THR Actress Roundtable Final Thoughts

But what she really wants to do is laughSee Part One for the full video and commentary on first half hour

The Hollywood Reporter's Actress Roundtable has become an event I impatiently await more than any other non-awards part of the season. It's how I used to feel about Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue before too many dud covers and too many other types of issues using that template. But I digress. Though I am deeply thankful for actresses on every day of the year it IS Thanksgiving so I'm eager to get to the festivities with my family of friends. So just a few quick final notes on each actress before turkey and pie!

Naomi Watts
Her palpable terror about auditions is fascinating when you pause to connect it with the exact moment that essentially made her a star: her persona-switching audition scene in Mulholland Dr. Unlike Anne Hathaway my tendency is not to go pollyanna and I completely don't believe that 'everything happens for a reason' as most people are so fond of saying in a soothing way when bad things happen but maybe those years of career trauma were worth it because Mulholland Dr just wouldn't have been so special without her absolute genius in that dual role. (I do not find her amnesia about I ♥ Huckabees amusing. That movie is so great and she is quite funny in it. "Fuckabeeeees!")

Helen Hunt
The Sessions star flips the questioning on to the reporters who completely lie through their teeth 'Yes, we'd ask the men the same questions'  LOL. (I've never heard that 'when were you last victimized?' school of questioning toward male actors that the "when did you feel forced into doing something you didn't want to do?" question belongs to.)

Helen Hunt is a smart one. "would you ask the same question of the men?"

Sally Field

It's cute the way she's so embarrassed about how much she hogs the conversation but if you're a good raconteur, as she is, hog away. I'm desperate to see this spy movie that Anne Hathaway wanted to write for her and how random is that?!

Anne Hathaway & Marion Cotillard
I will think of little else for the next hour than which movies they were talking about when they expressed that they were in over their head and can't even watch it (Anne) and so miserable and in hate with the director that they couldn't perform (Marion)... though I suppose Marion's will be easy enough to figure out given the clues.

Amy Adams
Still looking like she doesn't want to be there in this Part 2. What gives?

Rachel Weisz
The most surprising contender in the roundtable and, quite possibly, the most fun to have a drink with afterwards. I'm really pissed to hear that the studios responded with "no one makes movies like that" about her proposed very solitary Julia Butterfly-Hill movie. Um... Cast Away? 127 Hours?

Let's end with a poll.

Each actress was asked to share a role she really wanted to play or write or make happen somehow. Which of their imagined movies do you most want to see?

"I would like to play a monster. Like the Gollum."

poll by twiigs.com

THR Actress Roundtable - Part 1

Live Blogged via Tape Delay! Woot 

I've embedded the whole hour at the bottom of this post. Please to enjoy.

00:01 Photoshoots. We begin with a lot of hand to throat or chest or hair gesturing. And... pose! This year's models in order of first solo shot in the montage: Marion Cotillard, Sally Field, Naomi Watts, and Amy Adams, Anne Hathaway and Helen Hunt . Weirdly Rachel Weisz does not get a solo shot. Don't they negotiate every second of these things: "AGENT!!!"

00:38 One thing that's immediately clear about this latest edition of the Hollywood Reporter Actress Roundtable -- now one of the best Oscar traditions -- is that they're upping their game. The camera work is more expressive, and the spacious well designed interior with white couches is less corporate bland than I remember and more conducive to the group therapy session that follows. Psssh, it is so group therapy!. I mean they start with a question about fear and move straight into rock bottom trauma of careers the "should I give up?" moment before the big break. 

00:43 Helen Hunt's "I'm thinking about the question" face is hilarious. PONDERING in all caps. [Lots more after the jump.]

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Oscar Horrors: Margaret White Burns in Hell

Just one more day of Oscar Horrors! On this penultimate day of the series, JA has an incredible take on one of our shared favorites, "Carrie". -Nathaniel

HERE LIES... or rather, HERE BURNS IN HELL... Margaret White, Piper Laurie's Supporting Actress nominated performance in Brian DePalma's 1976 film Carrie.

JA from MNPP here - the only thing more shocking to me than the fact that Piper lost the Oscar for Margaret White is the fact that nobody's covered this performance for this here Oscar Horrors series yet. You could just sit back and quote her lines and be done with it - "I can see you dirty pillows." "Pimples are the Lord's way of chastising you." "I liked it. I liked it!" What a grand time it'd be! It would be like any given evening in my house, really. But give me an excuse to watch Carrie for the 50th time, and I will bite.

Piper lost the Oscar to Beatrice Straight's very brief role in Network; I won't diss Straight because I like her and I like that performance (and I like her a few years later in Poltergiest even more)... but come on. 

Rewatching the film today I was reminded what a note-perfect line Laurie walks. Dances, really. In sensible witch shoes. Her Margaret White should be what you see when you look up "Jesus Freak" in the dictionary.

But while she's often criticized for being over the top (and it's not as if director Brian DePalma backs off that angle -- when Carrie tells her mother she's going to the prom, Piper repeats the word aghast - "Prom?" - which DePalma then gooses with some ever-so-subtle lightning and thunder) what I noticed today is it's Margaret's smallness and fear that reveals themselves between the hysterics, and become disturbingly palpable. She is in a battle with herself, the beleaguered Christian, trying to be all the God Warrior she can be, but her beaten-down daughter, meekness personified (Sissy Spacek giving one of the finest performances ever put on screen, if you ask me), begins to beat her back at every turn and she's entirely befuddled by it. You can sense she's felt this before - when her husband, the one with the stinking roadhouse whiskey on his breath, also driven nuts by her zealousness, up and took off. It must be the Devil! You can see the parts clicking into place in Laurie's performance as her confusion turns into its own sense - this is what she is here for. Calmness washes over her; she has found her life's meaning. And it's a serenity that's terrifying.

