Best Actress Predix: Authors & Astronauts & Immigrants (oh my)

And princesses too! Actually I'm predicting neither Princess Grace (Nicole Kidman) nor Princess Diana (Naomi Watts) for the eventual shortlist though their names will undoubtedly continue to come up. Yes, the Best Actress Chart has arrived. 

Who wins ANOTHER Oscar this year? So many previous winners are back

My final shortlist is all Oscar winners -- which has only ever happened once (just last year in Supporting Actor ) but this is what my crystal ball is telling me so I obey. And anyway, it's a Previous-Actress-Winning Heavy year at least in terms of who got jobs headlining major motion pictures. Even lower in the charts there are a lot of Oscar winners, all told.  It's (maybe) that kind of year... though I could see a scenario where unOscared supporting chart players hop over to Lead Actress if they see a window and their roles are substantial enough (Adams? Harris? Winfrey?). And with 235 days left to go before Oscar nominations are announced, a lot could change: a quickly filmed or under-the-radar movie could hit it big on the fall festival circuit; holiday box office could shift focus around substantially at year's end; films could suddenly be moved to '2014 TBA' status.

Marion Cotillard will win Cannes Best Actress for... oh wait, people said this last year too and it didn't happenThe Wild Card
This time it's not a person but The Weinstein Co. themselves.  They've got more actress hopefuls than even they can handle since they're representing Grace of Monaco, The Immigrant, Philomena, August: Osage County and The Butler. (Does this clear the way for Sandra Bullock to win a second Oscar? I'm only mostly kidding) There is about a 1% chance that TWC will stay supportive of all of those films since they regular abandon their runts rather than nurturing them, to concentrate on the pick of the litter. Some of the ladies in question can generate some degree of media and internal industry interest even without puppet masters behind the scenes but not all of them. What do you think TWC will do when it's time to play favorites?  

Fun Trivia About The Top Ten on This Chart

• They have 47 acting nominations and 11 acting Oscars between them
• They range in age from 37 to 78 (will it really be a year skewing that mature?)
• 6 of them have competed directly with Meryl Streep for Oscar glory but only one, Sandra Bullock, has ever prevailed in head-to-head combat. (7 & 2 if you count Nicole winning the only Best Actress nomination from The Hours.)
• 3 Australians, 1 French, 3 Brits, 3 Americans

All First Wave Oscar Predictions
Index | Picture | Director | Actor | Actress | Supporting Actor | Supporting Actress |  Screenplays | Visuals | Sound | Animation 

Team Top Ten: Oscar's Greatest Losers (Actress Edition)

Hepburn won 4 Oscars. Every win leaves a trail of four lossesAmir here, to bring you our newest Team Top Ten. You may remember we tackled the best directors of the new century in our first episode and each first Tuesday of the month Nathaniel and all the contributors will vote on a new list. This time it’s all about two things I’m sure you all love as much as we do:

...Actresses & Oscar.

This is a list of the greatest performances that lost the Best Actress award. We’ve looked at the pool of 337 performances that were nominated for an Oscar in that category but failed to win and we ranked them in the order of our individual preference, irrespective of the actresses that won in any given year.

It was quite a heavy task, as you can imagine. How would you go about choosing only ten among so many stellar turns? 80 different performances managed to get at least one vote from our contributors. Actresses who have had multiple unsuccessful nominations were generally the victims of an internal spread of votes. Meryl Streep is the most glaring example, of course. Four of her performances garnered votes, but none was popular enough to make the cut. Katharine Hepburn’s performances were similarly divisive, though one of them stood head and shoulders above the rest as you will see below. There were surprising inclusions and even more surprising exclusions but the main takeaway was consensus over performances that have found their place in the critical canon. Only 6 ladies from this new century made the top 30, which is reason to rejoice, in my opinion -- old treasures aren’t forgotten just yet.

Swanson gave good face.

Nathaniel will share runners-up and some juicy trivia and stats because this experiment really deserves a lot more than a list of ten names. For now, however, here are the actresses Team Experience deems the greatest Oscar losers of all time:

THE 10 GREATEST BEST-ACTRESS-LOSING PERFORMANCES
are after the jump...

surprise! Holly Hunter made the list

10. Holly Hunter (Broadcast News, 1987)
Lost to Cher in Moonstruck

"The leads in so many romantic comedies blend together into a blandly likable blur. Not so with Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. She takes the trope of the hardworking professional woman who is great at her job but unlucky in love, and imbues her with a crackling specificity. Far from sanding down her rough edges, Hunter embraces them, from her crying jags, to her stubbornness, to her clumsy grabs at love, to that southern accent she makes no attempt to disguise. Hunter’s Jane Craig topped my ballot because she is the gold standard against which I measure all other romantic comedy performances."
- Michael C.

nine more iconic performances after the jump...

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Reader Spotlight: Patrick in Germany

We're getting to know the Film Experience community one-by-one. This is going to take us forever! (That's a good thing. Thank you so much for being part of such a big vibrant fanbase.) Today we're talking to Patrick who lives in Germany and writes for DieAcademy.de, a German site devoted to our favorite awards show.

Hi, Patrick. How long have you been reading The Film Experience?

Maybe 6 years? I like this site so much since it's always interesting topics and wonderful to read.

