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours!  Do you want to stay with the Academy's admiration of Yeoh or do you want to join me in bowing down to Cate Blanchett?  How do you feel about the controversies involving Williams & Riseborough now that we're out of the heat of the actual Oscar race?  And with a lot of plausible options-whom do you think was in sixth place?  Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Also in 2022: Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, International Feature Film, Animated Feature, Sound, Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2022

Past Best Actress Contests: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Voyage of Time (2016)

Film: Voyage of Time (2016)

Stars: Cate Blanchett

Director: Terrence Malick

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

As part of our month-long celebration of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, I am completing all of the remaining gaps in my Terrence Malick filmography (one of my favorite film directors) with what we're calling "Terry Tuesdays" throughout June.

While it is not on a Tuesday (I almost put it tomorrow, but figured I'd stick to the long weekend promise), we are finishing up the "Terry Tuesdays" lineup with Voyage of Time, the final film I needed to see to have completed the entire filmography of one of my favorite directors.  Malick's documentary is a unique film in a variety of ways.  First, there are technically two versions of this movie.  The longer version, which we'll discuss today, played at film festivals, specifically in Venice & Toronto, but if you saw this in theaters in the United States, it was likely a shorter, IMAX version that was narrated by Brad Pitt.  I live in Minnesota, and when this was initially released it only played in one theater in my state, and it was at the Minnesota State Zoo of all places, which meant that my budget-conscious heart at the time couldn't afford the price of both the movie AND the zoo ticket (2016 was a time of saving in my world as I was shoveling away for a new house).  I assumed I'd be able to catch it on home release, but the movie is next to impossible to find in the United States, and I had to get an international copy of the DVD to finally be able to watch it (Criterion, if you're listening, a Malick box set would be most appreciated, and adding this movie into that collection would be a wise move).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is the culmination of a project that Malick has been attempting since the early 1980's.  Essentially, though it's a documentary really it's more of a visual art project, showing us initially shots of human beings playing and enjoying life, and then moving all the way back to the Big Bang.  We then see the entire history of our solar system, including evolution, dinosaurs, mass extinction, the evolution of man, and the eventual demise of the sun.  Malick intersperses the movie with heavy-handed narration from Cate Blanchett (in full Galadriel mode) talking about "mothers" and speaking almost in poetry, rarely adding a lot to the actual happenings onscreen.

Voyage of Time is stunning, and I definitely liked it.  I think the dinosaur sequence and the later hunting sequences, despite being scenes that were not gorgeous cinematography (which abounds) might be the most successful because they provide the most narrative structure.  I will admit that I wished Pitt was the narrator not because I don't like Blanchett (I do), but because I feel like Blanchett's already so well-known for narrating the Lord of the Rings any movie that welcomes comparison does so while also inviting inferiority (no one can compete with The Lord of the Rings).  Watching this movie, I was struck by how much of it also borrows from The Tree of Life, which is a better Malick property.  You almost get the sense that while this is the movie Malick always wanted to make, he got tired of waiting for it to happen and made a version of this tale with The Tree of Life instead.  If you don't like Malick or have a low tolerance for him, this movie is not for you, but as I am a superfan, I left happy.

And with that, we not only finish up "Terry Tuesdays" but also our monthlong 10th Anniversary celebration.  I hope you enjoyed this extravaganza of posts & our multiple series & retrospectives.  We will continue into July with a new Oscar Viewing Project starting tomorrow as well as more reviews, politics, & whatever else comes to mind, but I am so thankful you joined me, and that I have this little corner of the internet to share my thoughts & passions with you.

OVP: Supporting Actress (2006)

OVP: Best Supporting Actress (2006)

The Nominees Were...

