In a recent Gold Derby Best Actress discussion, Tom O’Neill stuck his neck out by saying there’s a lot of heartfelt support for The Eyes of Tammy Faye‘s Jessica Chastain. Right away Deadline‘s Pete Hammond said “I haven’t heard that,” and a second later IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson (or was it Variety‘s Tim Gray?) said the same.
O’Neill didn’t argue it out and later that day an HE commenter said “that was a gulp moment…O’Neill being shut down on the Chastain schpiel and being told ‘okay Tom, let it go.'”
And that, ladies and germs, set the stage for tonight’s wowser SAG awards surprise…Chastain has won for Best Actress!
None of the know-it-alls were that enthusiastic about her performance. They were all “yes, okay, a good performance but it was mainly about Jessica having worn a ton of silvery eye makeup.”
Which, generally speaking, low-rent SAG-AFTRA voters are always impressed by, of course. The first thing that your basic SAG rube votes for is “most acting,” and the second thing is “most dramatic physical alteration…weight gain or loss, fake nose (TheHours), loads of base and mascara,” etc.
Chastain beat The Lost Daughter‘s Olivia Colman, House of Gucci‘s Lady Gaga, Respect‘s Jennifer Hudson and Being The Ricardos‘ Nicole Kidman.
HE to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone: If I’m not mistaken you said not too long ago that Kidman is probably the front-runner for the Best Actress Oscar. If she ever was a front-runner, she’s certainly no longer that after tonight. She’s actually finished, I would say. (Probably.)
One by one the presumed front-runners have fallen by the wayside — first Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart, then Gaga, now Kidman.
HE to Academy: You can’t give the Oscar to Jennifer Hudson — well, you can but you won’t. And you don’t want to give Colman a second Oscar so soon after the first. And so the only tenable nominee to vote for is Parallel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz! Who delivered the greatest performance among the five nominees anyway!
Hollywood Elsewhere will be gladly returning to the Santa Barbara Film Festival next week. I’ll remain there for eight or nine days. The SBIFF is the friendliest, sexiest, easiest-to-navigate major film festival in the entire civilized world. Start to finish, it feels a sea breeze. And with the new CDC ruling we might not have to wear masks all the time!
The Directors of the Year Award tribute on Thursday, March 3rd (Spielberg, Anderson, Branagh, Campion, Hamaguchi) is the kickoff event.
On Friday night Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart will sit for a longish, in-depth interview at the Arlington while receiving the Riviera Award.
The next day brings the dual Writers and Producers Panels on Saturday, 3.5.22. The writers will include Kenneth Branagh, Jane Campion, Zach Baylin (King Richard), Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter), Sian Heder (CODA), Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up), Denis Villeneuve (Dune) and Eskil Vogt (The Worst Person in the World), and will be tossed the usual softball questions by IndieWire’s Anne Thompson.
The Producers Panel, set for the afternoon of March 5 and moderated by the mild-mannered Glenn Whipp will include Laura Berwick (Belfast), Miles Dale (Nightmare Alley), Kevin Messick (Don’t Look Up), Rita Moreno (West Side Story), Sara Murphy (Licorice Pizza), Mary Parent (Dune), Tanya Seghatchian (The Power of the Dog), Patrick Wachsberger (CODA), Tim White (King Richard) and Teruhisa Yamamoto (Drive My Car).
The SBIFF Virtuosos Award ceremony will happen at the Arlington that evening (Saturday 3.5) with TCM’s Dave Karger moderating. Belfast‘s Ciaran Hinds, Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan, plus Ariana DeBose (West Side Story), Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza), Emilia Jones (CODA), Troy Kotsur (CODA), Simon Rex (Red Rocket) and Saniyya Sidney (King Richard).
The following morning (Sunday, March 6) will launch the Animation Panel, with SBIFF executive director Roger Durling moderating.
Not to mention King Richard‘s Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis receiving the Outstanding Performers of the Year Award in a ceremony that begins at 8 pm on Sunday, 3.6 at the Arlington theatre, (b) Penelope Cruz receiving the Montecito Award on Tuesday, 3.8 at the Arlington, (c) Benedict Cumberbatch receiving the Cinema Vanguard award on Wednesday, 3.9 at the Arlington, (d) Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman receiving the Maltin Modern Master Award on Thursday, 3.10 at the Arlington, and (e) a ten-year anniversary screening of David O. Russell‘s Silver Lining Playbook with a Russell q & a to follow.
