Anecdote / Conjecture time. I finally caught the Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene (thoughts forthcoming but definitely in the "must-see!" division) which is the star-making, or at least actress-making, debut of 22 year-old Elizabeth Olsen who is the younger sister of the famous/infamous Olsen Twins.
Critics screenings at the New York Film Festival often end with a mini press-conference and the writer/director Sean Durkin and Olsen (who seems to go by "Lizzy") were on hand today to answer questions. If you've ever been to a Q&A you'll know that most people preface their question with some sort of comment about their own feelings for the movie -- usually ass-kissing praise since the stars are present and stars have wondrous heinies.
One reporter, justifiably thrilled by Olsen's work as Martha says this to Lizzy:
I wanted to compliment you on the interiority of your characterization. You didn't externalize it the way some people do by being "insane" visually and that interiority was very engulfing and very convincing in comparison to some of the performances we've seen... it was a relief, actually.
LOL. I wonder who on earth she could be dissing...
[HINT: A Dangerous Method played for the same crowd in the same time slot the day before.]
To tell you the truth this coded jab made me feel a bit bad for Keira Knightley since different roles require different things of the actors who play them. A Dangerous Method obviously asks for exteriority in the character of Sabine who is, discarding sensititivy, a crazy person. For what it's worth, Olsen does have a couple big and uncharacteristically showy moments herself as Martha (also: crazy person) and I'm reasonably certain they'd be used as her Oscar clips and misrepresent the performance were she to be nominated. But I'm not so sure she will be. It seems to me that Knightley (should she campaign in lead) and Olsen have an inverted mirror problem when it comes to the race for a nomination. One is giving a showy external performance within a film that people just don't love that is, all the same, in the key of Oscar (period piece, expensive looking, biographical, traditionally romantically tragic) and the other is giving a restrained internal performance within a film that people do love that is, all the same, largely sung in a key outside Oscar's range (contemporary, low budget, fictional, very unsettling and untraditionally non-cathartic).
So who gets nominated? Or is it both? Neither? I swear, the more one stares at the Best Actress category this year the more confused one becomes.