San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ask Mick LaSalle: Figuring out Kristen Stewart’s greatness.
Dear Mr. LaSalle: At what point did you realize that Kristen Stewart was a fabulous actress? When I had my epiphany, I did not quite accept it. It had to be proved to me a couple of times. Odd.
Russell Holder, Davis
Dear Mr. Holder: That’s reasonable. We can’t devote our complete attention to everybody. We notice what we notice, and only eventually do we understand what we’ve been noticing. It’s like the way we make friends. It never happens on a single day, there’s just a moment that arrives where you realize that “Hey, this has happened.”
I first noticed and commented on Kristen Stewart in “Adventureland” (2009), and I remembered her enough so that when she started making those awful “Twilight” movies, I was sorry about this turn in her career.
I liked her again in “The Runaways” (2010), playing one of the goddesses of my youth, Joan Jett, but only fully realized that she was exceptional with “Still Alice” and “The Clouds of Sils Maria” (both 2014). Finally — with “Seberg” and “Charlie’s Angels” (both 2019), followed by “Underwater” and “Happiest Season” (both 2020) — I started actively looking forward to her movies and will now go out of my way not to miss one. I feel that way about maybe five American actors, tops.
Dear forever young Mick: Have you ever thought that in a perfect world a reviewer would have to view a film twice before writing a review?
Robert Freud Bastin, Petaluma
Dear forever young Robert: Sometimes. But the disadvantages of doing that would outnumber the advantages. Most movies are meant to be seen only once. They lose suspense and show all their seams on a second viewing. But what’s the use of a review telling you all the bad things the critic noticed the second time around, when readers are only going to see the movie once, at most?
Reviews, like journalism, are the first draft of history. They must be fresh and generally correct — as correct as possible, but absolute precision and certainty, even with a comparatively trivial thing like a movie’s quality, can be known only with time. Hello Mr. LaSalle: I’ve heard many people, including yourself, say that when two actors are nominated for the same movie in their category, they “cancel each other out.” I decided to research it. In all the years of Oscars, there have been 71 times when more than one actor has been nominated for the same movie in a category. Of those, there have been 23 times when an actor won when competing with another from the same movie in one of the acting categories.
Larry Brinkin, San Francisco
Hello Mr. Brinkin: Amazing. How is it possible that everybody who writes about the Oscars, including me, has never bothered to check this? Twentythree out of 71 is almost 1 out of 3, and considering that there are usually five nominees, there might actually be a statistical advantage to be nominated against someone from the same movie. At least it might be an indicator of the general quality of the movie and of the Academy’s enthusiasm for it. Though I still suspect it wasn’t an advantage for Dustin Hoffman to be nominated against Jon Voight for “Midnight Cowboy,” or for Al Pacino and Joe Pesci to be nominated against each other for “The Irishman” — two cases where the performances were equally great, totally different and hard to choose between.
I’ll never again feel comfortable talking about nominations canceling each other out. I’ll just eliminate that sage observation from my repertory of snakeoil prognostication. Thanks for a tangible contribution to Oscars scholarship.