Best Actress 2007

1998 through 2007

Best Actress 2007

Cate Blanchett - Elizabeth: The Golden Age
2
3%
Julie Christie - Away From Her
25
34%
Marion Cotillard - La Vie en Rose
32
44%
Laura Linney - The Savages
9
12%
Ellen Page - Juno
5
7%
 
Total votes: 73

Cinephile12
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Re: Best Actress 2007

Post by Cinephile12 »

Weak lineup.

First to go is Cate Blanchett. She's a talented actress (although she relies way too much on theatricality and mannerisms and her performances usually end up skin deep), but she's atrocious in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. She's either horribly over-the-top or smugly self-conscious. She provides paper-thin character development, and her film is an absolutely ridiculous mess. With a better screenplay and a better director, the result might have been interesting, but this was disastrous.

Next to go is Marion Cotillard. She's wonderful in the prime days and the old age scenes, but that's mostly because of the wonderful makeup, hairstyling and costume design, and her technical perfection and accurate mimicry. And that's all.The rest (and majority) of her performance is inconsistent, immature acting. Her film is also a mess.

Ellen Page was rather one-note (not necessarily her fault), but she handled this quirky role with maturity and energy. It was a fun little performance, and I found her consistent, despite the limited layers of the character.

The only performances that stand out here are Linney and Christie's.

Laura Linney is in the better film. The Savages is a darkly comedic and rather sarcastic film, and Linney's approach to her character is marvelous. She's very good. Unpredictably funny, yet painfully sad. She creates a real character, flaws and all. I despised some of her actions, but also felt sorry for her. The intriguing aspect of her performance is that she accurately underplays it, without becoming uninteresting. It's a rich portrayal of a rather fascinating character. She's my runner-up.

But the winner is Julie Christie. I thought her film was below average (the entire subplot with Dukakis was eye-rolling), but she's absolutely commanding. It's all in her eyes. The pain, the regret, the inevitability of her disease, the unquestionable and passionate love for her husband and life in general. It's all there. And Christie never uses the clichés that another less reliable actress could use (see: Judi Dench in "Iris"). It's extraordinary understated work. She's my pick.
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Re: Best Actress 2007

Post by nightwingnova »

Christie was luminous, beautiful and persuasive. But she was background as the film is about her husband's attempt to deal with the illness, not the other way around.

Page was very good in the role she played - but the role was pretty standard.

Linney was very good in a somewhat distinctive role.

I like Cotillard even if her illness scenes were ludicrous.
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Re: Best Actress 2007

Post by bizarre »

I've seen three of these - Cotillard, Linney and Page.

I'd have to give the edge to Page. Juno is probably single-handedly responsible for the most obnoxious wave of youth culture since the days of Wham! and mullets but looking past Cody's intertextual nervous twitch and its shudder inducing soundtrack Page really gives it an emotional clarity that would seem impossible to pull off were one to read the script in a vacuum. For one it must be incredibly difficult to make that dialogue sound at all natural - most of the cast (apart from Michael Cera, I'd say) never manage to get away from "homily | laugh line | homily | laugh line" patterns - but she does, and she also telegraphs the disjunctions between Juno's diagrammed view of her own situation and how she is actually psychologically able to handle it quite subtly early on in the film, long before the script blasts "Juno is not as mature as she thinks she is!" like a foghorn. I think Cody is a funny writer and judging from her other works she is beginning to be a good one, but it is still a miracle that any of Juno's actors survived that script - Page's achievement, however, is far greater than an against-the-script triumph.

I remember liking Laura Linney quite a bit in The Savages where she did something similar to what Ellen Page did - creating a witty character whose insecurities and cynicism are funny until, on a phrase, they aren't. However I saw it long ago and after seeing Linney in a lot of other films - her other Oscar-nominated works included - I've had to conclude that I do not like her. I'd have to give this a rewatch to doublecheck whether she falls into the same repertory theatre acting traps that mar her other performances.

