I’d like to buy Nicolas Cage in a historical context, but I can’t. He can only portray present-day wackazoids. I realize that Cage has been making films hand over fist in order to pull himself out of a financial abyss, but there needs to be limits. The second I saw Ron Perlman , I went, “Okay, I know what this thing is.”
Season of the Witch is obviously CG porn. The more they pile on the visual effects, the worse films like this seem. The landscapes in this trailer are somewhat less convincing than those in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Some look worse than those swirling sand-cyclone effects in The Mummy.
In order to become a Best Actress contender this year, you apparently have to play a character who not only struggles (who doesn’t?) but suffers through anguish and misery. You can’t be nominated for playing someone who just plows right through with a robust personality and somehow makes it all work out. You have to wear the yoke around your neck and show the hurt and the steel that it takes to get through difficult stuff.
Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory
Because if you didn’t have to do that, Rachel McAdams‘ irrepressible, never-say-die Morning Glory character could leap right into the Best Actress arena. Her character, a TV morning-show producer, has the drive and pizazz to finesse a tough job in a brutal, high-pressure environment.
Her vibe isn’t the same as Judy Holliday‘s in her Oscar-winning performance in Born Yesterday, but it’s almost in the same general ballpark. Ditto Katherine Hepburn‘s Oscar-nominated performance as a headstrong heiress in The Philadelphia Story. The closest precedent, of course, is Holly Hunter ‘s Oscar-nominated news-producer performance in Broadcast News.
But no — today’s rule is that tears have to stream down your cheek and you have to get bruised and pushed and kicked around.
Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman, portraying a Manhattan ballet dancer, suffers through intense insecurity and anxiety about whether she’s good enough to satisfy her director and stave off a competitor. Poor Annette Bening suffers the pain of marital betrayal in The Kids Are All Right, and Julianne Moore — the cause of Bening’s anguish — bears the guilt of having jumped into an impulsive, unwise affair. Another Year‘s Lesley Manville is constantly grappling with alcoholism and loneliness. Jennifer Lawrence suffers through constant suspicion, hostility and threats in Winter’s Bone. Nicole Kidman‘s character is tortured by the relatively recent death of a young son in Rabbit Hole. Anne Hathaway is dealing with first-stage Parkinsons disease in Love and Other Drugs. During half of Blue ValentineMichelle Williams is grappling with a marriage that’s lost its spark and is heading downhill. And I Am Love‘s Tilda Swinton plays a Russian-born wife of an Italian industrialist whose affair with a younger man (a chef) invites terrible tragedy.
Think about Diane Keaton winning Best Actress for Annie Hall 32 years ago, and how the only downswirl issues her character went through were relationship problems with Woody Allen. That kind of female role doesn’t seem to be happening any more. Not lately it hasn’t, and certainly not this year.
I’m basically saying I wouldn’t mind if the woe-is-me moodface from all those highly-touted female performances was enlivened by a little spritzy can-do by way of McAdams.
Meet the mopies — always with the tears and the stress and the anguish and the pain. (Except, possibly, in the case of Amy Adams — I haven’t seen The Fighter yet.)
This Hollywood Reporter‘s just-posted Best Actress round-table includes Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Hilary Swank (Conviction), and Amy Adams (The Fighter)…fine. Swank is a non-contender and I’m not convinced that Carter, excellent as she is, is a Best Supporting Actress favorite but okay, whatever.
Kids Are All Right costar Julianne Moore wasn’t invited because she was at the London and Rome film festivals. Another Year‘s Lesley Manville wasn’t in town, I presume. Blue Valentine‘s Michelle Williams and Winter’s Bone contender Jennifer Lawrence were in England shooting. And nobody was focusing on Love and Other Drugs star Anne Hathaway or Morning Glory star Rachel McAdams when this thing was taped on or about 10.25.
Lionsgate’s just-released Rabbit Hole poster is highly intriguing. Congrats again to co-marketing chief Tim Palen. The hanging tire suggests a kind of emptiness by way of the absence of a child who once played with it. It also suggests a kind of purgatory. A body isn’t hanging from the rope, but something is stuck and twisting in a world of hurt. I also like that the poster doesn’t resort to the expected cast faces (Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, etc.)
