Robert here. With this weekend's Oscars closing up the film year, can we take one final minute and dive into two performances that have been given the prestigious honor of being declared snubbed by the academy? That'd be, namely, Annette Bening in 20th Century Women and Sonia Braga in Aquarius (who are both nominated in Nathaniel's own awards; Braga was runner up for Best Actress in the 2016 Team Experience Awards).
Some minor spoilers and possibly very unpopular opinions after the jump...
There was talk of 20th Century Women getting Annette Bening her long overdue Oscar pretty much since the film's conception. While I truly don't relish being a contrarian, after finally seeing the movie, I don't think it is a film worthy of Bening's belated golden coronation.
While the beloved actress is very good in the movie, her character is the weakest of the three titular women and at times I felt she was relying on a familiar bag of tricks to compensate. Dorothea is a classic example of a character who mostly exists as another pair of hands to keep all the balls in the air. When the movie needs a plot to tie together all of its ideas, she delivers a plot, when it needs to justify the off-beat lifestyle she and her son lead, she is a free spirit, when it needs late coming final conflict, she is strict and overbearing, when it needs you to cry, she dies of cancer twenty years later. With a tighter script or more focus on her these swings in mood and motivation this portrait of a complicated woman might have worked, but as the movie stands, it felt forced and contrived to me. Bening does everything she can to bring life to the role and has many triumphs, notably her car scene with Elle Fanning, but it's hard to craft a truly great performance when the material simply isn't there.
Sonia Braga's character Clara in Aquarius is similarly at odds with herself. She is intelligent, kind, warm, condescending, curt and aloof -- sometimes all in the same scene. Unlike Mike Mills' film, full of flashbacks, flash forwards, news clips and voiceovers, Kleber Mendonça Filho's is grounded and slow. It begins with a twenty minute prologue and contains long scenes of Clara simply going about her life. The tension that drives the plot of the film – her conflict with the developers trying to buy her apartment – isn't introduced until thirty or forty minutes into the movie. Some reviewers have criticized the film for its pacing and length, but from my perspective, this allows us to fully immerse ourselves in Clara's world, which is essential to the success of the movie.
With this gift Braga is able to present a true masterclass of acting. Consider the scene in which she is pleading with her children to understand why she refuses to move out of her apartment. She turns to her gay son, who a few minutes prior she had been prodding to share pictures of his new boyfriend, and asks him to consider how he once felt -- how he knew he was right about his sexuality even though everyone else around him thought otherwise. Braga's pleading is not just sad, it is also calculating, and frustrated, and also angry. In this one scene you are able to see the entire history of their complicated relationship. All of this is written on her face and her body. It is truly masterful work that deserved more recognition this film year.
Were you feeling contrarian about either of these performances that people had been rooting for? Do you think time will be kind to the Oscar lineup as it is?