Posterized: Carey Mulligan

Carey Mulligan at the Women in Hollywood Awards earlier this weekTwo Oscar hopefuls will hopefully dominate the conversation. Steve Jobs went wide today and the scrappy fighting-for-our-rights British period piece Suffragette is finally starting its US release in select cities. The movie has whethered some controversy of late and unexpectedly muted reception critically... at least in its first round. But release is a different challenge than pre-release buzz. If audiences like it, expect the Oscar buzz to reheat. At least for its leading lady who, we should remind ourselves, already had a minor unexpected hit this year with Far From the Madding Crowd.

Which means it's time to think about Carey Mulligan again.  How many of Carey Mulligan's 14 films have you seen? The posters (and more commentary) after the jump...

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Ranking Kate Winslet's Oscar-Nominated Performances

Kieran, here. With this week's wide release of the already heralded Steve Jobs and yesterday's Elizabeth "Lee" Miller biopic casting announcement, it could well be a entering a second era of peak Kate Winslet. Winslet was on a career high with six Oscar nominations, four before her thirtieth birthday. Then things slowed down considerably. Yes, she had that awards run for Mildred Pierce and she was Globe nominated for her turns in Carnage and Labor Day. However, the consensus these past few years is that Winslet has been in a bit of a slump. If her Steve Jobs work does indeed land Winslet a seventh nomination, it'll be thrilling to see her return to the ceremony.

It's been seven years since Winslet last nomination for The Reader (which she won). In honor of one of our favorite actresses/shampoo-bottle-Oscar-speech-rehearsers let's look through her list of nominated performances, and rank them. Heavenly Creatures and Holy Smoke!, two of her best, are missing, but that's another story.

6. Little Children 
(Best Actress, 2006--Lost to Helen Mirren in The Queen)

Her turn in Little Children is an excellent example of how Winslet is rarely uninteresting to watch on-screen, even when she happens to be miscast. Todd Field makes good use of her highly-charged eroticism and her gift for conveying inner turmoil. Unfortunately, the screenplay forces her to tell more than show.

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Best Actor 2000: Who Gets Your Vote!

RETRO REMATCH FUN!  Apropos of nothing, let's time travel back to [spinning wheel of randomness] 2000. Who gets your vote in... [spinning wheel of randomness again]... Best Actor? Make your case in the comments.

• Javier Bardem, Before Night Falls
• Russell Crowe, Gladiator
• Tom Hanks, Cast Away
• Ed Harris, Pollock
• Geoffrey Rush, Quills

Bonus Q: If you could replace any of these men with these other key 2000 leads tell us who and why:

• Michael Douglas, Wonder Boys (GG Nom)
• Jamie Bell, Billy Elliott (SAG Nom)
• George Clooney - O Brother Where Art Thou? (GG Win)
• Christian Bale - American Psycho (zero nominations... except right here at The Film Experience where he medalled in our infant online year albeit at a different web address and a Boston non-profit indie film awards group called Chlotrudis then in their 6th year)

*Our actually serious Oscar competition investigation -- the "Smackdown" Series -- is not dead. There were just some speedbumps. News on the delayed 1963 Smackdown coming soon. 

On Kate Winslet's Oscar Win

As The Dressmaker makes its premiere at TIFF here's Murtada on its leading lady's controversial Oscar win.

Kate Winslet is back! That seems to be one of the many “comeback” stories this fall season. Reviews for her supporting part in Steve Jobs have been stellar. And The Dressmaker is playing TIFF tonight! Has she ever been away though? Since her much maligned Oscar win for 2008’s The Reader, she starred in a much admired mini series (Mildred Pierce) for which she received multiple awards, worked with Steven Soderbergh (Contagion), Roman Polanski (Carnage) Jason Reitman (Labor Day) and her old Sense & Sensibility friend Alan Rickman (A Little Chaos). Some of these have been better received than others but none, with the possible exception of Pierce, have ignited the passion of even her most ardent fans.

Winslet’s a great actress who deservedly won the highest acting accolade in her profession. Yet there is a cloud above that win amongst Oscar obsessives. It is a somewhat unpopular win that still inflames a lot of passionate discourse even years later. Let’s examine why after the jump.

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Tim's Toons: Corpse Bride, ten years later

Tim here. This past week marked the tenth anniversary of the festival premieres of two very different stop-motion animated features. We've recently chatted a bit about Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so other than reminding you that it exists, and it's still delightful a decade on, I will pass it by in silence. Instead, I want turn everybody's attention to Corpse Bride, or if you prefer - the boys in marketing clearly did - Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. The second movie's reputation has gone off in a very different direction over the last ten years: while Were-Rabbit remains a touchstone of sorts thanks to its iconic stars, I'll bet that a good number of you just thought, "Huh, Corpse Bride, I forgot all about that".

That’s not unfair. Revisiting it for the first time in most of that same decade, I found it to be visually inventive, and dangerously rushed as a narrative: based on a Russian folk tale of a young man who accidentally weds a beautiful dead woman, the films never quite shakes the sketchy structure of a fable.

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