So why hasn’t Tilda Swinton‘s heartily-praised performance in Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love popped through in this year’s Best Actress conversations? For one thing I Am Love is not universally admired. It’s all lavish and cranked up in a orchestrated Visconti-ish sense. That’s what’s sublime about it, of course, but at the same time it feels like an art-film exercise in “quotes.”
And yet the reviews Swinton got were something. “Tour de force” and all that. Consider this paragraph from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, written as part of his I Am Love review last June:
“This is the film toward which Tilda Swinton has been tending. Put together the chill of her majesty in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; the brunt of her motherly love in The Deep End; the leonine wildness that ate her up, in Erick Zonca‘s Julia; and the awful sense, in Michael Clayton, of a woman waiting to buckle beneath the formal demands of a working life — package all that, and you get Emma Recchi, winding the ribbon from a newly unwrapped gift around the spool of her worried fingers.”
But by Oscar season rules, it’s probably naive to think that a performance might rank as a contender for one of the Best Actress slots on mere “quality of performance” alone. And it’s pretty clear to everyone, I think, that Swinton’s Love performance just isn’t punching through. She’s not percolating. She has no heat. The last thing Tilda did that got people’s attention was that Laurel & Hardy flashmob dance number at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
On the strength of her performance alone (and I Am Love itself, which is like Visconti back from the dead) Swinton is quite mesmerizing. Quite the passionate woman, and slightly mad by way of erotic abandon. But I don’t have to tell anyone that the game, certainly at this stage, is about much more than that.
In a few weeks, I’m told, Swinton will be in LA for a big round of screenings and then on to New York. Magnolia will be sending screeners to the entire Academy, SAG Nominating committee and HFPA for starters.
In an email, columnist Scott Feinberg says that Swinton “has a very real shot at a Best Actress nod. Obviously the field is very crowded, and it may be tougher to get some voters to watch a two-hour foreign-language flick that came out months ago, but I suspect that those who do will not only vote to nominate her but place her very high on their ballots.
“Keep in mind that she’s very popular among her fellow actors, who I imagine admire her fiercely independent streak on-screen and off. While her supporting performance in Michael Clayton — which was good, but far from her best — lost the SAG Award, it won the Oscar, and it’s worth considering who she beat if you want to appreciate just how well-liked/respected she is.”
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone says “you never know with Tilda” and that “nothing is set in stone right now.”
Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich says this reminds her of “last year’s situation with Julia, another tiny movie with a terrific Tilda Swinton performance that couldn’t get any traction. During the NYFCO vote for Best Actress there was a strong cadre of support for Swinton, but Meryl Streep wound up winning anyway. This year it feels like even fewer people have seen I Am Love, and plus the performance is a lot less baity — more restrained, more technically impressive but less gritty, desperate, that kind of flashy stuff that really gets you noticed.
“So she probably doesn’t have a chance. And with plenty of other female performances out there that need a champion — Jennifer Lawrence, Nicole Kidman, maybe even Lesley Manville — there just might not be room for Tilda.”
Swinton’s p.r. rep claims that “there are many champions for this film out there. Like Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, Richard Jenkins in The Visitor and Melissa Leo in Frozen River, this is a performance and film that was the talk of the fest circuit at Toronto and Sundance last year, and the film did very well for a foreign film at box office. Buzz may not be crackling at the moment but it’s out there. Actors have seen the film although several key awards-season bloggers calling the race haven’t yet.”
In Contention‘s Kris Tapley says, “I still need to watch it. It’s sitting on my DVD player. I imagine it’ll be the same for Academy members all season long unless they feel a great need to give it a look.”
Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas says he “barely got through 45 minutes of the movie.”
The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy says he “can’t see” a Swinton headwind kicking in “but then I was an outlier on this: I believe I gave I Am Love its lowest score on Metacritic. I found it unbearable. But bully for Ms. Swinton if they can do it, I guess.”
Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson says “the only way for Tilda Swinton — who is admired by critics and art house audiences alike — to make the best actress Oscar grade this year for I Am Love is for critics to make a fuss over her in their year-end wraps and ten-best lists, and for critics groups and the Golden Globes to reward her and thus turn the screener into a must-see for SAG and Academy actors. Swinton has been nominated once (and won, for Michael Clayton).
