Best Actress Finale: Dresses, Reactions, Questions

Like we did with supporting actress, I've displayed the most lauded ladies of 2010 in the order of your preference: Natalie Portman stabbed all competition with a nail file "IT'S MY TURN" to the tune of 47% of your votes; Annette Bening (19%) just barely edged out Nicole Kidman (18%) in the last day of voting for second place and second place is always where Bening seems to end up (more on that tomorrow); Michelle Williams (11%) and Jennifer Lawrence (2%) followed. But look at Lawrence. She doesn't care. She had a grand time at the Oscars apparently, turning heads in the red tank dress and relaxed enough to quip to the press about bringing her brother as her date.

I'm from Kentucky, so that's normal.

It's interesting that her distinction  "Second Youngest Best Actress Nominee Ever" has been so ignored by the media; She's only 20. We might be seeing a lot more of her on Oscar's red carpet. She's already too old to nab the "fastest to two nominations in any acting category" since Angela Lansbury was 20 when she accomplished that. But theoretically Lawrence could still beat Joan Fontaine's record of fastest to two Best Actress nominations (Fontaine did the double by 24 and won) if good lead roles come soon. Up next are three supporting roles: The Beaver, Like Crazy and X-Men First Class.

Reaction shots, questions for readers and Portman's speech after the jump.

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Podcast: Sexy Interlopers. Oscar Role Play

New Podcast!
The gangs all here. Nathaniel, Nick, Katey and Joe were too full of the Awards Season spirit to squeeze into the alloted time so this one comes to you in two parts (part two tomorrow). We're bursting with chatter about the nominated actors in particular and the post BAFTAs King's Speech climate. So we decided to play The Film Experience's favorite hypothetical award season game: Which nominated roles do you think would have been interesting or totally different with the another nominated actors playing them? But that's not all...

Topics covered include

• Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell in The Eagle
• Queens of (Reaction Shot) Shade: Miranda Richardson and Anjelica Huston
• Nicole Kidman at the Grammys
• David Fincher "behind enemy lines"
• Aronofsky's homage to Natalie Portman
• Supporting Actress free for all. Who to predict?
• Role Play Switcheroos. Which actors would be most interesting in each other's roles? Helena Bonham Carter gets quite a vocal/psychological workout and Mark Ruffalo's Sexy Interloper in The Kids Are All Right finds plentiful sperm-donor competition.

Recent articles briefly cited: Nick's Annette Bening piece, Nathaniel's review of The Eagle, Joe's 1990 Oscar retrospective.

 LISTEN IN. We'd love to hear your comments. Especially about the annual Film Experience Oscar game. Switch the roles around. What'cha got?

Podcast: Post Bafta Climate and Sexy Interlopers

Best Actress. Final Notes

My favorite category didn't disappoint this year, offering up the strongest overall lineup in quite some time. In fact, though these 2010 Best Actress roles won't prove as iconic in the long run as 2006's primo batch, I actually think as an entire range of performances, it might be that year's equal. Would you agree?

Should Natalie Portman be nervous about her chief rival? Or is it all in her head?

The question in terms of who will win is whether Natalie Portman's long lead is going to pay off or if a recent arguable passion / mood to finally crown The Bening has grown enough in the industry to yank that shiny gold man away. If that happens, Natalie, not Annette, will be the one yelling "Interloper!"

But I don't think it's going to happen. The Bening can console herself with the knowledge that she is one of my 33 all time favorite actresses. ;)

THE UPDATED BEST ACTRESS PAGE
includesPOLL "Who Should Win?" and the reader requested "how they got nominated? silliness. Which is actually not ever entirely silly even though it's meant for fun. We all know Oscar is not only about the performances. And if you don't know that, you must have slept through Sandra Bullock's win last year.

16 BAFTA Moments. Helena Was Queen.

Since we all saw the BAFTAs on tape-delay, live-blogging seemed pointless. So SAG will have to stand as the last live-blog of the season. But here are my ___ favorite moments from BAFTA in chronological order. What were yours?

01.  Helena Bonham Carter on the red carpet, when the red carpet reporter describes her as Brit Movie Royalty (which she is).

In fact, this is the year of queens for me. I do big headed queen, then medium sized, maybe next year I'll do pinheaded queen. It's always fun to play queens because people do start treating you like royalty, it's a bit hilarious.

Helena is the only person alive that doesn't make me cringe when they're referencing Alice in Wonderland. She uses this joke again in her acceptance speech but it works both times.