Awards Daily's Sasha Stone is actually predicting (or half-predicting by way of an intuitive feeling) that Spencer's Kristen Stewart might be...well, a slightly more likely winner of the Best Actress Oscar race than some of us are supposing. Or so she suspects. Nobody knows anything, of course.
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Let no press or industry person overlook the simple fact that for weeks and weeks Hollywood Elsewhere stood resolute and alone against the stiff winds of seeming indifference…the only name-brand columnist who stood up and waved weekly flags for the beautiful Penelope Cruz and her deeply rooted performance in Parallel Mothers. Who else consistently stood hard and faithful as much as I? Who else single-handedly generated a Cruz bandwagon on a week-by-week, never-say-die basis?
All the other award-season Yodas and semi-dispassionate handicappers were either Doubting Thomases or cautious fence-sitters…damp-finger-to-the-wind equivocators. If you want to make it in this business you have to have heart.
Penélope Cruz:
-Didn’t get a Golden Globe nod -Didn’t get a Critics Choice nod -Didn’t get a SAG nod -Didn’t even make the BAFTA *LONGLIST*
A few days ago Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling posted a chat with Parallel Mothers star and Best Actress contender Penelope Cruz. I meant to post it right away, but I let other stuff overwhelm and I failed to muster the discipline…my deepest apologies.
But this really has to be said and withoutequivocation to all Academy members: Penelope Cruz gave the deepest, richest, most emotionally fulfilling lead female performance of 2021…by far. Way, way above the realm of her illustrious competitors (Kidman, Gaga, Stewart, Chastain, Colman). You simply can’t watch Parallel Mothers and not come to this very conclusion. It’s not possible — not if you’re honest with yourself.
Remember that Penelope has already won 2021 Best Actress awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the San Diego Film Critics Society as well as the Venice Film Festival’s Best Actress award last September.
My sincere apologies for late wake-up — I couldn’t fall asleep until 2 am. But all hail HE’s own Penelope Cruz (Parallel Mothers) for having snagged a richly deserved Best Actress nom, and in so doing having seemingly stolen Lady Gaga‘s ardently-campaigned-for Best Actress nom. Further cheers for King Richard‘s Will Smith, an almost certain lock to win Best Actor. Congrats to The Power of the Dog and director Jane Campion — obviously locked to win Best Picture and Best Director. Congrats also for Netflix having finally overcome fogeyish anti-streaming sentiments. Congrats to Drive My Car (four noms), director Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Best Director) and Justin Chang. Congrats to Guillermo del Toro for his Nightmare Alley being Best Pic-nominated. And…first cup of coffee, updates and additions as the wake-up process continues.
SNUBBING the obviously deserving Spider-Man: No Way Home is shameful, obstinate, ignorant, narrow-minded and blind. Sony should’ve offered streaming & screeners earlier in the game.
BEST PICTURE
“Belfast”
“CODA”
“Don’t Look Up”
“Drive My Car” / hats in the air for the Uncle Vanya-stamped grief monkeys! And that red Saab! And the 87 cigarettes smoked during the 179-minute running time.
“Dune”
“King Richard”
“Licorice Pizza”
“Nightmare Alley”
“The Power of the Dog” / OBVIOUSLY LOCKED TO WIN
“West Side Story”
SNUBS: “Being The Ricardos”, “tick, tick…BOOM”
BEST DIRECTOR
Kenneth Branagh, “Belfast”
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, “Drive My Car’ / SURPRISE!
Paul Thomas Anderson, “Licorice Pizza”
Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog”
Steven Spielberg, “West Side Story”
SNUB “Dune”‘s Denis Villeneuve
BEST ACTOR
Javier Bardem, “Being the Ricardos”
Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Power of the Dog”
Andrew Garfield, “tick, tick, BOOM!
Will Smith, “King Richard” / CERTAIN TO WIN
Denzel Washington, “The Tragedy of Macbeth”
BEST ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” / Tom O’Neil was right! The others were wrong!
Olivia Colman, “The Lost Daughter’
Penelope Cruz, “Parallel Mothers”
Nicole Kidman, “Being the Ricardos”
Kristen Stewart, “Spencer” / EVERYONE THOUGHT SHE WAS TOAST…what happened?
