Women's Media Nation | Social, political, and cultural issues relating to women

Best actress contenders – Thinking outside the box

posted by Women & Hollywood
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 10:33am CST

The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik has a recent piece about how small the pool is this year for Best Actress.

He talks about how the top three potential nominees are Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), with other contenders being Abbie Cornish (Bright Star), Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria), Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones), Penelope Cruz (Broken Embraces), Hilary Swank (Amelia) and god forbid Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side). Bullock’s potential inclusion to Zeitchik in indicative of the shallow pool. (Let’s remember that Julia Roberts had never done anything remotely like Erin Brockovich before she hit that one out of the park.)

The piece goes on to say that there are many men jostling for those top five slots and if there were 10 nominations some would still be left out.

No shit. Most movies, even the awards movies are made by guys for guys.

Here’s Zeitchik’s reasoning as to why women are so woefully underrepresented:

It’s axiomatic that older actresses who want to play strong lead roles often have to abandon features for venues like cable TV. Awards season has a way of reinforcing the point. During the 1980s, three women older than 50 won the best actress Oscar, while a fourth (Shirley MacLaine) was about to turn 50.

During the past 20 years, on the other hand, exactly one fiftysomething woman has taken the prize (Helen Mirren, for “The Queen”).

That’s far from a comment on this generation’s talent or even on the preferences of voters. But it does say plenty about the roles women are offered.

But it also highlights that, for all the strides made by the women behind the camera, the women in front of them can still be subject to the old prejudices. Indeed, the more cynical in town — including at least one actress awards-contender — say that the director and actress trends are hardly a coincidence. Many female directors, they argue, can feel pressure to cast a preponderance of strong male leads to negate the perception that theirs is a female-oriented film.

Yes, this is a good year for women directors as I have written about many times, but I don’t want the conversation to be that because we have several potential contenders for year-end awards, that the work is done. Women directors have a harder time getting traction. Let’s remember that.

But what this story reminded me of is all the strong female Oscar worthy performances that don’t ever make it onto the Oscar radar screen because they don’t have wide enough distribution or get killed by the mostly male critical establishment. Movies that star guys get distributed wider than movies by and about women. So it makes sense to look beyond all the films getting the buzz to some who can’t afford to mount Oscar campaigns or maybe even send out screeners.

Just because a film or a performance doesn’t get included in the “buzz” doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.

Here are some performances worthy of being considered:

Amy Adams- Sunshine Cleaning

Michelle Pfeiffer- Cheri

Nicole Beharie – American Violet

Shohreh Aghdashloo – The Stoning of Soraya M.

Tilda Swinton- Julia

Audrey Tatou- Coco Before Chanel

Michelle Monaghan- Trucker

Yolande Moreau- Seraphine

Catalina Saavedra- The Maid

Sophie Okondeo- Skin