Adriana Barraza, Babel

Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal

Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine

Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls

Rinko Kikuchi, Babel

My Thoughts: Category fraud is a big debate in the world of Oscars Twitter.  There are people that fall into a few camps about it.  There are those that are hardliners, breaking out stopwatches (which is extremely fascinating-this is not meant to disparage), and long treatises about the subject.  Others are more laissez-faire about the topic, thinking that there's nothing wrong with it and the performance's value should more fully dictate whether it should be included.  I tend to fall into the middle, perhaps a bit more to the former.  I think there are grey area performances, roles that are part of an ensemble & therefore it's hard to fault Oscar, and then there are performances where it's clearly cheating, to the point where I dock a star in the rating as a result of the performance being so completely in the wrong category.  Three performances today run the gamut between "definitely lead" and "arguably lead," and all three were among the most likely victors in 2006.

We'll start, though, with the two women that clearly weren't leads in their films, or should I say film because Babel scored the dual nomination trick in 2006.  Rinko Kikuchi is one of those two women, and does bring a bit of grace to her role as a teenage girl who is self-conscious about being deaf.  Unfortunately for Kikuchi, it feels like her character is underwritten, and she's definitely underperformed in the film, with not enough of Chieko's inner-world, and honestly this feels like Oscar honoring a baity role rather than a particularly interesting performance-we don't get enough of a sense of her isolation in relation to a unique onscreen character, and she's not very connected to the larger narrative of the story.

Adriana Barraza, though, is another story.  Her Amelia is underwritten as well (real talk: everyone in Babel is kind of underwritten-it's not a great movie), but she brings depth & emotion to it in a way that totally elevates the character and was my favorite story in the movie.  As a nanny who is illegally taking care of two children, and a woman who is forced to not attend her son's wedding due to Brad Pitt being unable to find someone else to take care of his children, she brings a truth to Amelia, giving us not just a heartbreaking look at what it's like to be illegally emigrated into the United States, but also how much of her identity is only at the discretion of two white employers who treat her with utter callousness.  A fascinating, complicated performance from Barraza.

Jennifer Hudson is not the actress that Adriana Barraza is-that's reality & borne out by some of her later work.  But sometimes actors get the roles they were born to play, and that's very much the case for her Effie White.  Hudson brings so much soul, broken hopes & dreams into Effie White when she's singing, tearing down the house with "And I Am Telling You."  Yes, there are moments in this that don't quite work (some line readings feel like Bill Condon should've given her another take), but there's so much heat & passion from Hudson's Effie that she totally makes the movie, stealing focus even when she's not onscreen.  That's sheer magnetism, and I'm a fan-I return to this performance often, and I didn't even like Dreamgirls all that much.  That being said, you could make a sincere argument that this is a lead role (I am debating it for my final My Ballot countdown)-it's hard to determine mostly because the script shifts its focus so often.  Because I can't quite decide I'm not knocking down a star, but I might still shift this when it comes to my own selections (it reminds me a lot of Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers in that it's hard to tell if it's actually a co-lead role or if Hudson/Lopez are so much more dynamic than their costars they're the only ones you pay attention toward).

Cate Blanchett, on the other hand, it's impossible to deny this is a lead role.  Not only is she in over 50% of the film, but it's very much the story of Barbara and Sheba.  I'm docking a star here for her, a performance I wasn't wild on to begin with.  It had been a while, and I wanted to revisit this movie before getting to our discussions of Blanchett & Dench, and I land a bit higher than I did when I initially saw it, though I don't hold it in the same regard others do.  Blanchett, in particular, cannot handle the abrupt pivot to gorgon lady in her penultimate showdown with Dench...Dench is also out-acting her, and giving one of the most singular performances of her career.  There's things to be mined in Sheba, particularly the way that Blanchett taps into her obsession with being young (notice how she's rarely in the company of people her own age), but it's not enough-she gets lost in the salaciousness of the plot.

Abigail Breslin, like Hudson, is probably a lead.  But again, there's enough of an ensemble feel here to make an argument that she shouldn't be in the lead category so I'm not docking her anything even if I might personally have put her in lead.  This is a pretty textbook definition of a cute performance from a plucky child in a likable movie.  I didn't really like Little Miss Sunshine, but like Babel, I understand its merits, and Breslin is one of them.  She totally sells this precocious girl, living in an atypical world and adapting to her surroundings, not yet rebelling against them.  It's always hard to tell at this age how much is performing and how much is just solid direction, but this is not one of the more objectionable nominations this category has ever produced.