SNUBS: Lady Gaga, “House of Gucci” / GAGA MAFIA STUNNED!
Jennifer Hudson, “Respect”
Tessa Thompson, “Passing”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Ciarin Hinds, “Belfast”
Troy Kotsur, “CODA”
Jesse Plemons, “The Power of the Dog”
J.K. Simmons, “Being the Ricardos”
Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Power of the Dog”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jessie Buckley, “The Lost Daughter”
Ariana DeBose, “West Side Story”
Judi Dench, “Belfast” / WTF?
Kirsten Dunst, “The Power of the Dog”
Aunjanue Ellis, “King Richard” / YES!!! HE’s choice to win!! Because she stood up and stood out!
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
“CODA”
“Drive My Car”
“Dune”
“The Lost Daughter”
“The Power of the Dog”
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
“Belfast”
“Don’t Look Up”
“King Richard”
“Licorice Pizza”
“The Worst Person in the World”
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
“Dune”
“Nightmare Alley”
“The Power of the Dog”
“The Tragedy of Macbeth”
“West Side Story”
BEST FILM EDITING
“Don’t Look Up”
“Dune”
“King Richard”
“The Power of the Dog”
“tick, tick…BOOM!”
BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
“Dune”
“Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
“Cruella”
“Cyrano”
“Dune”
“Nightmare Alley”
“West Side Story”
BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
“Coming 2 America”
“Cruella”
“Dune”
“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”
“House of Gucci”
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
“Don’t Look Up”
“Dune”
“Encanto”
“Parallel Mothers”
“The Power of the Dog”
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
“Be Alive,” “King Richard”
“Dos Oruguitas,” “Encanto”
“Down to Joy,” “Belfast”
“No Time To Die,” “No Time to Die”
“Somehow You Do You,” “Four Good Days”
BEST SOUND
“Belfast”
“Dune”
“No Time To Die”
“The Power of the Dog”
“West Side Story”
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
“Dune”
“Free Guy”
“No Time to Die”
“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”
“Spider-Man: No Way Home”
BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM
“Drive My Car” / Guaranteed winner
“Flee”
“The Hand of God”
“Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom”
“The Worst Person in the World” / HE’s favorite!
Asghar Farhadi‘s “A Hero” snubbed!
BEST ANIMATED FILM
“Encanto”
“Flee”
“Luca”
“The Mitchells Vs. The Machines”
“Raya and the Last Dragon”
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
“Ascension”
“Attica”
“Flee”
“Summer of Soul…or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised”
“Writing With Fire”
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
“Audible”
“Lead Me Home”
“The Queen of Basketball”
Three Songs for Benazir”
“When We Were Bullies”
BEST ANIMATED SHORT
“Affairs of the Art”
“Bestia”
“Box Ballet”
“Robin Robin”
“The Windshield Wiper”
BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT
“Ala Kachuu – “Take and Run”
“The Dress”
“The Long Goodbye”
“On My Mind”
“Please Hold”
Early tomorrow morning our suspicions and predictions about what the none-too-hip, stay-at-home-except-for-groceries, life-has-mostly-possed-them-by Academy members are preferring as far as the allegedly finest film accomplishments of 2021 are concerned.
I can attempt to describe the pit-of-hell depression I’m feeling about what will happen tomorrow, but I’m not sure I can do it justice.
All I know right now is the bottom line, which is that Hollywood Elsewhere has staked out three hills that I’m ready to die on or die for…three contenders that will have to be at least nominated for the Academy to maintain at least a smidgen of respect in my eyes.
Hill #1 is Parallel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz for Best Actress — apparently a dicey situation but who knows? Hill #2 is Spider-Man: No Way Home for Best Picture — an apparent no-go despite the obviously necessary hosannah response to a single film having kept exhibition alive in late ’21 plus Anne Thompson saying last weekend that she’s heard that Academy members are having trouble coming up with ten nominations…God! Hill #3 is King Richard‘s Will Smith for Best Actor — a safe bet. (Smith will probably win, in fact.)
It would be outrageous, of course, if West Side Story fails to nab a Best Picture nomination, but it probably will.
Everyone is depressed about the Oscar noms…about life, the pandemic, wokesters working overtime to ensure that the Republicans will take the House and possibly the Senate next November, inflation, everything. Barring a huge surprise or two, the only thing anyone will be talking about tomorrow are the snubs. HE lives for the snubs.
