Monday, March 17, 2003

Performance by an actress in a leading role

This is the first time in at least 35 years that all five best-actress nominees have been born within a decade of each other, and the first time they've all been born in the same decade, in this case, the 1960s, with Moore born in 60, Lane in 65, Hayek in 67 and Kidman and Zellweger in 69.

Related trivia question: Who was the first person born in the 1960s to win an acting Oscar? (Answer at bottom)

Salma Hayek in FRIDA
The exotic nomination. Salma Hayek's tremendously good in Frida – it's always worth remembering while watching Hayek in American movies that she's not working in her first language – but she's also being honoured for sheer stick-to-it-iveness. Actors love actors who write scripts, direct or produce their own pictures. It's every actor's dream.

An awful lot of people had tried to push Frida Kahlo: The Movie through the system over the years, including Madonna, but Hayek managed it with an eccentrically talented director (Julie Taymor). Hayek's trophy boyfriend, Edward Norton, did a polish on the script, and there's a mind-boggling array of drop-ins from the likes of Ashley Judd and Antonio Banderas.

Depressing thought: if there's a once-in-a-career nominee this year, Hayek is it.

Nicole Kidman in THE HOURS
Winning ugly. Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe as best actress in a drama by doing traditional award-winning things. She plays a real person, has prosthetics on her face (taking the edge off alarming good looks is a classic Oscar trick) and does an accent. That said, the Academy has persistently ignored Kidman's best performances – watch her in the thriller Dead Calm, in Gus Van Sant's To Die For or in 2001's psychological ghost story, The Others, which, in my opinion, leaves her mugging and marginally interesting singing in Moulin Rouge in the dust.

Of course, there's nothing new in this – so many Oscars have been won by people not doing their best work, it's frightening.

What does it mean when people say that someone like Kidman has "paid her dues"? Renée Zellweger was in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Diane Lane's done more cheap indies than any performer of her talent should have to endure. Julianne Moore was in a Sylvester Stallone movie. Are they crediting Kidman for coming out of her divorce from Tom Cruise with her sanity apparently intact? Beats me.

Other awards: Golden Globe (Drama)

Diane Lane in UNFAITHFUL
Diane Lane's first nomination comes in what is perhaps the single trashiest movie to grab a major nomination. It's another Adrian Lyne portrait of adultery, Fatal Attraction turned inside out. As the adulterous soccer mom, Lane is stunning, all quicksilver moods and alarmed sensuality.

If anything, Unfaithful makes us realize how conspicuously Hollywood can waste talent – Lane has been awfully good in some awfully bad movies over the past few years, and you would think that someone casting a mainstream picture might have noticed. I actually heard a complaint that Lane was "too old" to be with Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm, when she's actually only five years older than he is. And though her acting career began a decade before anyone else in the category, she's younger than Julianne Moore, and only two years older than Salma Hayek, who's still in the young- hottie category.

Lane may have picked the wrong year to give the performance of her career, but she's the most interesting dark horse in the category.

Kidman and Zellweger are the clear favourites. The Julianne Moore critical bandwagon stalled when the industry awards started, and Hayek, the surprise nominee – she won no critics groups or industry awards – is Miss Congeniality.

Other awards: New York Critics, National Society

Julianne Moore in FAR FROM HEAVEN
Julianne Moore is in danger of becoming Meryl Streep or Glenn Close – an automatic nominee. This makes me wonder what the Academy was looking at when Moore was giving astonishing performances in independent films like Safe and Vanya On 42nd Street back in the mid-90s. She's in danger of being so good that she gets overlooked. The great disadvantage Moore faces in this race is that she doesn't seem to be doing anything. Zellweger has musical numbers, Kidman has her makeup, Hayek has makeup, a critical injury and lots of sex scenes, Lane has a more emotionally open character. Moore is stuck giving a period-appropriate performance, all subtext, the character's passion seething beneath the surface, which never seems to impress the voters. They should know better.

Other awards: Toronto Critics, L.A. Critics, NBR

Renée Zellweger in CHICAGO
Zellweger's nomination is the preaching-dog spot. With absolutely no background as a singer or dancer, the marvel wasn't that she did those things well in Chicago, but that she did them at all. To be kind, though, she was more a convincing musical comedy star than Nicole Kidman was last year in Moulin Rouge. Since Jerry Maguire, Zellweger has been everybody's favourite non-star movie star. With her perpetual squint, she often seems less like the star of the film than the stand-in who'll be replaced as soon as they finish lighting the set, an impression enhanced by her being the one star of Jerry Maguire who didn't get an Oscar nomination.

Zellweger's SAG win was a sign of a number of things, one of which is that actors are very impressed when people "stretch," and Roxie Hart was definitely that. The other thing, of course, is that it's an indicator – the actors branch, while much smaller than the Screen Actors Guild as a whole, is by far the largest branch of the Academy, which says something when you're predicting winners.

Other awards: SAG Award, Golden Globe (musical/comedy)

Answer: Tatum O'Neal, born in 1962, won supporting actress in 1973 for Paper Moon.