by Eric Blume
Potentially great news just arrived for the undernourished Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress races: Jay Roach’s Bombshell had its first screening in LA on Sunday night, and the word out of the gate seems overwhelmingly positive.
Reviews for the film are embargoed for another eight weeks or so, but various sources online are saying Charlize Theron’s “transformational” performance as Fox News personality Megyn Kelly is explosive and catapults her into the top of the Best Actress race...
Word also looks great for Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie in the Supporting category, as well as a potential Supporting Actor nod for John Lithgow as creepy Roger Ailes. Several folks have referenced that “practically every actor in SAG is actually in the movie.” This is a factoid not to be underestimated, as actors are the largest voting block and have carried many movies to Best Picture nominations simply because they all wish they’d been IN the movie.
Looking at this news is interesting from an Oscar context. Charlize won Best Actress early in her career, and has had only a quick follow-up nomination (for North Country two years after winning for Monster), despite several complex and deeply accomplished performances, most noticeably in Young Adult and Tully. She’s well respected in the business, and has taken on a producer role on many of her projects (and outside of her own vehicles, as with David Fincher’s streaming series Mindhunter).
If one looks at her alongside Renee Zellweger for Judy, we’d have two actresses close in age, with careers that started around the same time, both of whom have already won Oscars, playing real-life people requiring physical and vocal transformations. It’ll be interesting, if they do end up being our front-runners, which actress Hollywood would prefer to anoint with a second Academy Award.
If Kidman and Robbie snag nominations, it’d be Nicole’s fifth and Margot’s second…and the second time in two years that we’d see two supporting actresses from the same film (after last year’s The Favourite) though that's not an uncommon occurence in Oscar history. Margot Robbie is already in the conversation in this category this year for her role in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, but as lovely as she is in that film, she doesn’t have much to do. Evidently Robbie has much more screen time than Kidman in Bombshell, which could weigh in her favor. Both are actresses held in high regard in Hollywood, and there’s definitely a scenario where both could be recognized, especially since the category this year isn’t overcrowded.
And while Lithgow has been winning Emmys (he has six!) and other industry awards with fair regularity, he hasn’t been up for an Oscar in 35 years (he has two nominations, for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment, back-to-back in the early '80s). It’d be fun to see him back in play for the big award, although his category is frontloaded with an assortment of huge movie stars this year, some of them in leading roles.
I realize there are concerns about this movie due to the gross Fox News of it all, and people are split on Jay Roach (I’m in the pro camp and thought what he did with the treatment of Sarah Palin -- and Julianne Moore’s performance -- in Game Change was remarkable), but we needed some juice in the actress categories this year, and it looks like we've got it.
What are your thoughts?