Cutting to the chase, here are Sasha Stone’s predictions plus my own comments in the form of an NGE classification (i.e., Not Good Enough). What that really means is that an Oscar contender should ideally represent an exceptional or transcendent or highly combustible effort. If the effort in question is just respectable or professional or moderately approvable, then it’s not good enough for an Oscar nom. Another NGE factor is a contender who is very popular or even locked in for political reasons. (You know who I mean.) If a contender doesn’t have an NGE, it’s more or less okay in my book,
Best Picture
Belfast (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA/SAG/DGA/BAFTA pic) / no comment The Power of the Dog (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA/DGA/BAFTA pic) Licorice Pizza (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA/DGA/BAFTA pic) / NGE, although it’s okay Dune (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA/DGA/BAFTA pic) / NGE West Side Story (Globes+/Critics Choice/PGA/DGA) Don’t Look Up (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA/SAG/BAFTA pic) King Richard (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA/SAG) CODA (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA/SAG) / NGE tick, tick…BOOM! (Globes/Critics Choice/PGA) Being the Ricardos (PGA) Alternates: Nightmare Alley (Critics Choice), Drive My Car, House of Gucci.
Best Director
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog (DGA) Kenneth Branagh, Belfast (DGA) Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza (DGA) Denis Villenuve, Dune (DGA) / NGE Steven Spielberg, West Side Story (DGA) Alternates: Guillermo del Toro, Nightmare Alley; Adam McKay, Don’t Look Up; Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Best Actress
Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos / NGE Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter Lady Gaga, House of Gucci / NGE Jennifer Hudson, Respect Alternates: Rachel Zegler, West Side Story; Tessa Thompson, Passing; Kristen Stewart, Spencer.
Best Actor
Will Smith, King Richard Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth / NGE Andrew Garfield, tick, tick… BOOM! / NGE Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos Alternates: Leonardo DiCaprio, Don’t Look Up; Peter Dinklage, Cyrano
Best Supporting Actress
Ariana DeBose, West Side Story / NGE Caitriona Balfe, Belfast Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog / NGE Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard…SHOULD WIN!! Cate Blanchett, Nightmare Alley / NGE Alternates: Rita Moreno, West Side Story; Marlee Matlin, CODA; Nina Arianda, Being the Ricardos; Ann Dowd, Mass; Haley Bennett, Cyrano; Martha Plimpton, Mass.
Best Supporting Actor
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog / NGE Troy Kotsur, CODA / NGE Ciaran Hinds, Belfast Jared Leto, House of Gucci…too broad, Al Pacino was better. Bradley Cooper, Licorice Pizza
Alts: Ben Affleck, The Tender Bar / NGE; Mark Rylance, Don’t Look Up / NGE; Mike Faist, West Side Story…SHOULD WIN!!; Jonah Hill, Don’t Look Up; J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos.
Again, HE’s top films of 2021:
1. King Richard
2. Parallel Mothers
3. West Side Story
4. Spider-Man: No Way Home
5. The Worst Person in the World
6. A Hero (Amazon)
7. RidersofJustice
8. No Time To Die
9. The Beatles: Get Back
10. Zola
11. Cyrano
12. Licorice Pizza
13. The Card Counter
14. In The Heights
15. TheLastDuel
With Oscar nomination voting having ended two days ago, the just-out 2022 BAFTA nominations won’t be influencing anyone about anything. If you ask me they’re only “meaningful” as a clear indication that Kristen Stewart, whose BAFTA snub of her Spencer performance follows the SAG omission of a few weeks back, is almost certainly finished as a Best Actress Oscar nominee.**
On top of which the BAFTA nominators ignored Parallel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz…what is effing wrong with these guys? We’re talking about a thoroughly degenerated set of aesthetic values. They don’t even nominate the year’s finest female performance?
The BAFTA Best Actress nominees are House Of Gucci‘s Lady Gaga (a premonition that she’ll probably win the Best Actress Oscar is truly soul-crushing), Licorice Pizza‘s Alana Haim (rounding out the pack), CODA‘s Emilia Jones (forget it), The Worst Person In The World‘s Renate Reinsve (superb performance, great part), After Love‘s Joanna Scanlan (who?) and Passing‘s Tessa Thompson (minimalism, no voltage, no nothing).
