The Oscar Expert Eyes This Year’s Pageantry

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t watch the Oscars.

I became obsessed with the awards races at an obscenely early age. One of my first “film memories” involves thinking quietly to myself that Jessica Lange, who won the award for Best Supporting Actress in 1983 for her work in Tootsie, triumphed in the lesser category because her superior performance in Frances would be snubbed later for Best Actress in favor of Meryl Streep’s tour de force in Sophie’s Choice. This was my first lesson in awards show politics and it was basically like learning that there was no Santa Claus. I was seven, and I haven’t missed a show since.

As much as my childhood illusions about the actual best performance prevailing were shattered, I am still a slave to this awards-voting body — even though I infrequently agree with their policies and often vehemently disagree with their pedestrian tastes to the point of being personally offended. At age ten, I sat slack-jawed as Moonstruck’s Cher stole the gold from Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction) and Sally Kirkland (Anna). The very next year when Jodie Foster’s The Accused performance won the top award despite being nominated against Close’s Dangerous Liaisons, Streep’s A Cry in the Dark, and Sigourney Weaver’s Gorillas in the Mist, I knew something was rotten in the land of Oscar voters.

Perhaps that is what keeps all of us coming back to the Academy for more: masochism. We want to punish ourselves with a disgusting, garish parade of babbling starlets while we openly curse the Gods that, oh, Joan Allen didn’t get nominated for her brilliant turn in The Upside of Anger in a year where the lifeless Reese Witherspoon swept the entire circuit with a performance of very little depth or ingenuity in Walk the Line. We true cinema enthusiasts enjoy the secret knowledge that our tastes are much better than these mewling industry standards.

My personal favorites rarely even get nominated, though most of them do instead become legendary amongst cineastes the world over: please remember that in recent memory alone the brightest work by women such as Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive), Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher), Sally Hawkins (Happy-go-Lucky) and Nicole Kidman (Eyes Wide Shut, The Others, Dogville, Birth, Margot at the Wedding) has been given the cold shoulder by the Academy. How can we be expected to take an organization that would turn its back on actual art such as this, in favor of cinematic junk food such as A Beautiful Mind or Dreamgirls, seriously?

Well, the tide seems to be turning a bit in the recent ten years. Thankfully, the quality of the actual winners is getting better. There is more of an even playing field in terms of ageism in the past few years, with more mature women like Judi Dench and Streep scoring multiple nominations, and there is at least more visibility for films featuring women of color, albeit primarily in the supporting category. The xenophobia isn’t as overt and rampant recently as it usually is, as evidenced by four European winners last year and a smattering of foreign-language performances here and there. Though one glaring snub this year, Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky, is a bad omen for future performances in films that dare to not pander to American audiences.

Still, it is the behind-the-scenes politics and the relentless campaigning that are paramount, and these are the elements that will seal the deal for many eventual winners. This is a tradition that extends back to the second Oscars, when Mary Pickford took the statuette for a bad performance in Coquette after tirelessly working and courting the press and voters. It is a tradition that has gotten more and more hysterical and Machiavellian as the years have gone by. How good are the speeches at the precursor awards? How much money did the films make? How many ads were placed in Variety? Did so and so look dewy fresh, and was she dressed to kill for such and such award? Did she not care about what she was wearing? Did she look fat? Nominees should be prepared for such ruthless scrutiny and more, and should take it all with a smile should they actually be interested in winning.

These are all tedious questions, and the system demands that it’s heroines be boiled down to their base archetypes, stripped to the bone for the world to see, to be sure, but all of this factors into the pageantry of it all in some bizarre, watchable way. It is infinitely more digestible a sound bite to have Best Actress chewed down to a little tidbit that would read something like this: “respected, two-time Oscar winning vet in the best year of her career (Streep) versus enfant terrible who has made a lot of money and has never won (Kate Winslet).” I get the sense that “stories” like this actually do matter to voters, as much as they want to make you believe that they don’t. We are led to believe that it is the actual quality of the performance that is being voted on, when clearly so many other idiosyncratic, superfluous little pieces of the puzzle factor in just as much as the actual acting.