02. Emma Stone on the red carpet joking that Andrew Garfield has been trying to kill her on the set of Spider-Man (2012). I still think it's pointless to reboot that movie but at least the principle cast is heaven.

03. Yay for Useless Trivia: Hailee Steinfeld reveals that the BAFTAs are one year to the day of her True Grit audition. And Darren Aronofsky reveals that Black Swan wrapped one year and one day before the BAFTAS.

04. Paul McCartney saying "I get to the pictures quite often". I love calling movies "the pictures."  It feels so Old Hollywood Magical. The Social Network is McCartney's favorite.

05. Amy Adams LOLing heartily at a joke about Sex & the City 2. The joke went like so:

Two of my favorite movies of the year aren't even nominated. Sex and the City 2 and The Expendables. What's not to love there. A band of old mercenaries get back together taking no prisoners -- you know where I'm going with this don't you? --  laying waste to everyone standing in their way. And The Expendables was great, too.

06. Discovering that Alexandre Desplat is a winker. He winked at no less than three people on his way up to the stage to accept Best Score.

07. The hokey joke of playing Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" instead of The Inception score when it won Best Visual Effects.

08. Helena's acceptance speech. Pretty great. I'd quote it but they let her talk for five minutes.

09. Jessica Alba's intro to Best Supporting Actor just because it's so illustrative of the "supporting" problem.

Robert DeNiro in the Godfather Part 2. Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspect. Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Time and again history remembers the supporting actor as much as the lead. Sometimes more so.

And then she goes on to list 5 nominees only one of whom, Pete Postlethwaite (The Town), is in a purely supporting role. The rest you can argue till the end of the day about whether they're leads in their films or not. OF COURSE THEY'RE REMEMBERED AS MUCH AS "LEADS" heh.

An Education reunion: Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike flubbing their lines.

10. Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper having MULTIPLE problems delivering the Original Screenplay. It just keeps getting worse. Pike almost reads the winners before the nominees .  As it cuts to clips, Dominic mumbles  "It's gone well"

11 Stephen Fry, a national treasure in Britain but basically an international treasure to those paying attention, introduces the Harry Potter tribute. He does a stunning job of balancing effusive praise with cutting wit so as not to make the tribute a total "HarryPotter!ZOMG!!!" gag-fest. And the plug for his audio readings of the same was pretty funny.

12 The intro to Aaron Sorkin's Adapted Screenplay acceptance speech.

Under more normal circumstances I would be very excited about this but sitting in the seat in front of me is one of the Beatles. Sitting in the seat in front of him is Julianne Moore and in the seat in front of her was Annette Bening so I'm maxed out.

Awwwww. Don't you love it when celebrities get all thunderstruck by otehr celebrities? I know I do. 'Stars! They're just like us!!!'

13 TILDA SWINTON.

...wait, you didn't need anything more specific than that did you? She's always a favorite moment.

14. The cognitive disconnect I felt when Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg accepted for David Fincher "He's busy making his next gift for all of us in another country." I experienced it as "He's busy making his next gift for all of us, Another Country" which would be quite quite something else entirely. Could you imagine a David Fincher remake of that homo-laced British Boarding School drama? But Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg... who gets to play Colin Firth and who would gets to play Rupert Everett? The other option would be an adaptation of James Baldwin's novel which would be something else, too! Especially since Jesse and Andrew would be all wrong for that one.

15 Gerard Butler introing Best Actress without commas

a lesbian couple with a dragon tattoo take up ballet to avenge their father's death.

Speaking of movies one could have fun inventing in one's head!

poll by twiigs.com

16. It was wonderful to see 88 year old Christopher Lee getting a tribute, and from one of his own directors too (Tim Burton, who he has worked with four times). He seemed genuinely touched and even moreso than many honorary winners of such things. Plus he was amusing: "I'm grateful that I don't follow in the steps of the great Stanley Kubrick whose award was posthumous."

That's it!

P.S. By the way Darren Aronofsky calling Natalie Portman the most focused committed actor he'd ever worked with kind of weirded me out. Not that I don't think it could be true but EVER? His films aren't exactly lacking for great performances or great actors.

P.P.S. How are YOU doing out there, quiet people in the dark? Speak. And by speak I mean type.

P.P.P.S. all the BAFTA posts in case you missed the nominees, fashions or winners.

Distant Relatives: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and The Kids Are All Right

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema.

