Prediction Updates: Lead and Supporting Actress

Oscar obsessives around the web, including myself, have been hung up on the Glenn Close vs. Meryl Streep Best Actress '80s Rematch! narrative for quite awhile now with Albert Nobbs and The Iron Lady still without real movie trailers to give the already popular media angle extra flavor. Less often discussed, and it's been nagging me for awhile now, is which young actress the Oscars will glom onto this year. Best Actress is often, statistically speaking, a beauty pageant who's who of hot 20 and 30something stars. This is not to say that the main race can't be between two 60-something ladies (it can if their names are Close & Streep) but we already know that that won't be the whole story even if it does turn out to be The Story.

There are three more slots to consider and more than that if you include the possibility that Close or Streep might not happen, if you include the precursor awards (which have room for more players) and the Supporting Actress category which has slightly more diverse preferences but which is still a sucker for a new "it" girl.

Which young beauties will be competing for gold? There isn't room for all of them.

Fresh Faces.
Which will Oscar get a Mulligan / Lawrence style insta-crush on?
ROONEY MARA, 26, with sociopathic edge and punk styling in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
FELICITY JONES, 27, doing young romance drama in Sundance hit Like Crazy.
ELIZABETH OLSEN, 22, winning acclaim as cult member in Martha Marcy May Marlene and probably winning credit for being talented younger sibling of the gajillionaire Olsen twin sisters.
MIA WASIKOWSKA, 21, proving she can carry a film and also be excellent while doing so in Jane Eyre.
ANDREA RISEBOROUGH, 29, soon to be winning "best in show" attention for W.E. 
JESSICA CHASTAIN, 30, seemingly in every other movie released in 2011 and hardly recognizable from one to the next.  

Already Stars.
Oscar's sweet spot for Best Actress wins is late 20s to early 30s. 
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, 26, serving mental patient realness in A Dangerous Method.
KIRSTEN DUNST, 29, undoubtedly memorably victimized in Von Trier's Melancholia.
MICHELLE WILLIAMS, 30, doing biopic iconography for My Week With Marilyn and romance for Take This Waltz 
EMMA STONE, 22, who won't get nominated for The Help but the enthusiasm about her career this year is totally hogging some of the spotlight that the other hopefuls are going to need. 

Who do you think will be showered with love and media attention 'round the holidays this year? Who will come up wanting? Which of the newbies will ever have careers as big as the "already stars"? Share your projections / wild prophesies in the comments.

Best Actress chart | Best Supporting Actress chart

Best of 2010: Cameos, Breakthroughs, Ensembles

The Film Bitch Awards Continue
Movie obsessives who get lost in star faces on the screen, would do well to keep their eyes peeled to the bit players or the actors toiling away in thankless roles. Sometimes, they're adding great textures or reinforcing the structural girding of their movie in the way they absorb or reflect or counteract what the name players are doing. Other times they're nailing one specific mood in such an amusing or ably defined way that you figure they might be be able to at least earn a living off commercials while they wait for someone to give them a shot at playing several moods. For instance, though I don't know her name I love the way the woman playing the real estate agent in Rabbit Hole is so silently 'this won't go well' nervous than 'this is worse than I expected' mortified by Aaron Eckhart's inappropriate intrusions into the home selling process.

 
My point is simply this: year after year ACTING remains a fascinating art form or craft or independently sentient color on a director's palette or whatever the hell you want to call it. Actors are magic. They have super powers.

I chose a scene from Never Let Me Go to illustrate this post because I think it's frankly a marvel. It's my favorite in the movie for the way it uses two tiny characters to make larger points about the whole film and to open up emotional pathways in the leads. When I went to write up Andrea Riseborough's caption, I found myself wishing for space for 250 words at least. In the middle of the scene, when all she and her boyfriend (Domnhall Gleeson) are pleading for information from their new companions there's this terrific beat.

I suppose you lot would know about that sort of thing. Being from Hailsham you'd know how that sort of thing works.

Greeted by the blank stares of our leads, and noticeably losing hope that her fantasy is a reality, those two sentences have this wonderful spike of condescencion and judgement, though she's pleasant and almost maternal in the rest of her scant few minutes onscreen. It sucks to have your dreams crushed by people greener than you.

Awards are also posted in Body of Work , Ensembles and Breakthrough categories. So read on for notes on Macy Gray, Mia Wasikowska, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis, Brandon Routh, and actors you may be less familiar with like Robin Bartlett, Anthony Deptula, Slamin Dazi and more.

all the writeups and nominations here.

Strike a Pose, on the Croisette.

Jose here. If The King's Speech hasn't given you enough of socialite Wallis Simpson to last you for a while -- I personally thought Eve Best's performance was the best thing in the movie and she should be getting the praise HBC is getting. But that's a whole other matter. Back to our post -- all you have to do is remember that our beloved Madonna is making an entire movie about her.

The shooting has remained pretty secretive and other than a few pictures the paparazzi have snagged (like rising star Andre Riseborough as Simpson to your left), we don't really know what the thing's looking like.

Maybe we won't have to wait much longer. Madonna has decided she wants her film to be part of the Cannes Film Festival just a few months away. French newspaper Le Parisien is reporting that the pop icon plans to have her film included in the festival's official selection.
This won't be official until festival artistic director Thierry Fremaux announces the official selection in April, so will the Queen of Pop be able to have her way this time?

The first official screening will take place next month when Madonna presents her second feature film to private distributors in Berlin. 

Madge is no newbie to the Cannes Film Festival, just a few years back she presented her documentary I Am Because We Are, which didn't seem to make a huge impression but wasn't trashed either. She had more luck with the smash documentary Truth or Dare which made a huge international ruckus at Cannes in 1991.

Madonna at Cannes in 1991 and 2008

So we'll just have to wait and see how W.E. fares with the picky Cannes audience. Will New York icon and Jury President Robert de Niro feel swept away by this very American tale? Or will W.E. be too much Wallis, too soon?