With many of the recent female Oscar winners, it is this whole story that matters. Jennifer Hudson’s rise from the South Side of Chicago to American Idol rejection to Bill Condon’s sparkling, gay revision of a Broadway classic– poof! Oscar! Diablo Cody’s (not very) scandalous past as a wise-cracking blogger-cum-stripper-cum Steven Speilberg employee – poof! Oscar! Marion Cotillard basically got out there and pounded the pavement last year, single-handedly charming all of the red-blooded male press (and probably most of the gays and the women, too) with her loveliness, style and cute broken English – poof! Oscar! There are several formulas, but generally there is a strong PR hook that all winners possess.

This has been a banner year for women in film, though you will not necessarily find that reflected in this year’s crop of Oscar nominees, not that this is a surprising revelation or anything, mind you (and not that the nominees are bad, per se, they’re just blah — with an exception or two). And now a look at the nominees in the top female acting races, along with those who really should have been given more consideration. My qualifications for discussing actresses and the Oscars? I’m gay and have watched the awards for more than 25 years now. If that doesn’t make me an Oscar expert, clearly nothing does.

As It Should Be

Cate Blanchett with fans

Best Actress

Academy Award Nominees

Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married

Angelina Jolie for Changeling

Melissa Leo for Frozen River

Meryl Streep for Doubt

Kate Winslet for The Reader

Matt Mazur’s Nominees

Cate Blanchett for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky

Melissa Leo for Frozen River

Kristin Scott Thomas for I’ve Loved You So Long

Michelle Williams for Wendy and Lucy

Runners Up: Juliette Binoche for Flight of the Red Balloon; Julianne Moore for Blindness and Savage Grace; and Tilda Swinton for Julia

Leave it to Oscar voters to make what is perhaps the most glaring snub of a beloved acting performance, maybe ever: Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky was roundly raved to the high heavens by critics and audiences (not least myself, see “No Girl So Sweet”), and won the majority of critic’s awards this season, beginning with the prestigious Silver Bear from the Berlinale last February. In winning the Golden Globe, and the New York Film and National Society of Film Critic’s awards, Hawkins made history by joining a select group of women who had swept the top critic’s prizes: Sally Field for Norma Rae, Streep for Sophie’s Choice, Michelle Pfeiffer for The Fabulous Baker Boys, Emma Thompson for Howard’s End, Holly Hunter for The Piano, and Helen Mirren for The Queen.

Notice that six of these seven actually won the Oscar, while one probably should have (Pfeiffer lost to Driving Miss Daisy’s Jessica Tandy, in trademark moment of Academy sentimentality). This snub that was heard around the world indicates not only a sharp turn away from reality and relevancy, but also a serious tailspin backward towards the organization’s xenophobic roots. It seems as though women don’t exist in the cinema outside of the United States if they don’t make money for the American film industry or they are considered peripheral when not in big budget Hollywood-friendly fare. The Hawkins snub is egregiously disgusting, proving that true quality is indeed not recognized every year.

How on earth did Cate Blanchett manage to get nominated last year for the flat Elizabeth: The Golden Age but miss out this year for a vivid performance in which she ages from 18 to 80-something and anchors the splashy romance between Benjamin Button and her character Daisy? Its also the first time Blanchett has top-lined a film that has made so much money. Daisy also happens to be, in my opinion, one of the strongest artistic leaps of her career so far. Yet the Academy sees fit to bestow a semi-gratuitous nod to an uninspired Streep in Doubt when it would have maybe been more interesting to see what one of her contemporaries might have done with a delicious character like Sister Aloysius (maybe a Kathy Bates or an Anjelica Huston?). Of course, she is a favorite to win on 22 February, but should have won her third for something more probing and artistic such as A Cry in the Dark, The Bridges of Madison County, or even Adaptation.

Rounding out my personal ballot would be the triumvirate of indie darlings: Melissa Leo, Kristin Scott Thomas and Michelle Williams, each of whom turned in career-best work. While each of these performances was championed in the press, there were grumblings that only one independent representative would be sat at the table this year, and lo and behold, so it was: Leo earned a justified nod, the best in the category. Scott Thomas and Williams, both fresh and daring in their respective films, were shunned in favor of the Angelina Jolie-Clint Eastwood-Changeling juggernaut. Breaking plates and saying, with a strained, Bronchitis-inspired yelp “I want my son back” a thousand times does not make for a compelling performance or a fully-rounded character, FYI. This nod to Jolie blatantly says “we want star-power nominated so people watch”.