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

The relationship between art and social change is one open to debate, with some people believing that art is essential to such change and others believing that its influence is non-existant or minimal at best. Still, as society continues its constant march forward, we can disagree about whether great art can effect it, while perhaps agreeing that the best art often reflects it, becoming a statement of what it meant to be in a certain time and place while touching upon deeper human truths that elevate it to the realm of timeless. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and The Kids Are All Right are two films from two different times in American history that deal with the changing definition of marriage. Both are domestic dramas. Both find their conflict by indroducing an unfamiliar outsider into a comfortable family atmosphere. But each handles the social issue at their center differently, the prior attempting to effect it, the latter to reflect it.
 
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is the tale of a stalwart, liberal, San Francisco couple (Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn) whose stalwart liberalism is challanged when their daughter brings home her new fiance, a brilliant, black man (perfect in that he is Sidney Poitier, imperfect for that same reason). Director Stanley Kramer, a great craftsman who never met a social issue he couldn't direct the hell out of, fills the next two hours with a series of soul searching debates, safe revelations, long speeches, and a delightful scene where Tracy gets into a fender bender with a black driver while trying to procure himeself some comfort ice cream. "Thirty or forty bucks, that's how much" says the other driver when asked the approximate cost of fixing his car. And so it is, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a film of its time.
 
The Kids Are All Right tells of a long standing lesbian couple, Nic (Annette Benign) and Jules (Julianne Moore) whose family is thrown into chaos when their kids bring their own guest to dinner. In this case, it's the man whose sperm is responsible for both youngsters. Played by Mark Ruffalo as a free spirited man of the earth, Paul's intrusion is dangerous as a disruption of a family unit already fragile from nothing more than the emotional comings and goings of every day life. In a series of events that involve less pontificating than the older film, Paul comes to represent an individual escape for each family member, something new, exciting, refreshing, as they come to mean the same for him.

Tell me who are you?

While both films purport to begin from a place of viewer sympathy, traditional (whatever that means) married couples will find more in common with Nic and Jules than Dinner's Matt and Christina Dreyton. Matt is a newspaper publisher. Christina runs an art gallery. Their daughter Joey is studying in Hawaii when she meets Poitier's John Prentice. They are clearly the creme de la creme of society. Their lives, until the introduction of John are pretty perfect. Contrastly Nic and Jules are at a point in their marriage where their love for each other, while clearly evident, is starting to be overshadowed by the little annoyances, work stresses, and two teenage kids who are, as teenagers tend to do, struggling to find their places in the world. The fact that Nic and Jules are lesbians, while essential to the story, is also almost beside the point. Their family is your family.  

Guess who's Coming to Dinner casts the viewer in the role of the All-American white family who must deal with change when it shows up at their doorstep. The Kids Are All Right casts the viewer as the unconventional family with two matriarchs who must deal when the All-American man (what is Paul but a modern cowboy with a motorcycle instead of a horse?) shows up at their door. According to both films, if you’re of the family’s young generation, you’re likely to embrace or even introduce the change. If you’re parental but romantic, you’ll come around quickly, but if you’re stoic and cynical, you’ll take far more convincing.

We got this solid love

This casting speaks loudly to each films’ motives. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a persuasive piece. It wants to change your mind and suffers from it. The film creates a number of devices to funnel every conflict into the interracial message issue. Included in this are the aformentioned beatification of Poitier’s character, his refusal to marry without the Dreytons’ consent, the short amount of time he and Joey have known each other (1 week -- drama!), Joey’s willingness to define herself only in terms of his wife (“and when we’re married, I’m going to be important too,” she says), and their impending departure to marry (that evening). Now, over forty years later when the interracial marriage element is a non issue, all of these, combined with the fact that Poitier is closer in age to his fiancee’s parents than hers, linger as genuine issues that you wish the characters would be reasonable to address. The film still stands as a slice of time and place but has cornered itself out of any larger universal context.
 
The Kids Are All Right is different. There’s no attempt here to manufacture drama. If the film does anything to make a persuasive argument for gay marriage it's by presenting Nic and Jules and their family as likable, flawed, realistic, capable of surviving great challanges but not without great effort. But generally the film seems disinterested in dignifying the debate by becoming piece of propaganda. The final statement seems to be one in favor of the strong bond of family. Only those who put in the hard work can be a part. So there is another common theme between the films, they are both strongly and progressively pro-family.

The final similarity between these two films (and by means of feeling I've been a little too hard on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) is a great cast, a collection of fantastic performances, filmmakers who, whatever their motives, have a clear and great empathy and understanding of their characters, and a general sense that life is measured in dinnertimes, when everyone gathers around in anticipation of joy, drama, food and family.