Written by Rachel Redfern.
This year’s nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role has the most diverse age of any Best Actress nomination field. Ever. With Emmanuelle Riva leading at the graceful age of eighty-five and Quvenzhané Wallis blooming at the energetic age of nine, can we just say, ‘Yes!’
I enjoy the Academy Awards for what it is: big dresses, nice tuxedos, and a (slightly) staged attempt to decide the best films of the year; however, I often do feel like the films, directors, actors and actresses that are nominated, are not surprising choices. There’s a sense sometimes, that it’s the same five directors, actors and actresses that are nominated every year; Steven Spielberg for instance has been nominated for a Best Director award EIGHT TIMES and has won twice. Not that Spielberg isn’t a great director, but I feel like we’ve been here before.
Let’s be honest, the academy could use with a bit of shaking up and while an old and young actress being nominated at the same time is hardly going to cause a riot, it’s a step in the right direction.
So here it goes, a run down of this year’s Oscar nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
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| Emmanuelle Riva nominated for Amour |
Emmanuelle Riva
It’s a well-known fact that the percentage of women over the age of forty in movies, is pretty low compared to the substantial portion of the population that they should actually represent. To whit, google ‘Women over forty in Hollywood’ and the majority of the articles that will pop up look something like this, “40 Foxiest Women Over 40,” or “Sexiest Women Over 40” and so on and so on. So basically, if you’re over forty in Hollywood and you can’t pass for thirty-two, then we just don’t want to hear about you.
That’s not to say, that there aren’t older actresses playing roles in movies, because there are, but just not important roles. The point in their lives that this age group has reached, is no longer interesting, despite the fact that Liam Neeson keeps running around beating up wolves and being mighty kick-ass for a man well past his fortieth year.
But, not this year. Emmanuelle Riva is the oldest Academy Awards nominee for Best Actress in the event’s 84-year history and she’s being nominated for Best Actress, meaning, one of the (if not the) main character in a film. Riva has been making movies for over fifty years, even starring next to Juliette Binoche in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s critically acclaimed film Three Colors: Blue. After having been such a stalwart actress and prolific artist, it’s wonderful that she’s finally been recognized for her contribution and skill.
Riva is being nominated for her role as Anne in the French film Amour, a beautiful film about love and aging and hope and even the scary thought of love in the face of death.
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| Naomi Watts nominated for The Impossible |
Naomi Watts
Let’s continue on with our theme of age. (I mean, why not? Chronology is as good a method as any to organize this post). Coming in at bright young age of forty-four, Watts has been producing movies for over twenty-five years and has starred in a fairly eclectic mess of films. She’s most famous for her role as Betty Elms in David Lynch’s thriller, Mulholland Drive, a film that garnered Watts a few awards back in 2001. However, this is Watt’s second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the first being for her work in 21 Grams; She’s also starred in big blockbusters such as, The Ring and King Kong.
Watt’s latest nomination for Best Actress is for playing Maria Bennet in The Impossible, a controversial film based on the true story of a family touring in Thailand when a tsunami hits and they’re separated. Go here to read Lady T’s take on the film.
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| Jessica Chastain nominated for Zero Dark Thirty |
Jessica Chastian
Jessica Chastian is a fast-moving young actress who has exploded into the top tiers of Hollywood, probably most noticeably for her part in The Help and Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Two years ago I’d never even heard of her; today, Chastain has been nominated for one of the highest awards in film and is at the center of a divisive controversy involving her role in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Zero Dark Thirty’s portrayal of torture, and Chastain’s involvement in those scenes has a few people boycotting the actress and encouraging others to do the same.
However, Chastain’s experience of filming Zero Dark Thirty in Jordan speaks well about her commitment to her art since, as she says of her situation during that time, “with regard to the way women are treated,” she says, recalling a particular incident when soldiers insisted that she walk to the prison instead of being driven. “They don’t see women that often. I was like, ‘I’m not getting out of this car, how dare these guys’, but then you think: this woman had to live in Islamabad and all these places when she was doing this job – and had to experience the same treatment of women where she had no control.”
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| Jennifer Lawrence nominated for Silver Linings Playbook |
Jennifer Lawrence
The twenty-two year old queen of this year’s unbelievably popular, Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence is next on our list of Oscar nominees for Best Actress and startlingly, this is already her second nomination for the award. She was first up for the award in 2010 for her role in the amazing, Winter’s Bone, (Seriously, read about it, watch it, love it) and at the time was the second-youngest actress to ever be nominated.
After a ridiculously short non-award-winning break of one year, Lawrence has been nominated this year for starring alongside Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook, another film about age and love and death and mental illness, though at the other end of the chronological spectrum from Amour. Lawrence has only been acting for six years and has managed to achieve some hefty success and play a wide-variety of roles: a poverty-stricken young girl from the Ozarks in Winter’s Bone, Mystique in X-Men First Class, Katniss in the Hunger Games and now, widow and sometimes sex addict, Tiffany Maxwell in Silver Linings Playbook. Whether she wins the Academy Award or not, I’m pretty sure that this will not be Lawrence’s last nomination.
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| Quvezhane Wallis nominated for Beasts of the Southern Wild |
Quvenzhané Wallis
Quvenzhané Wallis. I wish I knew how to pronounce that name correctly because it just looks absolutely lovely. This pint-sized powder keg of delightful talent was a mere six years-old when she started shooting Beasts of the Southern Wild, and at the age of nine, she’s the youngest nominee for Best Actress that the competition has ever seen. Tatum O’Neal however, was a pretty close second since she was only ten when she won the award for Paper Moon in 1973 (an amazing movie starring Tatum’s father Ryan O’Neal and one of my favorite actresses ever, Madeleine Kahn). Interestingly enough, Wallis isn’t even the youngest nominee in academy history; Justin Henry was only eight when he was nominated for Best Actor in 1979 and Jackie Cooper was nine for his role in Skippy.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is Wallis first film, though the actress is already slated to appear in Steve McQueen’s new film Twelve Years A Slave later this year. Here’s hoping that she continues to act and thrive in Hollywood and that hopefully, she’ll be able to rush us into a new age of films filled with women of character and distinction.
Who do you think deserves win? Who do you think will win? (Two very different questions to my mind). Do you think that the oldest and youngest nominations for Best Actress falling in the same year is revolutionary? Or just a usual kind of year for the academy?
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Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.
I’d be happy with any except Watts winning. She’s a good actress, but her character is a perfect example of the White Woman Suffering Beautifully trope that we see far too often in film. Her character is basically a saintly mother who suffers a lot, and she does it very well, but the other four actresses play actual human beings with flaws. (Also the extreme whiteness of The Impossible is even worse than I anticipated.)
Officially, Wallis was my favorite, but I don’t like kids winning Oscars because I’m always afraid their lives will be ruined if they get too famous too early, so I’m hoping for Riva, who was a close second fave.
According to the actress, her name is pronounced Kwa-ven-za-Nay (the za similar to how you would pronounce Zsa Zsa Gabor’s name)