“Metascore critics (32) gave it a 79, which is a strong score — they love Swinton’s performance. Who will the critics groups single out for best actress? Will Tilda Swinton beat out Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Annette Bening, Jennifer Lawrence, Lesley Manville and Diane Lane? The problem is that someone has to mount a viable campaign for her. Magnolia has not beaten the bushes for Oscars in the past. But the movie reached an almost $5 million gross which is good in today’s market.
“It’s not impossible.”
Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet says, “I’m probably not the best one to ask when it comes to this film, as I didn’t like it in the slightest. I can understand where people are coming from when they found it sensuous and passionate, like biting into that perfectly ripe piece of fruit, but it didn’t move me in that way. In fact it moved me in the opposite direction.”
But there are plenty of admirers out there, enough so that one can say that Swinton ought to at least be in the running along with the others. Do I think she has an actual prayer as things stand? Nope. I mean, not the slightest tendril of a slender reed of hope. But maybe I’m wrong, and I wouldn’t mind at all if I was.
The Best Actress locks are Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman, Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right (no Julianne Moore unless Focus takes Scott Feinberg‘s advice and pushes Bening and Moore together) and Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone. There are three prime contenders for the two remaining slots — Anne Hathaway for Love and Other Drugs , Michelle Williams for Blue Valentine and Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole (a.k.a. The Griefersons).
No offense, but the guys who posted this Movieline Best Actress chart on 10.20 didn’t quite understand all the ramifications and considerations that I’ve pointed out in today’s piece.
Lesley Manville needs to play it smart and go for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Another Year — she’ s a near-cinch to win if she does this. Sally Hawkins‘ Made in Dagenham performance doesn’t match the quality of her work in Happy Go Lucky — let’s face it. When Naomi Watts (portraying Valerie Plame) is outed as a CIA agent in Fair Game, she goes into a strange gopher hole of denial that doesn’t feel all that compelling or admirable. And whatever fervor may have existed for Diane Lane‘s Secretariat performance has gone away due to ebbing box-office, I’m afraid.
In a 9.15 Toronto Film Festival review, I wrote that John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole “isn’t half bad. A little better than that actually. It may, in fact, begin to penetrate as a Best Picture contender down the road. It contains Nicole Kidman‘s best acting in a long while, and Aaron Eckhart, as her emotionally subdued husband, has his best part since his amiable biker guy in Erin Brockovich.
Rabbit Hole “is a restrained/contained middle-class grief drama in the vein of Ordinary People (i.e., dead son), and yes, it does seem curious (although perfectly fine and allowable) that Mitchell has made such a quietly effective MOR drama without so much as an allusion to wang sandwiches or semen facials or that line of country.
“David Lindsay-Abaire‘s screenplay (based on his play) never lays it on too thick, but doesn’t hold back too much either. It’s a process drama about keeping the trauma buried or at least suppressed, and about how it comes out anyway — a little hostility here and there, odd alliances and connections, a little hash smoking (a la American Beauty), stabs at organized grief therapy, questions of whether to keep or get rid of the son’s toys.
“It finally explodes in a bracing argument scene between Kidman and Eckhart, and then it subsides again and comes back and loop-dee-loops and finally settles down into a kind of acceptance between them. Not a peace treaty as much as an understanding that overt hostilities will cease.
“A few people applauded at the end of this afternoon’s press screening. I haven’t heard any clapping at all at any TIFF press screenings so far, so this probably means something.
“There’s a wonderful scene in which a Kidman disses a group-therapy couple who’ve also lost a child. They’re sharing the notion that God has a plan and He needed their child so he could have an extra angel in heaven, blah blah, and Kidman just shoots that shit down like Sgt. York. Perfect
“The only jarring element in the whole enterprise is the casting of the chubby, big-boned, dark-haired Tammy Blanchard as Kidman’s sister. They don’t just look like they couldn’t be sisters or cousins — Blanchard doesn’t look like she’s from Kidman’s genetic family. She might as well be Aborigine for all the resemblance. The only explanation (and if it was offered I apologize for missing it) is that Blanchard was adopted or sired by a different dad than Kidman’s. Their mother is played by the always spot-on Dianne Weist.
