This is Helen Mirren's fourth Oscar nomination, and seeing how she won just a few years ago for
The Queen I find it unlikely she'll be honored this time around for playing Tolstoy's wife in a costume biopic few of the Academy voters will actually get around to watching. Mirren, who turns sixty-five this year, will have other chances to add to her Oscar hardware down the line.
This makes sixteen Oscar nominations now for Meryl Streep, thirteenth as Best Actress, increasing her total for the most ever received by anybody in the acting categories. But for all those nominations she has
only won twice, and they were at the beginning of her career for
Kramer vs. Kramer and
Sophie's Choice. Her portrayal of the iconic Julia Child was the highlight of that movie, and it could be that The Academy will decide it's time for her to actually win another one of these after twenty-seven years.
Her co-star Mo'Nique has taken home plenty of awards so far this year for her scary portrayal as maybe the worst mother ever seen on screen, but it is newcomer Gabourey Sidibe's empathetic work in the title role that makes the intense trip worth taking. It would be a surprise to hear her name called come Oscar night, but it would also likely make for one of the most genuine on-stage breakdowns of emotion the Oscars have ever seen.
Carey Mulligan's 2009 has put her on the fast-track to stardom, culminating in the Best Actress Oscar nomination, and she'll have a number of high-profile projects hitting the screens in the next couple of years. I thought she was fantastic in
An Education, playing the character's coming-of-age with grace and believability. As much as I loved the performance and was happy to see her get the nomination, I don't think she has any realistic chance this year. But she's on her way to a promising career.
Sandra Bullock had a great year, too. Despite the embarrassment of
All About Steve, nobody but The Razzie Awards are going to hold it against her since the Romantic Comedy
The Proposal was a humongous box office smash and the sports-based drama
The Blind Side was an even BIGGER smash with a shocking $240-million and rising! Plus now she's wound up with the first Oscar nomination of her career, and other nominations and awards on top of it. At forty-five in a Hollywood landscape where ingénues come and go she's managed to survive and at this stage in her career have a lucky break of a year. Since she became a star in the early 1990s with the action blockbuster
Speed and the Romantic Comedy
While You Were Sleeping, she's hung around through a number of mostly uninspired formulaic comedies and dramadies some of which did OK numbers wise and kept her working but not many blockbusters or critical darlings in the lot. I don't think
The Proposal or
The Blind Side are really any better than some of the other things she's done and been more or less ignored for, but for whatever reason she hit the jackpot this time. Good for her, I guess. But is it enough for her to be named Best Actress over two veterans with Oscars and two newcomers looking for their first?
I hope it goes to Mulligan but don't expect it, suspect it'll go to Streep which I'm fine with, think it would be fun if Sidibe had her name called from the envelope, and really will only be disappointed if Bullock wins it. So, as these things go, it'll probably be Bullock. Ho-hum.