Best Actress isn’t as clear cut a frontrunner as it has been in recent years, but there is a favorite.
First let’s get the
Meryl Streep thing out of the way. This is her twentieth nomination, sixteenth as Best Actress, with three overall wins, the most recent one being for
The Iron Lady. I don’t think she has any real chance of winning for her syphilitic warbler in
Florence Foster Jenkins, but it adds to her already historic accumulation of nominations. The only question is will Streep catch or pass Kate Hepburn, who had four wins, all for Best Actress? Assuming Streep, who is sixty-seven, keeps going into her seventies and maybe even her eighties, she will catch Hepburn and win a fourth and maybe even fifth Oscar. But it ain’t gonna be this year.
Isabelle Huppert is akin to the Meryl Streep on French cinema. She’ll turn 64 in March and has been a star in Europe since the 1970s. She has been nominated for sixteen César Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscar, winning only once for Chabrol’s
La Cérémonie (1995). She has also been named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival twice, once early in her career for Chabrol’s
Violette (1978) and for what is widely considered her greatest performance in Michael Haneke’s
The Piano Teacher (2001). She has appeared in a handful of U.S. productions, but not many: Cimino’s
Heaven’s Gate (1980), Curtis Hanson’s Hitchcockian
The Bedroom Window (1987), Hal Hartley’s
Amateur (1994), and David O. Russell’s
I ♥ Huckabees (2004) being the most prominent. This is her first Oscar nomination, for Paul Verhoeven’s weird
Elle. It does feel a bit like a career achievement nod, embarrassment for never having nominated her until this point. Not that she isn’t good, because she is always good (she is also in Mia Hansen-Løve’s
Things to Come and Joachim Trier’s
Louder Than Bombs in 2016). But I don’t think that sentiment coupled with the nominated performance is going to get her the win.
Ruth Negga was really an unknown until Jeff Nichols’ cast her as one of his two principles in
Loving. If you knew her at all it was probably from her supporting roles on the TV series
"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." and
"Preacher". But she was given the plum opportunity to play Mildred Loving, a small town Virginia woman who was thrust into the current of history when her marriage to a white man in the segregated South eventually led to the Supreme Court case that overturned miscegenation laws. The real life person she portrays was very quiet and private, but she also kept nudging the case forward, and Ruth’s performance captures that low key spirit of triumph and dignity beneath her surface.
Loving was overlooked except for Negga, and while she won’t win I do hope people find the film.
This is
Natalie Portman’s third nomination. He first was for Mike Nichols’
Closer, and her second brought her Oscar glory at the center of Darren Aronofsky’s
Black Swan. Had she not won before, I think her turn as
Jackie Kennedy would be the favorite. But sometimes winning that second one is more difficult than the first. I liked Pablo Larraín’s stylized, impressionistic look at the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and his funeral, and Portman is more than up to the task of playing an icon at her most vulnerable and her most ferocious. It isn’t a perfect impression of Jacqueline Kennedy, but it is a compelling and emotionally true one.
The favorite is
Emma Stone in
La La Land. This is her second nomination, having netted a Supporting Actress nod two years ago in
Birdman. As a 28-year-old star who has paid her dues and had a successful career to date, playing the struggling actress who dreams of bigger things was right in her wheelhouse. She acquainted herself well with the singing and dancing parts, more impressively than her co-star Gosling, and the joys and setbacks the character goes through are the heart at the center of the movie that has enchanted so many and seems destined to win Best Picture.
Has anyone won Best Actress for starring in a Musical before? Yes. Going back to the early days of Oscar Louise Rainer won for
The Great Ziegfeld. Later Julie Andrews won for
Mary Poppins and Liza Minnelli for
Cabaret. There have also been winners who played singers but weren’t in Musicals with a capital M but rather biopics about musicians including Sissy Spacek in
A Coal Miner’s Daughter, Reese Witherspoon in
Walk the Line, and Marion Cotillard for
La Vie en Rose. So it isn’t completely unheard of, and some fairly recent winners in the Supporting Actress side include Catherine Zeta-Jones for
Chicago and Anne Hathaway in
Les Misérables.
If she does win, at 28-years-old Emma won’t even be in the top twenty for the youngest Best Actress winners, the youngest being Marlee Matlin for
Children of Lesser God and Jennifer Lawrence for
Silver Linings Playbook, who were 21 and 22. Actresses tend to win their first one in their twenties, and men in their mid to late thirties. This is partially the ingénue thing, and that as women age Hollywood has fewer and fewer lead roles for them.
No, this performance is not going to stand as a gritty Method piece that will be studied for decades to come, but it is incredibly endearing and fun and Emma Stone is the perfect vehicle for Chazelle’s bittersweet Musical delights. And that should be enough to make her an Oscar winner.
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. Watching Solaris and 2046 over the next few days before sending my sci-fi list then i'm going to get back to 2016 movies.