Had voters dared to step even further outside the box, they might have noticed that the stalwart Julianne Moore delivered two intense, exploratory performances, as is her custom, in the reviled Blindness and the tawdry Savage Grace. Between these two unusual characterizations, Moore can easily lay claim to being the US’s most experimental, risk-taking actress working today. She is constantly stretching and trying new things. I can’t even think of another American actress brave enough or capable of playing Barbara Baekeland, the incestuous, unstable Bakelite plastic empire socialite. In French productions, there was last year’s knock-out Supporting Actress victor Tilda Swinton tearing it up with a ballsy, boozy leading lady turn as Julia and the gorgeously animated Juliette Binoche, aglow in the meditative Flight of the Red Balloon. But since their films really didn’t make any money and they don’t fit neatly into a “type”, they will go unnoticed, unfairly.

Best Supporting Actress

Academy Award Nominees

Amy Adams for Doubt

Penelope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Viola Davis for Doubt

Taraji P. Henson for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler

Matt Mazur’s Nominees

Penelope Cruz for Elegy and Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Hanna Schygulla for The Edge of Heaven

Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler

Misty Upham for Frozen River

Debra Winger for Rachel Getting Married

Runners Up: Patricia Clarkson for Elegy, Married Life and Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Bette Midler for Then She Found Me; and Hafsia Herzi for The Secret of the Grain

This is the category where Oscar and I most often disagree, where they generally get the nominees very wrong. There is a distinct lack of imagination to this category, as it stands, not only this year, but most. Eschewing real supporting performances for fraudulent leading lady turns or star power wattage, this is the category in which some of the most abominable atrocities have taken place (Renee’s guffawing, cracked-out Granny Clampett cartoon in Cold Mountain? Girl, please.) It is also where women who are deemed “due” in some way are often thrown a bone, usually because they are old and or British.

The aforementioned Zellweger had a hot streak of film performances that began in 1996, which included three straight years of winning the Golden Globe, and two consecutive Oscar nominations for Best Actress. The second nomination, for Chicago took the Screen Actor’s Guild Award, too, so when the actress lost to Nicole Kidman for The Hours, there was a misplaced feeling of guilt that dispersed amongst voters that indicated she was owed in some way. Magically, the very next year, she does a divisive, uneven supporting turn for a respected filmmaker and, well, sorry Shohreh Aghdashloo, Patricia Clarkson, Marcia Gay Harden, and Holly Hunter – you never stood a chance. Injustice!

This year, Oscar has ruefully nominated yet another African American woman for essentially playing a mammy – something that might have won Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939, but seems terribly anachronistic in 2009 when it is Taraji P. Henson opposite Brad Pitt. Henson’s baffling nomination for her paper-thin work in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button stands among the worst this category has ever produced, race notwithstanding. The actress should shoulder this blame, of course, with director David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth, both of whom did her an extreme disservice by not ever allowing her character Queenie to seem real; she was always there to serve her white co-stars and she did absolutely nothing else. On the opposite end of the spectrum we have the absolutely phenomenal Misty Upham in Frozen River playing perhaps the most complex, substantial Native American female part in film history, yet she was never considered a strong contender, despite turning in one of the most original characters of the year, a sharply-drawn woman of color who has never been seen onscreen before. Epic fail, Oscar!

