Readers of this column already know that Philip Seymour Hoffman
will win the Oscar for Best Actor on Sunday night. He’s in a
tight race with Heath Ledger, and though you can’t have too
much of a good thing when it comes to acting performances, you can
pick a winner.
The choice between Hoffman and Ledger is almost Orwellian in
nature: Both are fantastic, but one is more fantastic than the
other. I turn to “Animal Farm” for a reason, because it
also provides an apt description for the Oscar categories
themselves. All Oscars are equal, but some Oscars are more equal
than others.
I am of course referring to the relationship between the Best
Actor and Best Actress categories. Now, before all you
XX-chromosomed readers send me angry e-mails with a link to a
Wikipedia article about the suffragettes, hear me out. I’m
not knocking girls. I’m knocking the way Hollywood handles
them.
Looking at the nominees for Best Actress this year, I’m
fairly certain Reese Witherspoon will win the award for her
performance in “Walk the Line.” However, the method by
which I made my decision, and the method by which many such
decisions will be made in the next few days as gamblers fill out
their pool ballots, is strikingly different from the way I picked
Best Actor.
In the Best Actor category, Hoffman and Ledger immediately stand
out as the two frontrunners, with David Strathairn coming in a
solid third and Joaquin Phoenix and Terrence Howard just happy to
get free seats close to the Kodak Theatre stage.
Conversely, a quick glance at Best Actress does not offer the
same pop-out effect.
I first note that Keira Knightley and Judi Dench don’t
have a shot simply because their movies weren’t that good. I
next discount Felicity Huffman simply because I doubt enough voters
saw “Transamerica” to make her a legitimate threat,
even if she did give the best female performance of the year. That
leaves me with Witherspoon and Charlize Theron as frontrunners even
though I’m not particularly excited about either of them.
Backing into a pick is never as fun as actively choosing.
The problem with the Best Actress category is that it’s
always like this. Last year, you could immediately discount Annette
Bening (“Being Julia”) and Imelda Staunton (“Vera
Drake”) for the same reason I’m dumping Knightley and
Dench. Next goes Catalina Sandino Moreno because nobody saw
“Maria Full of Grace,” even though she was wonderful in
it. Suddenly you’re left with Hilary Swank (“Million
Dollar Baby”) and Kate Winslet (“Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind”) as frontrunners, even though neither is
an exciting pick.
Perhaps the notion of memory erasure in “Eternal
Sunshine” isn’t so farfetched as the academy seems to
pick the same thematic group of female nominees every single year,
and we never notice. But for once, I’m not going to blame the
academy.
It’s true, the academy seems to struggle every year coming
up with five female performances worthy of being nominated for Best
Actress. I still can’t believe Keisha Castle-Hughes was
nominated for “Whale Rider” in 2003, and the year
Dakota Fanning gets nominated may be the first year I boycott the
Oscars entirely.
However, I don’t think I could do any better with the
nominations, which leads me to think that the problem is more that
there just aren’t enough good, real roles for women in
Hollywood. It’s an overused and boring argument, to be sure,
but I’m more excited about the showdown between Michelle
Williams and Rachel Weisz for Best Supporting Actress than I am
about any of the nominees for Best Actress.
Such an Orwellian inversion of the Oscar hierarchy can’t
bode well either for the academy or for Hollywood as an industry.
Witherspoon and Swank were fine in “Walk the Line” and
“Million Dollar Baby,” respectively, but I find it
rather disheartening that they represent the two best leading
female performances in the last two years.
Where have all the Katharine Hepburns gone? Or, though it pains
me to ask, what happened to Julia Roberts? As much as I actively
enjoy disliking Roberts, at least Erin Brockovich was the kind of
role into which an actress could sink her teeth.
On second thought, maybe you should send me that suffragettes
link. It would probably make a good movie.
Tracer hopes Weisz beats out Williams for Best Supporting
Actress, but doubts she will. E-mail him at
jtracer@media.ucla.edu.