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone: “Reading anything into the acting categories is basically like fan fiction role play for Film Twitter.”
All but one of BAFTA’s Best Film nominees are the usual nod-outs — Belfast, Dune, Licorice Pizza and The Power Of The Dog. The surprise (to me at least) is the nomination of Don’t Look Up, which has run hot and cold across the board. It got in, I’m guessing, because it says the right things about political imbeciles and climate change. Meanwhile I am still deeply, deeply depressed about the likely triumph of The Power of the Downer Dog
Outstanding British Film nominees are After Love, Ali & Ava, Belfast, Boiling Point, Cyrano, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, House Of Gucci, Last Night In Soho, No Time To Die and Passing. I can’t muster the passion to even speculate. God, this is so boring.
Sasha Stone’s bottom line: “The BAFTAs aren’t really the BAFTAs as we once knew them. Meaning [that] they aren’t really a consensus vote. They are a tightly micromanaged jury vote to spare the membership embarrassment or bad headlines for not being inclusive enough.”
BAFTA declaration: “Juries are made up of industry experts, with each jury comprised of BAFTA members from a diverse range of backgrounds, experience, gender, location and age groups.” Translation: “It’s more important for the BAFTAs to be sensitive and supportive of artists representing historically marginalized cultures and tribes than to select the ‘best’ in this or that category, whatever that actually means.”
In other words, a signification portion of the BAFTA nominees have been decided upon by woke-minded jurors. It’s basically political bullshit. The BAFTAs used to be about the usual factors — popularity, the “due” factor, estimations of quality, reflections of Academy sentiments. Now they’re almost worthless — woke whores, a dog-and-pony show by way of Twitter.
** BAFTA’s Stewart snub can also be read as a rejection of Pablo Larrain‘s flourishy, “Diary of a Mad Princess” fantasia.
A friend and I were discussing the strength of Academy-voter enthusiasm for Nicole Kidman‘s performance in Being The Ricardos.
I honestly like and respect her Lucille Ball as far as it goes, but I’m not getting the Best Actress fervor. Put it this way: I admired her in Being The Ricardos, but I like Lucille Ball‘s performances in Five Came Back or Too Many Girls a bit more.
We all know what the Nicole narrative was before everyone saw Being The Ricardos. “She’s wrong for the part, doesn’t look like Lucy, they should have hired Debra Messing,” etc. Then it opened and everyone said “oh, Nicole’s better than we expected…not bad!” And then somehow that got turned into Best Actress Oscar heat.
Kidman’s Lucy is satisfactory but is it Oscar-level good? She’s fine but it’s almost laughable to even compare her Lucy performance to Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers.
While Jordan Ruimy also approves of Kidman’s Lucy performance, he claims it isn’t as good as she was in To Die For, Birth, The Hours, The Others, Moulin Rouge, Destroyer, Birthday Girl, Bombshell, The Paperboy, Rabbit Hole, Portrait of a Lady and Dogville.
This led me to wonder what David Thomson, author of “Nicole Kidman” (’08) and arguably her greatest fan, thinks of her work in Being The Ricardos. So I reached out and Thomson replied as follows:
“I agree with Jordan. I think Being the Ricardos is an absurd project that ends up dejected. Whereas the younger Kidman could take silly ventures and make them seem necessary. I don’t think Kidman is turned on by Lucille, whereas we felt she was eating To Die For (among others) alive.”
Alternate Thomson take: “Miraculously Kidman could channel her sexuality into the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf [in The Hours], but she can muster none of that interest in Lucille Ball. I suspect she [had] dreamt of being Woolf but finds Ball a pain in the neck. Just guessing.”
…and is therefore wrong, wrong and terribly wrong for having stated that Spider-Man: No Way Home is one of the six Best Picture “longer shots” (right behind the list of six “possibilities“) on his THR checklist.
In strictly numerical terms, Feinberg has Spider-Man: No Way Home in 19th place. Let me explain something right here and now — that movie is not in 19th place!! It’s in sixth or seventh place among ten. Maybe even in fifth! Because it’s the Sony savior movie…the jackpot movie…the film that has lifted all spirits and raised all boats. And Feinberg cannot shit on this film….he can’t!
To my way of thinking Feinberg’s spitball picks are directly a result of listening to too many elite snooties, and we know who and what I’m talking about.