I know you're really into the Oscars but how about the Lolas, Germany's own movie awards. Which German stars do you recommend our international readers get to know?

The Lolas are not as big of a deal as they should be, but I love some German actors who are still too unknown abroad but doing great work all the time, like: Sibel Kikelli (two time Lola winner for Gegen die Wand & Die Fremde), Susanne Lothar (a three time Lola nominee who died last year) and maybe the best young German actor of our generation August Diehl (who you've seen in Inglourious Basterds and Salt but he's been nominated for the Lola three times and won for "23"). It would be a great pleasure to read a post about any of them.

Two current German greats: August Diehl & Sibel Kekilli

Hey, surely you've noticed my love for Sibel Kekilli. So great every time (though it was weird to see her do that romantic comedy What a Man)

Yes I noticed that. I think she was the best of the cast in What a Man, too but not a good movie. But Head-On. What a performance!

Agreed. Name your three favorite movies in the following genres. Horror, Comedy, Drama, Musical and SciFi. Go...

Horror: The Exorzist, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs (if I put it into this genre)
Comedy: Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Pillow Talk
Drama: The Godfather (1 & 2), American Beauty, All about Eve (if I could choose 5: Sunset Boulevard and The Hours)
Musical: West Side Story, Chicago, Moulin Rouge!
Sci-Fi: Alien & Aliens, Blade Runner, Terminator (1 & 2).

Do you care about a significant other's taste in movies?

The Answer ist YES! It sounds a bit overdone, but I have a problem with guys, who don't like Kate Winslet in general or have mainstream taste of movies and don't feel complex emotions. The movie that comes to mind is Brokeback Mountain. This movie is not about a gay couple, its about love and why two people can't be together because of external and internal circumstances. Heartbreaking! But I think some hearts are too cold to feel that and that is not what I am looking for. (I hope most readers will know what I mean?)

Patrick with his great love Kate Winslet

I understand you are kind of a lot obsessed with Kate Winslet. What other actors/actresses really grab you?

Julianne Moore. She's still so underappreciated it makes me burst me into tears. I also love Bette Davis, Thelma Ritter, Sean Penn, most of the work of Nicole Kidman and Michelle Williams, the 70s and 80s Work of Meryl Streep (but getting tired of her work after the brilliant Angels of America), Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling and many more.

Take an Oscar away. Regift it.

Only one? I love the Oscars, but wanna change so much, especially the Oscars for Kim Basinger & Catherine Zeta-Jones (both to Julianne Moore). The biggest fault from the last decade was the Oscar for Tom Hooper's Direction of The King´s Speech. TKS was good, but the direction was TV-Movie-Material I think and The Social Network is by miles superior! If Colin Firth had pick up Best Actor Oscar the Year before for his brilliant performance in A Single Man maybe he wouldn't have won Frontrunner Status and The Kings Speech wouldn't win Best Picture and Director??? When Kathryn Bigelow announced Hooper as the "winner" it was the only time I completely lost interest in the other awards for the evening; it STILL hurts!

Previous Reader Spotlights
And our imaginary Honorary Reader Oscars go to...
lovely ladies: Mysjkin, Lynn Lee, Ester, Leehee, Jamie and Dominique 
(and yes we need to hear from more of the girls) 
dashing gents: Christian, Lucio, Joey Moser, Zé Vozone, Tony T, Andy Hoglund, Ferdi, K.M. Soehnlein, Sergio, Borja, John, Chris, Peter, Ziyad, Andrew, Yonatan, Keir, Kyle, Vinci, Victor, Bill, Hayden, Murtada, Cory, Walter, Paolo, and BBats

With Six You Get Link Roll

Movies.com has all the distribution deals from TIFF so you can see which films are coming your way in 2013
Deadline Kate Winslet's Titanic screen test!
Culture Monster Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert to team for Jean Genet's The Maids. Alas, not for the screen.

Pajiba 20 Lessons Hollywood can learn from this summer
Flickr Truly amazing photoset of California billboards from 1974/1975 including billboards of Oscar interest

Today's Must Read
"Extraordinary Machines" by Steven Hyden which looks back at the celebrity coupledom of Paul Thomas Anderson and Fiona Apple, the way they were, and the way they are now divergent.

It had been his intention to write a conventional 90-minute comedy for Adam Sandler, whom he met while tagging along with Apple when she performed on Saturday Night Live in 2000. What he actually made was more like a Fiona Apple song — a disorienting mishmash of bright melody and percussive dissonance, with a main character who was odd and oddly compelling and prone to oddly explosive, out-of-nowhere outbursts. Unfortunately for Punch-Drunk Love, Fiona Apple songs were still a few years away from returning to fashion, and the film died at the box office.

It's a really insightful piece about two of showbusiness's most fascinating artists. So go read it.

A Modern Day Fleming?

Jose here. I am fully aware that Stephen Daldry isn't among the most beloved filmmakers in the world; however, I feel that he's earned a bad rep on some extremely unfair bases, given that he excels at a kind of filmmaking that was the norm during Hollywood's golden age. His entire career seems to have been made to piss off auteur theorists, and today on Mr. Daldry's 52nd birthday, I couldn't help but wonder: is he a modern day Victor Fleming?

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