And that's the thing with this performance and why it continually rings true to me - in the twenty minutes or so of screen-time that Laurie has, she simultaneously charts not just a broad portrait of religious fervor driven way off the deep end, but the pinpoint center wherein stands a very small very frightened woman, deranged by her own terror of abandonment. Once was enough, twice is too many, and she will drag her daughter straight to Hell before she ever lets go.

Feline Oscar Twins: Anne & Michelle?

In the hall of fame of superhero/villain catchphrases “oops” (Anne Hathaway, The Dark Knight Rises) never stood much of a prayer against “me-ow” (Michelle Pfeiffer, Batman Returns), nor could the dark side self importance of 2012’s “there’s a storm coming Mr Wayne” ever best the sexier playful 1992 ‘dark side?’ retort “no darker than yours Bruce”  But catch phrases aren’t everything...even when you've got zingy ones like "life's a bitch now so am I" In the great Catwoman wars of popular culture, it’s always in some ways a draw. Every generation and every aesthetic gets their own James Bond and so it goes with all enduring characters which win several iterations. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle may never claim the easy universally agreed upon “Best Catwoman Evah!” victory you’d expect given Pfeiffer’s mammoth performance (give or take Heath Ledger, the most psychologically precise, overachieving & seismically inspired in superhero cinema) but what can you do? Before The Dark Knight Rises premiered I braced myself for the onslaught of “best catwoman ever” pieces which I knew would proliferate. In truth they would have even for a  performer less dazzling than Anne Hathaway’s.  Out with the old and in with the new is, generally speaking, the law that governs pop culture. It’s just How Things Work.

Catwoman watching Catwoman. Feline staring contest in 1...2...

With the recent news that Anne Hathaway would be campaigned as Best (Leading) Actress for the role, a strategic move which has been taken more seriously than I was expecting given that she has no prayer in hell of a nomination for everyone’s favorite good/bad girl in spandex, this Hathaway/Pfeiffer story wouldn’t leave me.

Twenty years back when Michelle Pfeiffer lept into the feline role vacated by Annette Bening she nailed the role winning “best in show” reviews, winning a massive new army of fans, achieving her biggest box office hit, and sailing on to an Oscar nomination for the year (albeit not as Catwoman). Leap forward a couple of decades and history repeats itself four times over…. Well three times over for now but we all know Anne Hathaway will make it four-for-four once Les Miz hits.

It's worth thinking about Hathaway and Oscar through the prism of Pfeiffer. It's not a perfect identical twin situation but the similarities don't end with "what happened with Catwoman." At the time of Batman Returns/Love Field Michelle was a 34 year old previous Oscar nominee who had been famous for 10 years and had already co-starred in one very major also-ran Best Picture nominee (Dangerous Liaisons). At the time of The Dark Knight Rises/Les Miserables Anne is a 30 year old previous Oscar nominee who has been famous for 11 years and has already co-starred in one extremely major also-ran Best Picture nominee (Brokeback Mountain). Both actresses played Catwoman in the summer and followed it up at Christmas time by starring in something more typically Oscar-friendly, Pfeiffer in a civil rights drama and Hathaway in an epic musical. 

On top of all of Fantine's problems... she never return her DVDs to the video store

But here's where the similarities end and Hathaway's Oscar story may have a much happier ending. For one, Anne Hathaway's Catwoman arrived in a culture that has moved past viewing superhero films as "fluff" and is therefore less shy about recognizing acting achievements inside of them. For another, the eventually nominated performance by Hathaway is likely to be "the right one of the two" whereas Michelle was chosen for the wrong performance -- not that she isn't very good in Love Field, but it's not the inspired no one else could do this work that her Selina Kyle was. Finally and most obviously Les Miserables will be no Love Field, a film that was barely released and was largely only acknowledged -- if it was acknowledged as all -- as a vehicle for a Michelle Pfeiffer nomination. If you want to stick to the Pfeiffer narrative Les Miserables is far more likely to be Hathaway's own Fabulous Baker Boys... only this time there's no Jessica Tandy in sight to steal the statue away from a glorious actress in the full bloom of her star power.

Oscar Horrors: Hush Hush Campy Agnes

[Editors Note: For today's episode of Oscar Horrors, I invited award-winning writer Manuel Muñoz ("What You See in the Dark" "The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue") to join us. I've gave all the contributors a list of every Oscar nomination from the horror genre and they chose their own subjects. -Nathaniel R.]

Here Lies... Agnes Moorehead in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is either Grand Guignol catnip or the most ridiculous Scooby Doo plot ever, depending on your level of generosity.  The film lacks the sustained camp thrills of its kissing cousins What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Strait-Jacket.  But it remains obligatory viewing, whether to fulfill your quota of the era’s is-she-crazy suspense vehicles starring Hollywood’s aging belles, or to check out Oscar offerings with peculiarly high nomination counts.  Charlotte picked up seven (yes, seven) Oscar nods and while you might shrug off most of them as applause for technical show, a major Supporting Actress bid (and maybe an almost-win) came with the fourth and final invite to the big dance for Agnes Moorehead as 

But first, the tawdry beginnings.  Set on a once sunny Louisiana estate in 1927, the film introduces us to a young Charlotte, whose father doesn’t approve of the news he’s heard from her secret suitor.  At an elaborate party (and in one of the most nimbly arranged sequences of the film), things get downright bloody, and Charlotte emerges from the shadows with one of the most conspicuously stained dresses ever to stun a crowd.

Fast forward decades later, and our fun begins. 

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