Previously on Herrington & Akers on the Oscars:
Day 1: Supporting Performances
Day 2: Screenplays
Greg Akers: A couple times now you’ve mentioned reasons why you think you’re terrible at predicting Oscars. Untruth of that assessment aside, I would compare picking categories based on relative merit akin to guessing the NBA All-Star Game starters based on worthiness. It’s a fool’s game. The starters are the most popular players, even if they don’t deserve it.
Best Lead Actress
Nominees: Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty), Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Emmanuelle Riva (Amour), Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Naomi Watts (The Impossible)
Akers: First, this is a really great category. I at least like and in some cases love every performance. I would be very happy if my fifth favorite won. This seems to be a two-way race between Chastain and Lawrence. Stat alert: The winner of the Golden Globe has won the Oscar 14 of the last 17 years. Chastain and Lawrence each won the Golden Globe this year in their respective categories. Riva won the BAFTA, but that has only mattered 8 of the last 17 years, and every time the BAFTAs were right, so were the Golden Globes. It’s a trend, yo.
I’m leaning to the side that Jennifer Lawrence Will Win. The narratives that she wins are either that she gets caught up in a Silver Linings Playbook feeding frenzy, or at the least capitalizes on Chastain being hurt by the controversy around Zero Dark Thirty. Chastain has a tougher row to hoe. (Question: Agrarian metaphors: uselessly obscure at this point in popular American culture?)
Should Win: On the other hand, I think Jessica Chastain has the edge in terms of merit. She’s simply amazing. I couldn’t help but think of her as having a Sarah Connor-type trajectory, with Chastain taking her character, Maya, from the weak-stomached (some might say well-adjusted) CIA smarty to the badass, take-no-prisoners crusader. In a scene toward the end of Zero Dark Thirty, Maya even dons aviator sunglasses, a knowing reference made by Kathryn Bigelow to Connor in her ex’s, James Cameron’s, Terminator 2. And Chastain (and screenwriter Mark Boal) really nail Maya in the last scene in the film, as the character sits alone contemplating her achievement and the toll it took (personally and beyond) to get there. “What’s next” is the perfect question to ask, and I love how Chastain handles it. “What price victory” is the question the film doesn’t ask but implies. Why does nobody talk about the ending to Zero Dark Thirty when discussing where it sits on the sliding scale of righteousness/repugnancy?
As for the other nominees: Silver Linings Playbook is an actors’ movie, and Lawrence gets the best of it in the film as Tiffany, a prickly-pear, slutty widow with a heart of gold. She’s going to be great to watch for years to come. Riva is hard to watch (in a good way) as the dying Anne in Michael Haneke’s hard to watch (in a good way) Amour. Wallis is fierce, a ball of energy, as Hushpuppy, and I still can’t get over that she was only 6 when they made Beasts of the Southern Wild — only 5 when she got the part. We both have 8-year-old daughters; I’m picturing them back when they were 5 or 6, with a performance like that. Crazy. I love Watts, too, in her brutally physical performance in The Impossible. In practical terms, having to spend weeks in the water on the set … Watts is impressive.
Got Robbed: I don’t think Keira Knightley has ever been better than as the title role in Anna Karenina. For that matter, I should’ve mentioned the film as getting robbed for Adapted Screenplay. A friend says he was glad when Anna Karenina threw herself under a train. (Spoiler-alert for a plot point from a novel more than a century old?) I just don’t get the dislike and relative forgotten-ness of the film. That’s a really good movie.