Other Precursor Contenders: We saw on Monday that the precursors were all over the map on Best Supporting Actor.  The other three categories were not so lucky, and stayed relatively uniform.  The Globes went with Hudson, and the only change from Oscar's lineup was Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada) in place of Breslin, and SAG copied Oscar exactly in both winner & nominees.  The BAFTA Awards also picked Hudson, but went with a pretty off-kilter nominee lineup, as Hudson beat Breslin, Blunt, Frances de la Tour (The History Boys), and Collette.  All things considered, I have to think Blunt was in sixth place, though while that performance is well-regarded now, I assume it was a distant sixth place-this was a lineup that Oscar clearly wanted.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Blunt is one of the better-known actors working today who has never gotten a date with Oscar despite a plethora of opportunities.  It was her first foray into awards season, though, that she should've triumphed-her work in Devil Wears Prada is basically the reason to have a category like Best Supporting Actress (totally elevating a performance that otherwise could've been window dressing), and she should've been among the nominees.

Oscar’s Choice: Unlike her Dreamgirls costar, Hudson didn't have an embarrassing movie premiering during awards season, and as a result she won easily on her film debut.  In second, I suspect it was Breslin rather than a quick second trophy for Blanchett that was the runner-up.

My Choice: I'm torn, so we'll go backward.  I have Kikuchi in last, and just ahead of her is Blanchett.  Breslin is in the middle-not too good, not too bad.  For the top prize I know that Barraza is the better actor, but Hudson is giving the better work, or at least the work I'm the most drawn toward, and I'm going to give this trophy to her just as I did in 2006.  Debatable category fraud and some scenes in the  memory have not worn as well as they did when I initially gave it to her (at the time, it was a slam dunk), but I can't shake her Effie White, and think it's the best of these five performances.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Is everyone with Oscar & I on Effie White, or do you think that someone else was best-in-class?  Which of these performances was category fraud and which was just a big supporting role?  And what's it going to take to finally get Emily Blunt a nomination, or is she her generation's Mia Farrow?  Share your thoughts below!

Also in 2006: Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2006

Past Best Supporting Actress Contests: 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019

OVP: Supporting Actress (2004)

OVP: Best Supporting Actress (2004)

The Nominees Were...

Cate Blanchett, The Aviator

Laura Linney, Kinsey

Virginia Madsen, Sideways

Sophie Okonedo, Hotel Rwanda

Natalie Portman, Closer

My Thoughts: We continue our week devoted to the supporting nominees of 2004 with the actresses.  I remember the 2004 Oscar race for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons that I do was because it was the first Oscar season ever that I had seen all of the Big 6 contenders on Oscar night (I want to say I hadn't seen 1-2 nominees on Oscar nominations announcement, specifically Vera Drake and Maria Full of Grace, but my memory only serves me so far here).  As a result, I had a lot of opinions going into this race, probably some more fully-felt than I might have had in retrospect (since it was the first Oscar race where I not only followed, but could have opinions about everything).  This was truest in Supporting Actress, where two of the nominated roles standout as pretty inconsequential (and so much lesser than the other three) that I remember being actively angry at their inclusion in a way that I am not in retrospect, having seen far greater sins the further I've gotten into the Academy's archives.  That being said, we'll cover those two first as they aren't really important to the conversation of the "best" of the year.

Sophie Okonedo won her first (and to date, only) Oscar nomination for Hotel Rwanda in 2004.  This is an intense film, with very little levity & is exceedingly grim.  It's also a movie with not enough character development for my taste, and that is most evident in the role that Okonedo is supposed to play.  She is oftentimes asked to scream or cry in the movie, but otherwise there's nothing there other than a devoted wife.  She doesn't lend much more to what's happening onscreen, and feels too big for the part (the best thing I've ever seen her in was her work in the recent Broadway revival of The Crucible-her acting style is much more at-home on the stage), playing for the rafters more than providing subtlety.  It's the kind of performance Oscar oftentimes goes for regardless of quality, but it's not a worthy inclusion.

