This Oscar season, Scene It All Before blogger Zach Stone and I are teaming up to offer our varying perspectives on the 2010 Academy Awards. This is our second installation in the series. To see his comprehensive view and opinion of all four acting categories, click here.
The Best Actress category is extremely close and difficult to predict this year, but it isn’t because of an overload of spellbinding cinematic portrayals that keep your eyes glued to the screen for 90-120 minutes. Instead, none of the nominees deliver a strong enough performance to definitively separate themselves from the rest of the pack, leading the Academy to choose from a lackluster pool of candidates in comparison to the usual cast of competitors.
Sandra Bullock is the favorite with the guild support thus far, although I don’t know why. I wonder if the Screen Actors Guild voters who gave her the award saw her in the same film as I did. In The Blind Side, I wasn’t convinced Bullock was Leigh Anne Tuohy; instead, it was obvious she was just pretending to be a stubborn, hard-nosed Southern woman. Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself. I wouldn’t make such serious allegations without justification. Good acting performances, especially those deserving of Oscar gold, shouldn’t remind you the character is being portrayed by an actor/actress. You should be convinced the actor/actress and the character are one and the same. In that regard, Bullock fails miserably.
The next leading candidate is big screen queen Meryl Streep. In the last four years, she’s been nominated for the Best Actress award three times. DY-NA-STY! DY-NA-STY! All told, she’s been nominated 13 times over the course of her entire career. Add three Best Supporting Actress nominations to her credentials and you clearly have a living legend. However, those stats are severely hampered by the glaring fact that only two of those 16 noms resulted in a win. Could this year break a dry spell that spans 27 years and 12 nominations? More on that in a minute.
Gabourey Sidibe is the out-of-nowhere story at this year’s Academy Awards. Sidibe shines as Precious, the obese and impoverished mother of two and incest victim. While she does enough in her role to make the film work, she is not what carries this film. Understandably so: This is Sidibe’s first acting role…ever. Knowing that, it’s an impressive and admirable performance, but not good enough to win Best Actress. Her place among Streep and Helen Mirren should be an honor, and while she may come close due to the lack of separation between each actress’ individual performance, she’s a long shot dark horse.
Bringing up the rear in this race is newcomer Carey Mulligan and old face Helen Mirren. In An Education, Mulligan is a prep school senior who is in such a rush to grow up she has an affair with a man nearly twice her age who can give her the extravagant life she craves. Ultimately, I don’t see any reason why Mulligan’s portrayal of a naive and, at times, stubborn teenage girl is remotely special enough to deserve Best Actress. Mirren’s problem, on the other hand, is lack of visibility. I’ve certainly had a lot of trouble getting the opportunity to watch the one time Best Actress winner’s portrayal as Leo Tolstoy’s temperamental wife Sofya in The Last Station. The lack of exposure for the film will hurt its chances in the two categories in which it received nominations (Christopher Plummer secured a Best Actor nom for his take on the enigmatic author himself).
That leaves Bullock and Streep. Would you ever expect Sandra to legitimately challenge Meryl for supremacy in the Leading Lady world? It’s Speed, The Net, and Miss Congeniality versus The Deerhunter, Sophie’s Choice, and Doubt. Yikes. However, we can’t evaluate based on past roles and performances. The Academy wants to know why you deserve to win this year and this year alone, or else Streep would be racking in the hardware every award season. With that said, I’ve already told you my piece about Bullock’s shudder-inspiring take on Leigh Anne Tuohy, but does Streep then capitalize on the opportunity to seize Oscar gold?
Personally, I think that’s a tricky question to answer, primarily because Streep’s Julia Child isn’t the driving force of Julie & Julia. The film simultaneously tells two stories: Julia’s quest to publish the first book on French cuisine written in English and Julie’s (Amy Adams) goal of following 365 recipes in Child’s cooking book for each day of the year. While a Best Actress should be a major driving force behind the film’s story, Julie & Julia is unique because it has two separate plot lines. Also, Julie’s storyline comes across as more important than Julia’s and feels more central to the film. Julia Child’s part reads more as a history lesson than anything. For that reason, Streep feels like the film’s number 1A lead while Adams is the film’s number 1 lead.
Also, a big problem I had with Streep’s performance was that it seemed at some points to border on impersonation. I had a tough time deciding whether or not her take on Julia Child belonged on the big screen or in an SNL sketch. Still, while her version of Child’s voice does seem like a caricature at times, when you capture the spirit and personality of such a widely recognized and complicated public figure as well as Streep does, I don’t care if she appears on the screen for two minutes or two hours - she’s done your job, which is exactly what you expect from Meryl Streep in any of her films.
That’s why Streep should take home the prize this time around. She’d be a long shot in any other year, but with 2010 being such a weak field for Best Actress candidates and Sandra Bullock’s abysmal role of Leigh Anne Tuohy being her only competition (and she really is), Streep is most deserving of winning the Academy’s top leading lady prize. It’s funny considering how many reasons I can say why she shouldn’t win, but I’m still convinced there’s no better person this year. It’s a shame considering all the times in the past when Meryl Streep has turned in better performances that proved fruitless, but with a current Chicago Cubs-esque streak in Academy Award nominations like this, I’m sure she’ll will take what she can get.