In Doubt, we have Amy Adams and Viola Davis, part of a quartet of acting nominations for this not-particularly exemplary film that colors well within the lines, taking zero chances. Davis is indeed blazing in her twelve minute role, and is a burst of life into an otherwise benign movie that shouldn’t have been so boring. Adams, who probably just missed out on being nominated for Best Actress for Enchanted last year is back, maybe at the expense of someone like German actress Hanna Schygulla. Schygulla, who gained notoriety for working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the brilliant The Marriage of Maria Braun way back in 1979, roared back onscreen with another similarly courageous contemporary talent: Fatih Akin. In the Kieslowskian The Edge of Heaven the veteran performer gets the chance to play an interesting, charismatic middle aged woman that is an essential to the triadic-structured narrative. Schygulla’s is a haunting, eloquently concise performance about loss and the grieving process which follows. The return to form of such a treasure of world cinema certainly merits more attention that a semi-retarded nun doesn’t it? At least the National Society of Film Critics was able to see past the obvious and award Schygulla as Best Supporting Actress.

Penelope Cruz, who might be seen as “due” by some voters after her bid for Best Actress two years ago for Volver, seems to be the front-runner for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, thanks in part to Kate Winslet’s promotion to the leading category for The Reader. But wouldn’t it be more interesting to actually allow for a supporting player to combine their body of work for the year and be awarded for more than just a single performance? If Cruz’s performance in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona was eligible to be double-billed with her stellar, moving work in Isabelle Coixet’s Elegy, this would be a slam-dunk. Perhaps then, Cruz’s co-star in both films, Patricia Clarkson, the very definition of “supporting actress”, would actually stand a chance at a nomination, too, instead of just the huge, international movie star. Clarkson was also top-notch in Ira Sachs’ Married Life. I’m just saying…

Had Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain been released last year, former Supporting Actress winner Kim Basinger might have been in heavy contention for her excellent, thoughtful work. As it stands, this year’s crop of runners-up is a bit more thin than usual. Lena Olin was blazing in her two scene featured performance (as two separate characters) in the Holocaust drama The Reader. Anjelica Huston was solid in Choke. But then there are two very off-the-beaten path choices that merit much more consideration than they are being given: Hafsa Herzia for her sassy turn in the restaurant drama The Secret of the Grain and, shockingly, Bette Midler for her understated performance in Helen Hunt’s directorial debut Then She Found Me.

Herzia, because of how far outside of the conventional systems her film was, never stood a chance, and neither did Midler, really, either, despite being a two-time Oscar nominee, and a beloved, respected veteran who managed to find a more interesting part than most of her contemporaries are being offered right now. I know it sounds implausible, but Midler is very good in the film, playing a warm, funny and natural character that she makes her own in a very different way than we are used to seeing from her. Perhaps aside from their indie outsider status, they suffered from age bias: rarely are supporting actresses in their late teens or fifties rewarded in this category. Remember, Oscar loves its extremes. As Midler’s co-star Goldie Hawn so succinctly put it in The First Wives Club: there are three ages for women in Hollywood: “Babe, “District Attorney”, and “Driving Miss Daisy”.

Another of Hollywood’s famous, favorite “types” is the hooker with a heart of gold. She isn’t a call girl in The Wrestler, but Marisa Tomei’s single mom stripper with a heart of gold breaks the mold enough to be truly innovative, but she is still reminiscent of so many other dramatic supporting performances in that archetypal tradition. Tomei’s victory in this category in 1993 for her comedic role in My Cousin Vinny is often derided as a fluke or joke win, but as she proved with a second nomination for her stunning work in 2001’s In the Bedroom and her diligent work on the New York stage, Tomei is an character actress to be reckoned with.

Her commitment to playing interestingly-conceived, sensual working class types has become something of a signature for the versatile actress. As the layered Cassidy/Pam, she again shows a side of herself as a performer that had been previously hidden. Literally speaking, she does it with very little clothing on, working a pole. Fighting class constraints and ageism while doing lap dances, Cassidy’s plucky, strong spirit feels very new, very risky. What is amazing about this is that her naked, physical commitment to the part never feels show-offish or voyeuristic; it is free and eventually tragic in Tomei’s hands.

Hers is a bravura performance that is maybe the one thing the Academy and I can agree on this year. For her work, Tomei deserves to take home Oscar number two, and finally cement herself as this generation’s Shelly Winters or Dianne Wiest – both of whom took home two wholly deserved Supporting Actress statuettes in their prime. Should she win, a word of advice to Ms. Tomei: show the envelope with your name on it to the camera so we never again have to hear detractors grousing that your win is a mistake!