Neither is Laura Linney, a brilliant actor & one of my favorites from her generation who gets the least of her Oscar citations with Kinsey.  Linney, like Okonedo, has to play the doting wife for most of the film.  This was in the era where it felt like Linney was on the verge of an Oscar nomination (think Joan Allen in the 1990's)-not a star, exactly, but someone that you should pay attention to because this could be building to a big statue moment.  That didn't happen (though she has plenty of Emmys at this point), and you kind of get why with the Kinsey nomination, where the Academy cited her for being a warm screen presence, but nothing more than that-the script has no interest in her as we explore Kinsey's bisexuality further, and she feels less-than-consequential to the resolution.

The remaining three are all triumphs, though.  Natalie Portman plays the part of Jane, the closest thing that Closer has to a moral compass, very close-to-the-vest.  It's the toughest part in the quartet to play, mostly because she must remain unknowable (and yet knowable upon rewatch), a trick that is part the script but mostly what she's bringing to the role.  Portman doesn't make her an ingenue or try to dumb down the part, which would've been an instinctual read but taken away from the ending of the film-her Jane was in control the whole time, not just learning a lesson from the men she surrounded herself with.  It's smart, cool performing from an actress officially graduating from child star into a proper adult thespian.

Cate Blanchett has the advantage of playing Oscar's favorite leading lady, Katharine Hepburn (Meryl can say what she will, but she doesn't have four acting Oscars yet, does she?).  Blanchett owns this part, adopting a perfect Connecticut accent, and finding a way to balance Hepburn's onscreen persona.  It's very difficult to play a famous actor like this, one whose private life was hidden from us (Hepburn is not Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, just as well-known at this point offstage as on), but whose public face is embedded in our memories.  She gives the movie a jolt of electricity, and a tenderness to Hepburn, a woman in love, but not willing to sacrifice herself for a man who might destroy her.  This was the exact right time in Blachett's career to get her an Oscar, so it's a treat that it's for such a great piece of work.

Similar to her costar Thomas Haden Church, nothing about Virginia Madsen's career heading into Sideways seemed to indicate an eventual date with Oscar.  Her biggest successes were in the 1980's & early 90's in films like Dune, Fire with Fire, and Candyman.  But given this role, she shows what genius can look like when you take a chance on a performer who has been under-utilized.  Her Maya is a difficult part-playing someone world-weary but not necessarily jaded is a tough balancing act to maintain, but she does it so well.  That epic monologue about the "life of wine" would be obnoxious in the mouth of someone less earnest, but she so fully commits to this role it's difficult not to root for her, easily the best part of this acting ensemble.  A total home-run.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Golden Globes stayed pretty close to the Oscars with their nominations, only excluding Okonedo in favor of Meryl Streep (The Manchurian Candidate), though their winner was Natalie Portman.  SAG went with Blanchett as their victor, and similar to Best Supporting Actor, hurt Portman's chances by not nominating her at all (there must be a story on Closer being a complete bust with SAG that I don't know about as it missing entirely with that cast feels strange) and instead favoring Cloris Leachman (Spanglish).  BAFTA also gave their trophy to Blanchett, here favoring only Portman from Oscar's lineup, going instead with Streep, Heather Craney (Vera Drake), and Julie Christie (Finding Neverland).  Conventional wisdom would dictate that Streep was in sixth place, but considering Finding Neverland's strength (and that movie's less-than-stellar reviews) I'm inclined to disagree, and think that Kate Winslet for Finding Neverland nearly landed this field (she plays a dying mother in period clothing in a Best Picture nominee...she was in the hunt).

Actors I Would Have Nominated: If the Oscars were going to take the time to cite Virginia Madsen, a product of the 1980's with a well-earned nomination, they might have continued that trend by also recognizing Darryl Hannah.  Her Elle Driver in Kill Bill, Volume 2 is perfection-the exact kind of scene-stealing work that would surely have gotten a nomination in Tarantino's later years, but warranted it even in a field like 2004.

Oscar’s Choice: Portman's momentum stalled after the SAG miss, the Oscar was Blanchett's for the taking (and she did).

