THAT PRECIOUS GOLD STATUETTE
The Oscars takes place Monday morning prognosticate the results
Battle for Best Actress
With other categories nearly locked, the fiercest battlefield for armchair spectators is Best Actress. The nominees are: Isabelle Huppert from Elle; Ruth Negga from Loving; Natalie Portman from Jackie; Emma Stone from La La Land; and Meryl Streep from Florence Foster
Jenkins. All these except Loving and Florence Foster Jenkins have been released in Thailand. Partisan punditry and inside speculations aside, this is a tough race, in which learned predictors risk losing face. (That Amy Adams wasn’t in the list was a shock to everyone.) The three front-runners are Huppert, Stone and Portman — not specifically in that order — and we have the spectacle of one of the greatest actresses in cinema history neck-to-neck with two younger American actresses, wide-eyed and studious. The Irish actress Negga, from Loving, is sensitive and admirable, though she will have other chances in the future. Streep — with her record-making 20th nomination — is pitch-perfect as a tone-deaf socialite who wants to become a singer, but we can’t imagine the Hollywood doyen winning again from such a minor role.
The dame of French drama — of drama, period — Huppert has never been nominated before, a glaring testament to how the Oscars are such an insular institution, out of touch with the rest of the world. Cinephiles everywhere would easily argue that Huppert — now 63 and having been in the movies since the early 1970s — is on equal footing if not actually surpassing of Streep for a place in the pantheon of movie acting. A true European performer, Huppert’s roles are risky — emotionally, physically, morally and technically (as the masochistic lead in The Piano Teacher, for example, or the depraved mother in Ma Mere). And in the black comedy Elle, she plays a woman who’s raped in her own house yet refuses to let the incident define her. It’s one of the most complex, inscrutable and entertaining characters we’ve seen in years. (The project was originally conceived as an American production, and we don’t even want to imagine what that would have looked like.)
To me, it’s either Huppert or Portman. The latter, playing Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, is the nuclear reactor in that strange and enthralling film (grossly overlooked in other categories). Here’s an actress whose edifice is technique (like Streep), with her every drawl and facial movement calibrated to inhabit her character. She wants us to believe that she’s Jackie, the grieving widow and maker of myth, mother and mourner, airheaded doll and angry lioness who’s just lost her lion. We see Jackie, of course, and we also see Portman as Jackie; it’s inevitable, the blessing and curse of playing real-life figures, the Hollywood mirror game of art imitating life imitating art.
Stone, the shining star in La La Land, has gained momentum during the award circuit despite losing the Golden Globe to Huppert. What can I say? I enjoyed watching her, but is this a momentous, prize-winning performance? She sings and dances and charms and widens her egg eyes, and that much-heralded audition sequence shows her range. But I’m still not convinced, especially in a very competitive year such as this.
So, in the ideal world, Huppert should win. In Hollywood — a world of its own — it’s probably Stone.