1996's Best Actress Oscar Nominees

Swapping out KST for Heather Matarazzo or Courtney Love or Linda Henry or Debbie Reynolds would've made this a pretty untouchable lineup.

that blethyn-mcdormand-watson trifecta is pretty woah

Blethyn. Scott-Thomas was this year's Award Fraud winner in that she's really a supporting actress.

btw Blethyn and Watson, I'll favor the kitchen-sink harridan

I've only seen Fargo and Breaking the Waves, but c'mon, Frances McDormand! The Academy Awards are great at largely bypassing the Citizen Kanes and Pulp Fictions of the world for films and performances that are forgotten within a year, but it seems to me that this is one of the times where they actually awarded the performance that outlived its moment.

Frances McDormand is the best thing in Fargo, but she's on for about 20-25 mins

Watson's debt to Falconetti is no less powerful for being self-evident.

but she's on for about 20-25 mins

I'm not sure that I agree with you on your police work there, Lou...No, that sounds about right--so you're saying it's a supporting performance then, I guess. Hopkins won with much less screen time. Lead/supporting is more of an intuitive thing with me than strict screen time. It feels like McDormand's and Macy's film. I would have been more inclined to bump him up to the lead category.

what I remember about Fargo:

"you betcha"
wood chipper

My only response: total fuckin' silence.

I'd have thought "kinda funny lookin'" would have been above "you betcha" in Fargo's memorable quotes.

Not a popular opinion, especially around here, but The English Patient is much more entertaining to me than Fargo.

The Keaton nomination for MR always flummoxed me. Typical Oscar tropes though: her character has bad hair, dying of cancer, Meryl Streep's her sister, etc.

Keaton, Streep and Leo are all good in MR imho, tho all too pretty.

Fargo is great and all, but dropping it, Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction into the same sentence overcomes me with IMDB Top 250 malaise.

Keaton's nomination was kind of a shocker for me too at the time. I really did think either Madonna or Courtney was gonna slip in there.

I agree about the quality of Leo's work – not often cited, but it's still one of his best performance.s

IMDB Top 250 malaise

Don't worry, I'm not equating Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction in terms of quality (just something along the lines of, "what people still talk about long after the fact"). You'll be glad to know I haven't even seen The Shawshank Redemption.

I'd be even more glad if you had and recognized it as the shockingly overrated movie it is.

Four of the five nominees are from four of the five BP nominees, which is rare in recent Oscar history.

*whoops: I meant three of the five BA nominees.

mcdormand, it's a big entertaining performance. watson's good but she got on my nerves by the end of the movie (LVT's fault, not hers). blethyn's very good, probably the best acting-qua-acting. but i just have a lot of fondness for fargo. never seen marvin's room. i don't hate the english patient like yr supposed to, but i'd take binoche over kst in that.

I admit, I'm one of those people who thinks Emily Watson's performance is sort of among the top two or three dozen of all time in any movie ever.

Remember the "shock" when Binoche beat Lauren Bacall that year? Binoche actually won for a very good performance (not as good as Marianne-Jean Baptiste though). David Thomson acidly remarked at the time that one could see what a limited actress Bacall was when she couldn't even fake looking fake-relieved on hearing Binoche's name called.

Binoche actually won for a very good performance (not as good as Marianne-Jean Baptiste though).

To say nothing of Barbara Hershey or Joan Allen, for that matter.

Forgot about Hershey! Barbara Hershey was awesome.

I don't want to detour this into a Pulp Fiction thread (please, no...), but overrated, yes. Shockingly overrated, no. I think it's pretty great up to that awful Christopher Walken scene (now that's shockingly overrated), after which it never gets back on track. I much, much prefer Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown.

The one thing that knocked me out about Breaking the Waves was the bizarrely anomalous soundtrack.

I meant Shawshank, not Fiction.

(And also, Allen's Crucible perf was shockingly underrated imo.)

For the record:

Juliette Binoche – The English Patient as Hana
Joan Allen – The Crucible as Elizabeth Proctor
Lauren Bacall – The Mirror Has Two Faces as Hannah Morgan
Barbara Hershey – The Portrait of a Lady as Madame Serena Merle
Marianne Jean-Baptiste – Secrets & Lies as Hortense Cumberbatch

i was trying to remember what barbara hershey was in that year that got nominated. i can't remember her performance at all because that movie was so bad.

The movie's terrible, but I'm a Jamesian, so what do I know (I do prefer what Ian Softley did with The Wings of a Dove the following year)? Hershey is splendid though (so is Martin Donovan as Isabel's sardonic cousin dying of consumption).

i like that wings of the dove! i liked the washington square with jennifer jason leigh a lot. i don't know if movies of henry james novels are a good idea, though.

martin donovan is such a babe, i didn't know if he was the best casting for Ralph. i miss martin donovan where has he been?

Martin Donovan is so underrated.

oh yeah, this was the year Nicole Kidman should've won.

(and Portrait for Best Picture)

How can anyone sit through Wings of the Dove?

cuz Linus Roache is hot.

now i miss linus roache too

I think the knockabout sex scenes helped

xxp

I couldn't remember if you or Morbs loved TPOAL

The two best James adaptations: The Heiress and The Innocents.

I have an itch to make a home-vid softcore version of The Aspern Papers

haha would watch

how can you like portrait of a lady (the movie), though???

it's way better than if Campion had done it 'straight'

would love to watch a Berlin Alexanderplatz take on The Portrait of a Lady.

even Shelley Winters is good in it

xp

The two best James adaptations: The Heiress and The Innocents.

― Gucci Mane hermeneuticist (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, August 24, 2010 12:24 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

never seen the innocents, but it makes sense, turn of the screw is the only james that leaps to mind as potentially "cinematic"

even John Malkovich is an embarrassment in it.

also Truffaut's The Green Room

haha he's an especial embarrassment, iirc. that would have been excellent casting if the movie didn't suck so bad

xp

I really did think either Madonna or Courtney was gonna slip in there.

wait wait wait

you thought Madonna's acting in a movie was GOOD?!

I don't want to detour this into a Pulp Fiction thread (please, no...), but overrated, yes.

fwiw Pulp Fiction is easily Tarantino's worst movie

nonsense!!!!!!!

haha sorry i promise i won't say anything more about it

The Green Room is a worthwhile misfire. I couldn't get over how boring Truffaut himself was (maybe that's partly what attracted Spielberg).

no Shakey, Eric's talking abt Oscar attention, in which "good" is irrelevant

if ppl still made short films, "The Beast in the Jungle" wd be worth a stab.

no Shakey, Eric's talking abt Oscar attention, in which "good" is irrelevant

*whew* that's what I was hoping

Yeah, totally. (Though I admit I thought Courtney Love was better than good ... at the time.)

Didn't know you were a Jamesian, Morbs. Do you sport a Masonic ring?

(Mads, otoh, I just assumed the Globe win would translate to an Oscar nod.)

I read lots of James... long long ago

since interiority was his thing, the more the films play fast n loose, it's usually for the better.

i'm w/alfred on the english patient>>>fargo thing. i've seen fargo several times and i'm always a little bored, though it's well-directed and acted.

man there are always characters like macy and mcdormand in coen bros movies but those characters almost never come off as actual human beings but here they do and credit all to macy and mcdormand for that, probably why fargo seems such an anomoly among their films, the only one that feels like adults had something to do w/ its making, to me anyway.

english patient otoh had tuscany, the sahara, and juliette binoche and it still wasn't enough. enjoyed the book though!

A Serious Man had human beings.

but more jokes -- funnier ones

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