My Choice: There are a few cardinal rules for the OVP, chief among them is that you don't consider any other race when picking the winner-you focus solely on the five performances at hand, and don't worry about if someone already has a trophy or if you know there's a trophy coming to them.  If I were considering such things, I might be inclined to go with Virginia Madsen, who is just superb in Sideways and I know will never get a role like this again.  But if I'm being honest, I think Cate Blanchett is slightly more successful in The Aviator, and deserves this trophy even if I know she's already got an OVP title.  Behind these two are Portman, Linney, and Okonedo, in that order.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Is everyone on Team Cate when it comes to this field, or do you want to make the case for a different lady?  Why is it that Oscar is so obsessed with the "devoted wife" role (is it just sexism, or is there something more to it)?  And which of Oscar's frequent favorites (Winslet or Streep) nearly added to their tallies in 2004 with a just-miss sixth place?  Share your thoughts below!

Also in 2004: Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2004

Past Best Supporting Actress Contests: 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019

OVP: The Good German (2006)

Film: The Good German (2006)
Stars: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Every few years, some filmmaker thinks they can do it.  Perhaps watching from their screening room in Bel-Air, they chance upon Michael Curtiz's 1942 classic, and think, without any sense of hubris, "I bet I could make Casablanca."  That clearly was the case with Steven Soderbergh circa 2006, and as a recent Oscar winner who basically had a blank check from the studio, he had better resources than most do in such circumstances.  He stacked up two then-recent Oscar winners as his leads (Cate Blanchett & George Clooney), and even put it in black-and-white for a nice touch.  But here's the thing about Casablanca-while there are countless great wartime romances out there, there's a reason that Casablanca is the best.  It's literally a perfect movie, 102 flawless minutes of cinema that happened, based on every legend of the film, nearly by accident.  Trying to recreate something so grand, arguably the greatest movie of all-time, is a recipe for disaster.  And to be sure, The Good German is definitely a disaster.

(Spoilers Ahead) Here's the deal-the plot of The Good German is so confusing, that it might be the first time ever that I have seen a Wikipedia explanation of the film told outside of chronology and with spoilers in early paragraphs because otherwise it won't make sense while describing it.  Of course, while you're watching it for the first time, it then doesn't make sense but I'll try summarize it here.  Essentially, we have Jake (Clooney), who initially seems like a side character-a reporter coming to Germany after World War II, and we see the story from the perspective of Tully (Maguire), his abusive, petulant driver who is profiting off of the war and having sex with a local woman we assume to be a prostitute named Lena (Blanchett).  As the film progresses, though, Tully is murdered in what was clearly meant to be a red herring (Maguire would've been a pretty big actor at the time to have randomly vanished so soon in the movie), and we focus on Jake & Lena, who had a relationship prior to the war.  Lena's husband is a former SS Officer who is trying to out his former commander, a commander who was in charge of a concentration camp that tortured people...but because of his rocketing know-how, the Americans still want him to be on their side, and have to kill Lena's husband to keep him from testifying, since obviously the Americans can't hire a guy who ran a concentration camp.  The film ends with Lena's husband dead and the Americans getting what they want through his commander, but not before Jake learns the truth about Lena (who escapes): in order to stay alive, she essentially sold out Jews to the Gestapo, despite being Jewish herself.  The film ends with her, headed off into a plane alone, and him leaving her behind.

The artwork for the film and the ending are definitely the biggest homages to Casablanca.  The ending could almost work if we'd had more hints about Lena, or if what came before it had been any good.  After all, in the end of Casablanca (another spoiler alert if you haven't seen it, but hopefully if you've seen The Good German you've seen Casablanca), Rick does the noble thing by letting Ilsa leave with her husband, as her husband can do the most good by going to Lisbon.  In The Good German, Jake lets Lena get away after they've essentially sentenced her husband to death, and he lets her go despite her being a criminal; Emil is Victor Laszlo, the man with the true conscience, but instead of growing one as the film progresses, Jake is seduced by love rather than ennobled by it.  It's a clever perversion of the Hollywood ending of Casablanca, and it's a finale that should work for the movie.

