The long Oscar endurance race that began on Monday is entering the home stretch. Today, with our penultimate installment, Flyer film writers Chris Herrington and Greg Akers are gazing at the lead Actress and Actor categories. Who will and should win and who got robbed? Read on.
Best Actress
Nominees: Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine).
CHRIS HERRINGTON: “Oscar buzz” tells us this is a two-person race between Bening and Portman, and given that hers is a more central and more showy performance in a somewhat more high-profile film, I’m saying the person that Will Win is Natalie Portman.
Should Win: Rabbit Hole is one of the few nominated films that I didn’t manage to see, so I can’t comment on Kidman. As for Bening, she’s good but I thought Julianne Moore had both the more substantial role and better performance in The Kids Are All Right. And I think Portman is quite effective in Black Swan and won’t complain when she wins. But for me this comes down to Lawrence and Williams. The former is perfect in Winter’s Bone, but it feels like alchemy that may not be repeated. Michelle Williams — as we’ve seen in Brokeback Mountain and Wendy & Lucy — is the real deal. While her co-star in Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling, never lets you forget that he’s acting, Williams never lets you catch her performing. Her naturalism is pure poetry.
Got Robbed:Williams gave one of my three favorite lead female performances of last year. The other two are, unsurprisingly, not on this slate of nominees. One is Hye-Ja Kim, a South Korean TV icon who apparently tweaks her persona as the disturbingly dedicated title character in Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother. The other is Lesley Manville, a longtime regular in Mike Leigh’s company of great actors who finally gets her spotlight in Another Year, where she is unnervingly good as a very difficult character.
On this we agree: Lesley Manville in Another Year was “robbed”:
