An hour ago I heard the best explanation (or at least the best partial explanation) as to why the Julie Christie momentum bandwagon stalled and gave way to Marion Cotillard‘s winning the Best Actress Oscar. (And I’m not getting into this topic as a complaint — I’ve long worshipped Cotillard’s La Vie en Rose performance as Edith Piaf.) I’ll give the person who told me credit for this when I hear from him and he says it’s cool, but until then here it is non-attributed.
Cotillard beat Christie because young actresses almost always beat older actresses in the Best Actress race. One reason this happens, it is believed, is because of the male geezer vote, which always responds to the sexual allure element. This is precisely how the guy put it: “They vote with their dicks, the geezers.”
The big exception to the rule was Helen Mirren winning last year for The Queen, but remember how she said saucy things all through the campaign, reminding everyone that she was a woman with a considerable sexual appetite and so on, posing for those hot-mama magazine covers. You can’t tell me that didn’t boost her vote tally.
I think it’s fair to speculate that Diablo Cody may have won also because of the old-geezer vote. I know that Lorenzo Semple, Jr., said in one of his “Real Geezer” confessions (it’s either in segment #1 or segment #2) that Cody’s stripper background was a decisive factor in his voting for her.