But it doesn't, because The Good German is such a mess.  The script is all-over-the-place.  Honestly-there are too many under-developed characters, and the whole red herring aspect of Tobey Maguire dying a fourth of the way through the film (and then it not really mattering that he was dead) is bizarre.  It doesn't help matters that Maguire is terrible with this part, badly miscast even though, quite frankly, I don't know who would have been good in such a weirdly written part.  Clooney & Blanchett at least have plausible characters, but neither adds anything of note or intrigue here-they read their stylized dialogue with detached irony.  In some ways Clooney would play a similar character the following year to raves; arguably the best role of Clooney's film career is Michael Clayton, and Jake is not dissimilar to Michael's warped, but tried, sense of morality.  But Clayton made sense in his film, and Clooney never makes sense of his Jake.  This is a movie that tries to be grounded and yet pay homage and yet kind of make fun of films like Casablanca all in the same breath, and it never works.  The best part of the movie other than the leads look great (both actors photograph well in black-and-white, though the cinematography is punchy-too reliant on heavy shadow when light might make it more intriguing, always a Soderbergh sin behind the camera) is Beau Bridges in a small part as a morally-bankrupt colonel.  His character at least feels fleshed-out, even if he's given nothing to do.

Before we leave, I have to admit I don't get the score at all, the film's only AMPAS-approved element.  I know Oscar has a crush on Thomas Newman, and occasionally I do too, but this isn't one of his best, and it's a weirdly sporadic score.  Much like the movie, it shows up in a big way in scenes that should play small, and yet in scenes where the light hum of a string or bassoon might work, it's absent.  Newman's nomination here was surely part of their gut reaction need to nominate him every chance they get, but not only did they bestow "Oscar nominee" on a bad movie, there's also nothing notable about what Newman is doing here. It's not even that pretty, and it doesn't feel necessary at all.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)

Film: Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
Stars: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Emma Nelson, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer, Laurence Fishburne
Director: Richard Linklater
Oscar History: Though it didn't score with Oscar, Cate Blanchett did get a surprise Globes nomination for Best Actress.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In just a couple of days, I will be announcing my Top 10 lists for 2019 (it'll be Sunday & Monday), and as a result I'm trying to get through a couple of last-minute screenings.  One of those was a movie I had every intention of seeing when it was in theaters when it was out in August, but for some reason it alluded me, despite there not being a lot of major films in theaters at the time.  The film's reviews were paltry, and the box office poor, but I see pretty much every Cate Blanchett movie, and I definitely see anything that Richard Linklater crafts together (three of his films were on my Top 10's in past years of this decade), but the film just never happened.  As I felt that Linklater's perch as one of my favorite directors of the decade required me to get this done before I completed 2019, this has become one of the last three screenings I'll do before the "end" of 2019.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the bestselling novel by Maria Semple, the movie is about Bernadette (Blanchett), a brilliant architect who has become increasingly antisocial & isolated in the years since her greatest triumph (an environmentally-conscious house) was destroyed by a callous neighbor.  In the years since, she's become less responsive to her husband Elgin (Crudup) and relies on her daughter Bee (Nelson) for most of her human connection.  Her world comes to a head when Bernadette's neighbor Audrey (Wiig) has her house flooded because Bernadette removes some bushes (on Audrey's request), knowing that doing so will cause a mudslide into Audrey's house.  Things get worse for her when it's revealed that she's been accidentally using an identity thief as a personal assistant, and her husband wants to send her to a mental health facility to get past her anxiety issues.  Instead, Bernadette runs away from him, stays with Audrey (and apologizes) & then goes on the trip to Antarctica that her daughter wanted them to take as a family alone, eventually discovering a project while in the southern continent to redesign a science facility, thus reigniting her passion for architecture, her family, and her life.

The movie is very different than the book, something I didn't know from reading the book, but seeking out a description of it afterward as it was hard to tell what was missing in this movie that had somehow been present in Semple's massive bestseller.  In the book, Elgin is much more of an ass (he has an affair with his assistant while Bernadette is missing), and the mystery is actually a mystery, not something we see explained pretty much the second Bernadette disappears.  This makes much more sense, as Bernadette the film is a movie with very little stakes.