“Is Rabbit Hole a Best Picture contender? With ten nominations, yeah. Any film that inspires critics to clap has a shot in this game. So I think it’s in there. It’s a very decently made film that, the Blanchard casting aside, never gets anything wrong, and gets a lot of things right. It’s not in the class of The Social Network or Black Swan or Let Me In or Biutiful, but it’s a well honed, entirely respectable, honestly affecting drama.
“Sandra Oh gives a fine performance (her best since Sideways) also as a divorcee whom Eckhardt develops a certain interest in.”
Who wants to see a revolt-of-the-robots movie called Robopocalypse? Show of hands? I personally don’t think the title has enough syllables. It’s not hard enough to pronounce. Why not call it Robopoppadiddypopalypse? (Nine being better than five, right?) Like it or not, this will be the next high-crank, super-wank popcorn movie from the billionaire hack known as Steven “Abe Who?” Spielberg.
The book it’ll be based upon, written by Daniel H. Wilson, won’t be out until next June, but it’s obviously a Transformers-type deal aimed at 13 year-olds with the once-great Spielberg, a guy who used to make films that at least sounded semi-original, picking up discarded Reese’s Pieces dropped in the forest by Michael Bay and James Cameron, whose “war against the machines” in T2 sounds fairly similar.
TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneiderreports that shooting will commence after Spielberg finishes his War Horse movie and after The Adventure of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn has been released and after Spielberg has arranged for all his checks to be sent to the right bank accounts and signed off on all his merchandising deals.
The fourth Oscar Poker podcast, which Sasha Stone and I finished recording about two and a half hours ago, focused on the strongest acting nominees. It should be posted to iTunes sometime this evening.
The only thing we disagreed on was a bizarre idea initially floated (or so Sasha recalled) by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson about Natalie Portman‘s brilliant Black Swan performance. Thompson has intimated that Portman’s performance might be a problem with some women because her ballet-dancer character doesn’t convey enough in the way strong or courageous positivism. By this standard a Best Actress nominee has less chance of winning if she portrays a character beset by any form of weakness or anxiety or rampant insecurity, as Portman’s character certainly is.
In other words, women in the film industry are so insecure that they have issues with any less than admirable female character because this would send out “the wrong message.”
What else did we say? There’s no disputing that Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) is the Best Actor front-runner with Jesse Eisenberg, James Franco, Robert Duvall, Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Jeff Bridges and Ryan Gosling also in play. And that the smart play for Another Year‘s Lesley Manville is to go for Best Supporting Actress and not Best Actress, which is looking like a big duke-out between Portman, Annette Bening, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicole Kidman and possibly Naomi Watts. And that Rosamund Pike is a serious comer in the Best Supporting Actress competition a la Barney’s Version.
Former Time staffer and James Cameron biographer Rebecca Keegan and recently departed Entertainment Weekly writer/blogger Nicole Sperling are now official L.A. Times entertainment reporters and Oscar season pulse-takers. The idea is to fill the spaces left by the semi-departed Tom O’Neil (who recently reclaimed Gold Derby) and Pete Hammond (now with Deadline).
TheWrap‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Lionsgate has acquired domestic distribution rights to John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole, an exceptional grief-recovery drama with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart that I reviewed yesterday. The plan is to open the film later this year and mount campaigns for Best Picture and Best Actress.
I’ll admit that the physical disparity between Rabbit Hole costars Nicole Kidman and Tammy Blanchard, cast as warring sisters in John Cameron Mitchell‘s well-regarded film, doesn’t seem that acute in these shots, which were taken at a TIFF press conference three days ago. But their differences are accentuated in the film, trust me. And it’s definitely a problem.
(l.) Nicole Kidman, (r.) Tammy Blanchard during TIFF Rabbit Hole press conference earlier this week.
If Blanchard doesn’t look “chubby” in her scenes she certainly appears well-fed and is clearly on the road to ampleness once she passes 40. On top of which she’s obviously big-boned and carrying the genes of dark-haired, dark-eyed ancestors. Whereas Kidman’s appearance in Rabbit Hole is her usual-usual — slim-bony, pale skin, ginger-haired, Irish-lassy-by-way-of-Sydney. One look and you’re telling yourself, “No way in hell are they sisters.”