At times I’m persuaded that snooties are sworn enemies of emotional fulfillment and satisfaction (and I’m including the kind of spiritual payoff movie that Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed was) and too many are supporters of status-quo kowtowing and path-of-least-resistance wokeness, and right now they’re all striding around with big Power of the Dog and Drive My Car buttons on their chest.
This is fine and good except for the fact that both of these films are (a) homework, (b) depression pills and/or (c) detention class films that you need to endure because they’re well crafted and their directors (Jane Campion and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, respectively) are justifiably respected.
Bottom line: Snootie favorites are to be regarded askance unless HE agrees with them. The snooties often convey excellent taste but they also have a way of bringing everyone down or at least boring us to tears. The snooties are an across-the-board problem now…they’re knowledgable and sophisticated and a pain in the ass. I’ve said this many times but we all need to recognize that the snooties live in their own cloistered little realm, which is a polite way of saying Camp Rectum.
And as far as Spider-Man: No Way Home is concerned they’re too snobby and haughty to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the second hour of that recent Sony release delivers something emotionally extraordinary, and in so doing has generated the kind of once-in-a-decade response that is already the stuff of box-office legend. The snooties deserve community condemnation for looking down their noses at this film.
As far as the Best Actress race is concerned, the snooties (in this case the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association) have been correct in declaring that Penelope Cruz‘s performance in Parallel Mothers is the year’s best. And so in this respect Feinberg is once again dead wrong in stating that Cruz is a Best Actress “possibility”, and behind CODA‘s Emilia Jones yet…c’mon!
One of Feinberg’s Best Actress “frontrunners” is completely erroneous, and I’m speaking, of course, of Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart. In the wake of the SAG nomination blowout she’s totally and completely finished…just ask Clayton Davis! C’mon, Scott…put Cruz into KStew’s slot!
The other four frontrunners are Being the Ricardos‘ Nicole Kidman, The Lost Daughter‘s Olivia Colman, House of Gucci‘s Lady Gaga and The Eyes of Tammy Faye‘s Jessica Chastain. I find it deeply, horribly depressing that Gaga might win, but the lowlifes (i.e., SAG-AFTRA) love her to death. The most likely winner, I suppose, is Kidman, who was pretty good as Lucille Ball, the only problem being that her features look like carved porcelain soap.
I’m sorry…okay, not that sorry but the heavily-funded, once-seemingly-favored Best Actress campaign behind Kristen Stewart’s performance in Pablo Larrain’s Spencer collapsed this morning.
KStew was killed by SAG members who failed to nominate her, and at the same time nominated Respect’s Jennifer Hudson, probably due to identity politics as noone was predicting she’d be among the top five. She’s fine but the movie isn’t.
The SAG nominators, by the way, were completely clueless and dead wrong to ignore Parallel Mothers’ Penelope Cruz, whogave 2021’s best female lead performance — handsdown, nodebate.
In an interactive N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece, critic A.O. Scott celebrates 11 actors whom he believes delivered the creme de la creme of 2021 screen performances. Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart, Passing‘s Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, King Richard‘s Will Smith, The Tragedy of Macbeth‘s Denzel Washington, Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima, et. al.
One presumes that if one of Scott’s favorites somehow couldn’t make himself or herself available for a special N.Y. Times photo session with Ruven Afanador, they were replaced by another favorite. So let’s be liberal and hypothesize that the two finest female performances of the year — Penelope Cruz as a woman with child in Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers and RenateReinsve as a young woman of solitude in Joachim Trier‘s TheWorstPersonintheWorld — were on Scott’s initial list but couldn’t fit Afanador into their schedule.
In a 14-paragraph discussion about various pluses and handicaps affecting the 2021 Best Actress Oscar race, Vanity Fair ‘s David Canfield and Rebecca Fordacknowledge (a) the worthiness of Lady Gaga, Kristen Stewart and Nicole Kidman’s respective performances in House of Gucci, Spencer and BeingTheRicardos, and at the same time (b) note that buzz for the films themselves has beensettlingdown. Andtheysalute West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler, of course.
Then theyactuallymanage tomention(in paragraphs #10 and #14) theyear’sfinestleadfemaleperformances, handsdown — Parallel Mothers’ Penelope Cruz and TheWorstPersonintheWorld’s RenateReinsve. Whichstruck me as obligingand accommodating.