Cate Blanchett: Oscar contender, yes, but don't bet on win for Blue Jasmine
|
Version 0 of 1. Before jumping to the tempting conclusion that Cate Blanchett’s Golden Globe win for Blue Jasmine automatically guarantees her the best female actor Oscar for the same role, perhaps we should pause and take a breath. Cautious behaviour? Agreed. But consider that we’ve seen a hyper-neurotic character played to virtuosic perfection by a much-admired Australian in a Woody Allen movie before. The actress was Judy Davis, the film 1992’s Husbands and Wives, and the performance was seemingly admired universally. Everyone assumed Davis had a lock on Hollywood’s top prize until the moment Jack Palance opened the envelope on stage on Oscars night and announced that year’s best supporting actress winner as … Marisa Tomei. This for My Cousin Vinny, a comedy that hadn’t exactly set the world aflame. Not to denigrate Tomei, a fine performer, but the choice appeared so bizarrely unjust that for years urban legend had it that Palance must have misread the winner on the card and in panic read the last mentioned-name from the nominees listed on the autocue. There’s never been a shred of evidence to bolster that story. Wiser, I think, to conclude that at the Oscars, despite their apparently reliable predictability, shit can happen. Just because Blanchett gives one of modern cinema’s most extraordinary performances as Allen’s Jasmine, alive right down to the finest flicker of emotion, the subtlest dart of the eyes, does not mean she will go on to win the award she deserves. The Academy Awards are as much about whose turn it is to win than who most deserves the honour, and Blanchett has won once before, for her turn as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator. That was in 2004, in Oscar terms not so long ago. This year she faces stiff competition from Amy Adams in American Hustle and Judi Dench in Philomena. Adams has been nominated four times in the space of only seven years without winning, so some may be thinking along the lines of Gough Whitlam’s slogan “it’s time”. Meryl Streep is up again, of course, this time for August: Osage County, and since the Globes divide acting prizes into drama and comedy-musical, and both Hustle and Orange were classified as the latter, Adams and Streep didn’t compete against Blanchett. In the Oscars, assuming they’re all nominated, all three will be in the same category. In the eyes of many Blanchett was robbed the year she failed to win the Oscar for 1999’s Elizabeth, her first nomination. Since then she’s been showered with acting prizes and nominations – including Academy nods for Notes on a Scandal and Dylan flick I’m Not There, both supporting roles. There’s also been eight Golden Globe nominations including three wins (the earlier two were for Elizabeth and I’m Not There), and five BAFTA nominations and two wins. For Blue Jasmine she’s been scooping up awards and shortlistings from various US critics bodies and predictably won the best female actor prize in Australia’s international AACTA awards at the weekend. Blue Jasmine was one of those occasions when the vast majority of those who appreciate great acting knew they were witnessing something special only minutes into the film. My hunch is that Blanchett will indeed go onto be named this year’s best female actor at the Academy Awards. It will be one of those occasions when the acting Oscar goes to the person most obviously deserving it. But you never know. The celebrity assigned to envelope-opening duties might have left their spectacles at home. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |