Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actress

Brie Larson is far and away the frontrunner this year for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Room.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Actress

The nominees are:

Cate Blanchett for Carol

Brie Larson for Room

Jennifer Lawrence for Joy

Charlotte Rampling for 45 Years

Saoirse Ronan for Brooklyn

I have not seen a more competitive year at the Oscars than this in my time following them. It seems like every category has two or three legitimate contenders that could come away victorious. Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant are battling it out through the crafts categories, while The Big Short and Spotlight wait in the wings, ready to pounce on the top awards. Nothing seems particularly settled, and that has made this season exciting.

Nothing is settled, that is, except the top two acting categories. It took longer than it usually does, but one actor and one actress have risen to the top, and each now seems assured of an Academy Award win. We will talk about Best Actor tomorrow, but today, we are focused on Best Actress in an incredibly strong year for women.

You can always determine the quality of the year by the strength of the performances not nominated, and this year, we have Yana Novikova in The Tribe, Marion Cotillard in Macbeth, and Sarit Larry in The Kindergarten Teacher all on the sidelines, along with many other wonderful performances. The five actresses below have all turned in tremendous work, but only one has run away with every award under the sun, including the Screen Actors Guild Award, the BAFTA, and the Golden Globe.

Brie Larson for Room – Larson has been appearing onscreen since she was 9 years old and is now in line to become the 11th-youngest Best Actress winner in the 88-year history of the Academy Awards. She has dominated the awards circuit thus far this season, and barring a major scandal in the very near future, she will roll to that richly deserved Oscar win in a little more than a week’s time.

One of the best things about Larson’s awards success is that it has driven more people to discover the film and her work in it. Room is a harrowing experience but one which rewards viewers willing to endure it. As Joy, the kidnapping and sexual abuse survivor at the heart of the story, Larson is among the film’s chief draws. She is battered but not broken, terrorized but not terrified. She is a survivor whose pain we could never imagine, but through Larson’s performance, we come that much closer to understanding the character’s personal hell.

Some have said viewers will find the film too painful to sit through, too difficult to watch. To a degree, that is the point. To sexual slavery and abuse, which goes on in every part of this world, we too often turn a blind eye. Those unwilling to see this film are the very people who need to see it most. Abrahamson has done a commendable job portraying the suffering and horror that exist in this world, but it all starts with a tremendous, committed performance by Larson.

Saoirse Ronan for Brooklyn – At the beginning of this Oscar season, most pundits figured the Best Actress race would be a fight to the finish between Larson and Ronan, thinking Brooklyn would be more popular than it ultimately proved to be. It was not an unreasonable position to take. Brooklyn is a delicately moving romance about a shy, brave girl who makes her own way thousands of miles from home. If Room is an endurance test, then Brooklyn is its opposite, a feel-good story about perseverance.

Ronan is absolutely luminous as Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey. Though the plot may have all the trappings of a fairly drippy romance, Ronan’s performance makes us care about Eilis as a person. Ronan gives Eilis steadfastness and charisma that are not always present on the page, lending weight to the struggles of this lonely immigrant girl. Like Larson, Ronan made her first onscreen appearance at the age of 9, earning her first Oscar nomination at 13 for her supporting role in Atonement. She is a longshot to win the Oscar this year – as is everyone not starring in Room – but if she keeps choosing smart, interesting projects such as this and this year’s Lost River, she will be back.

Cate Blanchett for Carol – When Carol Aird enters a room, all eyes are on her. She is beautiful, yes, but she is alluring and mysterious in a dangerous way. You know you should not follow her, but the fear of what you could be missing out on is too much to bear. She is classy and confident, the kind of woman who knows what she wants and has little trouble getting it. Luckily for her, she is played by Blanchett, an actress about whom all the same things could be said.

Blanchett was nominated just two years ago and won Best Actress for her role in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. A seven-time nominee, she also won Best Supporting Actress in 2004 for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. She is indisputably among the best actresses of her generation because she is unafraid of disappearing into her characters. She has been Bob Dylan and Katherine Hepburn, a Soviet commander and Queen Elizabeth I, and she is fiercely committed to creating the reality of each and every role. As Carol, Blanchett crafts an enigma, a human puzzle box at the center of the story that both the characters and the audience must solve.

Jennifer Lawrence for Joy – Lawrence is a hard actress to pin down. Just 25 years old, she is the youngest person ever with four acting nominations from the Academy, and she is also the second-youngest Best Actress winner in Academy history. She always delivers great performances, but sometimes, she seems at the mercy of the characters she is given to play. All of this is to say, she really needs to get back to doing work outside franchises or for David O. Russell. If she can get back to the kind of gritty, intense performance she gave in Winter’s Bone at 19, it seems she would be taking steps in a better artistic direction.

She is not bad in any of these films, but now, with The Hunger Games series at an end, she has an opportunity to break out and try something different. As a fictional version of Miracle Mop creator Joy Mangano, Lawrence is playing a strong-willed, intelligent woman of the sort Russell usually writes for her. This time out, though, the overall script is so shoddy that Lawrence can only do so much. She carries off the part with poise and professionalism, but she will have better roles and better chances to show off her talents in the future.

Charlotte Rampling for 45 Years – Putting aside her recent unfortunate comments regarding diversity at the Oscars this year, Rampling is well respected within the industry, and that veneration is most likely why she finds herself nominated here. I named this the best performance of the year, and I would say the contest is not close, but the Academy does not seem to have warmed to 45 Years the way it otherwise might have. It is an unfortunate oversight, and I hope more people discover this movie in the years to come. It is a treasure.

At the core of that treasure is Rampling and her emotionally raw, wounded performance as Kate Mercer. As a woman whose husband has been lying to her for nearly five decades, Rampling shows all the pain, betrayal, and hurt Kate experiences with little more than a furtive glance or a shift in posture. Due respect to her excellent scene partner, Tom Courtenay, but I would argue the entire film could be played in a tight close-up on Rampling’s face, and the emotional impact would still register. She has been in this game a long time and turned in some of the most iconic performances of European art-house cinema, but this may be her crowning achievement.

The final analysis

Larson will win her first Oscar. The honor is well earned, and one hopes she continues to make savvy decisions with her career, unlike so many other Oscar winners who cash in their prestige for a payday or two. She deserves her choice of roles right now – not just because she is young and people will pay to see her but because she is a gifted performer who will only get better as she gains experience.

Will win: Brie Larson for Room

Should win: Charlotte Rampling for 45 Years

Should have been here: Yana Novikova for The Tribe

Tomorrow: Best Actor

New movie review: Brooklyn

Saoirse Ronan stars as Irish immigrant Eilis in director John Crowley's romantic drama Brooklyn.

It sometimes seems we lack appreciation for simplicity, particularly in our entertainment. Call it the Lost effect or whatever you want, but audiences and critics especially now demand immense complexity from television shows and films. This has led showrunners and filmmakers to mistake illogical mythologies and labyrinthine plotting for depth of character and richness of storytelling. As it is, entertainment that engages the mind but not the heart is doing only half its job.

Director John Crowley’s Brooklyn does not make this mistake. Crowley, working from a script by Nick Hornby based on the novel by Colm Tóibín, takes a simple story and tells it well. Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is a young woman living in a stiflingly small Irish town in the 1950s who embarks on a journey to America, leaving behind her mother and older sister. In the U.S., she gets a job, makes friends, and falls in love with an Italian-American boy, Tony (Emory Cohen). Tragedy brings her back to Ireland, where she is forced to choose between her old life and the new one she has made for herself overseas.

Simple enough, but Crowley and Hornby infuse the characters and situations with humor, heart, and emotional honesty. There is never a false moment, and while the plot may be relatively small shakes in the grand scheme of things, Eilis’ conflict seems great because we care deeply about what happens to the character and want what is best for her.

Emory Cohen and Ronan in Brooklyn.

Ronan, who is still all of 21 years old, has not had a lengthy film career, but it sure has been an interesting one. Oscar nominated for just her third feature, Atonement, she has consistently chosen compelling parts in daring films by talented directors, including Joe Wright’s Hanna, Peter Weir’s The Way Back, and Ryan Gosling’s Lost River, not to mention her turn in last year’s Best Picture-nominated The Grand Budapest Hotel.

In Brooklyn, Ronan takes another left turn to explore the life of a girl who lived not so long ago – an age at a time that could make the character many of our mothers or grandmothers now. It is her most sensitive, subtle performance yet as she inhabits the sweet, soulful psyche of an immigrant who feels displaced both at home and abroad. Ronan easily taps into Eilis’ gentle naïveté but adds an undercurrent of strength and resiliency that is less on the page than in the performance.

Credit is due to the filmmakers, however, for bringing to the screen a movie filled with strong, well developed female characters when a lot of movies in theaters these days struggle to come up with just one. The boarding house Eilis lives in is populated by a witty, funny group of women who joke and snipe but ultimately support each other, and Eilis’ mother and sister are an intriguing study in people burdened by old-world values as the new world springs up around them.

The male characters are somewhat less developed but no less interesting. Cohen, playing the American love interest, and Domhnall Gleeson, Eilis’ suitor back in Ireland, deliver grounded, sympathetic performances as two men in love with the same woman. There are shades of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront in Cohen’s tremendous portrayal of a lunk-headed guy who falls in love with a shy girl from the neighborhood – there are also shades of Eva Marie Saint in Ronan’s performance. 

Domhnall Gleeson and Ronan in Brooklyn.

As for Gleeson, here are his credits for the last two years: Frank; Calvary; Unbroken; Ex Machina; Brooklyn; The Revenant; and a little movie called Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It is a hot streak few other actors can lay claim to, and he has earned every one of those roles with consistently brilliant performances in wildly different parts. He has little screen time in Brooklyn, but the character is crucial to the film’s arc, and Gleeson leaves enough of an impression that we understand fully Eilis’ dilemma.

The key to the story is that neither man is a villain. They are well meaning people who see in Eilis the same things the audience sees. One simply represents her old life and the other her new one. In choosing between these two men, Eilis is really choosing between the past and the future. The culture she was raised with values the past deeply, and she values her culture, so it becomes a question of how willing she is to leave behind the life and people that made her who she is.

Apart from a few gorgeous shot set-ups, particularly when Eilis is checking in at Ellis Island, Crowley’s direction is unfussy and effective. He matches Hornby and Tóibín’s simple but sophisticated story with a straightforward style that leaves the plot room to breathe and gives the actors space to shine. Brooklyn is not the fanciest or flashiest movie you will see this year, but it is something better: admirable.

See it? Yes.