Stakes, if you look at his filmography, is not Richard Linklater's forte.  Films like Before Sunrise, Boyhood, and Everybody Wants Some! are bright masterpieces, but if there are stakes they're ancillary to the plot, which is essentially just looking at characters and letting the story shape around them as you film.  This isn't obviously how they're written (they have plots-this isn't a Terrence Malick film), but his talent as a director is in finding the stories that happen in our everyday life that shape us as people, not using characters in a more traditional sense-we don't always have an understanding of what is important in this world.  Given a novel to confine himself and his writing, Linklater struggles.  The movie has occasional moments of interest (the scenes in Antarctica are the only ones where Linklater and Blanchett's uneven performance work), but this is a creative failure even if it's an intriguing one.  Every time you think you like Bernadette, he holds back, not letting us free into the world of this fascinating, complicated woman, and no amount of lovingly-framed architecture is going to change that.  This is worthwhile only if you're a Linklater or Blanchett completist, but don't expect anything more than missed opportunities.

OVP: Actress (2015)

OVP: Best Actress (2015)

The Nominees Were...

Cate Blanchett, Carol
Brie Larson, Room
Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

My Thoughts: Despite some people's protestations, there are good years and bad years for films.  This is particularly true when you look at field-after-field of nominees from a given year for the Academy Awards.  The Best Actress race of 2015, however, is a really good year, and just staggeringly better than Best Actor, to the point where I wonder if this might be the biggest gap in quality ever amassed between the two fields.  Case in point, the least of these five nominees would place at least second in the men's field, and the remaining four would knock my Best Actor choice (Michael Fassbender, see links below for that race and a whole host of other 2015 contests) out of the field.  This might not be the best field of actresses Oscar ever assembled, but it's (in my opinion) the best field of performances we have yet to profile in this series after nearly a decade of write-ups, beating even 2010's Best Actress.

We'll start with, therefore, the woman who actually managed to win in such a field, Brie Larson.  Larson's work in Room is the type of performance that would win in most Oscar seasons.  Robbed of vanity for the first half, she has remarkable chemistry with young actor Jacob Tremblay, essential since they're the only two people they've seen other than a violent kidnapper in years.  Larson's best parts of her performance, though, come in the back-half of the movie, when she encounters the perverse celebrity of a kidnapping victim (the scene with the television interview, made necessary by her legal & medical bills, is unflinchingly hard to watch), and has conversations with her mother (played by Joan Allen) that she's been bottling up for years, not able to express them to anyone as she tried to create a world for her son.  It's a towering achievement, and a worthwhile winner in such a field.

On the opposite end of the "Oscar newcomer" list is Charlotte Rampling, 43 years Larson's senior but also enjoying her first nomination in 2015.  Rampling's work in 45 Years is (I'm trying really hard to avoid hyperbole but failing here) one of the truly great acting creations of this young cinematic century.  The way that she unfolds a thoughtful woman who never really pondered the beginnings of her relationship is stupendous, as is the way you can tell what she is thinking from the slightest of shifts in her gaze or the rearranging of her hands.  It's a soft, subtle performance, one filled with mystery (what will she do with her life?), but Rampling plays all of her cards.  One of the finest actors of her generation, she is that rare person to get an "old age" nomination for the best performance in their career.

We continue on this list of "best she's ever been" with Cate Blanchett, someone whose two decades of fame affords her lots of competition for that title.  But Carol (and Carol) is Blanchett firing on all cylinders.  The line readings, the way that she seems to be saying goodbye to the love-of-her-life from the moment they meet, is magical.  Carol is a romance with a ticking clock, but it's the rare one where the leading actress clearly knows that there will eventually be an ultimatum, because she's been there before.  Blanchett brings a layered calm to her Carol, knowing that she must speak in code not only for her own safety but also because she doesn't want to scare Therese away.  The scenes with Chandler & Paulson, where she lets some of her guard down and you see what's real and what's just there to entrance is brilliant.  It's the sort of role that potentially no actress of her era (or any era) could have played so well, and Blanchett never scenery-chews in order to steal a scene.  Flawless.

Saoirse Ronan is probably not giving her career-best work here (I'd give that nod to Lady Bird two years later in her young career), but that shouldn't be confused with her not giving a truly seismic piece-of-work in Brooklyn.  Given an introverted character still inclined to study the world, her Eilis is the rare character study at the center of an epic.  The way that she falls in love, first with Tony & then with Jim, is pure joy.  Perhaps the best scene of the movie, and one that only works because of what Ronan has done before, is when Eilis is confronted by her nosy neighbor over her marriage to an Italian-American even though she's been seen with the local Irish boy.  The way she states that she's proud of her husband, but leaves a shred of doubt in her voice (that perhaps, given the chance, she might just pick Jim to stay in the country she loves), is devastating and a tour-de-force of acting.

Which brings us, finally, to Jennifer Lawrence.  Lawrence got a lot of ire from me that year (and a lot from a lot of people in the wake of this nomination...worth noting she hasn't been back since) considering that there were better performances to cite that year rather than a 25-year-old getting her fourth Oscar citation.  However, her work in Joy is good, it's just not up to the level of any of these other women (or Lawrence's past nominations).  The scenes with Bradley Cooper are splendid, and I loved the ways that Lawrence hinted at the eventual magnetism that Joy Mangano would bring to her TV personality.  The script is more at fault than Lawrence, giving us a host of one-dimensional side characters and a meandering plot that should just be focusing on Joy's rise, not the inherent need to continually take her down.  But Lawrence is good, and this performance is better than you remember.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Golden Globes of course split their nominations between Drama and Comedy/Musical, but even with that split we still are missing one of the eventual nominees (Rampling). Larson took on the Drama field, besting Blanchett, Ronan, and Oscar's Supporting Actress nominees Rooney Mara (Carol) and Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl), while Lawrence took the Comedy/Musical over Melissa McCarthy (Spy), Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), Maggie Smith (The Lady in the Van), and Lily Tomlin (Grandma).  SAG took a weird tactic with a rich year by putting Helen Mirren (Woman in Gold) and Sarah Silverman (I Smile Back) for bad movies alongside Blanchett, Ronan, & the victorious Larson, while BAFTA also went with Larson, but substituted out Ramplin & Lawrence in favor of Smith & Vikander.  All-things-said, unless Alicia Vikander's The Danish Girl was in sixth place, my money is that it was Smith, who was at the height of Downton fever at the time, had just had massive hits with the Marigold Hotels, and normally gets in when she's a contender.  In 2014 or 2016, she almost certainly would have gotten her seventh nomination.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Perhaps no year is better to illustrate the "snub" problem than 2015's Best Actress field.  Every year magazines will proclaim a field of "snubs" which are really just actors that were floated as potential nominees, rather than finding people you'd put in in place of someone else.  Melissa McCarthy, Alicia Vikander (Testament of Youth) & Blythe Danner (I'll See You in My Dreams) are definitely worthy of an Oscar nomination, but as they aren't better than these performances save Lawrence, I couldn't include them since I'd have to put in Juliette Binoche (Clouds of Sils Maria) as an aging, mourning actress in a complicated relationship with her assistant in the Top 5.

Oscar’s Choice: Larson won easily.  Second place probably would've been Ronan considering Lawrence & Blanchett had recently won (and Rampling's political comments had made giving her the trophy at the time impossible), but no one was beating Brie Larson.

My Choice: I have to go with Rampling, giving possibly the best performance of the decade.  Blanchett follows, with Larson, Ronan, & Lawrence at the back (but there are no losers here).

Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours!  Are you with me on Team Rampling or are you staggered I didn't follow the crowd with Brie Larson?  Despite being good work, anyone actually want to defend Lawrence's nomination being one of the year's five best?  And if not, who would you throw in her place?  Sound off in the comments!

Also in 2015: Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Production Design, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Documentary Short, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Previously in 2015

Past Best Actress Contests: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014