Marion Cotillard is an actress with a unique grasp of technique but who also has presence to spare. I'm glad she has an Oscar, and I'm glad this performance got it - but I didn't like it much. The film is terrible, its non-linear structure completely pointless and unilluminating, like one of the editors let their toddler play around on ProTools for an hour and then was too lazy to fix the resultant damage. Cotillard is definitely hurt by it but I have a feeling she's too bombastic to have been effective in the way she needed to be were the film more straightforwardly told. Her quieter moments are all nice and well-observed, and some of her loud moments have real power, but it is a bit of a stunt. However bravo to the Academy for rewarding a foreign-language performance in this day and age.

I will probably see Julie Christie's film, I will probably never see Cate Blanchett's.
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Re: Best Actress 2007

Post by bizarre »

My personal choices:

1. Tang Wei, in "Lust, Caution"
2. Molly Shannon, in "Year of the Dog"
3. Jeon Do-yeon, in "Secret Sunshine"
4. Brenda Blethyn, in "Clubland"
5. Anamaria Marinca, in "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
ALT: Ellen Page, in "Juno"
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Post by Hustler »

Voted for Christie
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Post by Eric »

Italiano is right. These recent races don't really have much to offer in discussion that isn't already apparent in the archives.



Edited By Eric on 1270004546
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Post by flipp525 »

back-and-forths.



Edited By flipp525 on 1270009031
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Post by Snick's Guy »

OscarGuy wrote:First of all, Flipp, I think your comment is in extremely poor taste. We should not be so flippantly dismissive of anyone's age, especially when condescendingly suggesting that Peter might drop dead at any minute, thus his rushing these threads.

Is anyone truly inconvenienced by a brisk revelation of polls? Are we not mature enough, present-minded enough or intelligent enough as to be able to separate, collate and participate in multiple discussions at once? I see no dearth of contribution or a decrease in the quality of such contributions simply because the polls come out so quickly.

So, I hope that we can stop complaining about the speed of the release of these polls and just enjoy the chance to discuss and share fellowship with fellow film enthusiasts.
Here! Here!
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Post by dws1982 »

The Original BJ wrote:
Big Magilla wrote:With the last few years fairly fresh in our minds these last few Best Actress should be a no-brainer
True. No brains were involved in the selection of Best Actress '09.
Dead horse alert!
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Post by The Original BJ »

Big Magilla wrote:With the last few years fairly fresh in our minds these last few Best Actress should be a no-brainer
True. No brains were involved in the selection of Best Actress '09.
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Post by Big Magilla »

I took over these polls only because Jowy Jillia seems to have diasppaeared, and no one else seemed willing to do anything but complain. Jowy was probably irriated by the contsnt harping about the polls coming too fast. He had wanted to finish with Best Actress by the end of 2009.

I had planned to finish the Best Actress polls two months later, prior to this year's Oscar but gave in to the nagging. My current plan is to finish with them this week so we can start on the more interesting Best Supporting Actress polls where I suspect there will be a lot more disagreements.

With the last few years fairly fresh in our minds these last few Best Actress should be a no-brainer, in most cases a reiteration of things we've already posted here.

If someone else wants to volunteer to step up to the plate and take these over they are welcome to do so.
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Post by ITALIANO »

Also, honestly, these recent years have been discussed to death often, so I don't think we need to stay here too long. It's the past that we can go into with more depth and a fresher approach, so I hope we will get quickly to a new category and the 30s again.
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Post by OscarGuy »

First of all, Flipp, I think your comment is in extremely poor taste. We should not be so flippantly dismissive of anyone's age, especially when condescendingly suggesting that Peter might drop dead at any minute, thus his rushing these threads.

Is anyone truly inconvenienced by a brisk revelation of polls? Are we not mature enough, present-minded enough or intelligent enough as to be able to separate, collate and participate in multiple discussions at once? I see no dearth of contribution or a decrease in the quality of such contributions simply because the polls come out so quickly.

So, I hope that we can stop complaining about the speed of the release of these polls and just enjoy the chance to discuss and share fellowship with fellow film enthusiasts.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
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Post by flipp525 »

Mister Tee wrote:Okay, it's like shouting into the wind at this point, but...did we really need a new year's thread barely 48 hours after the '06 race was posted? Is someone rushing to catch a flight?

Big Magilla has this notion that he might pass away before we manage to get through discussions of all the races. Hence, the unnecessary speed-up and his co-opting of the entire thing. It's hard to let go of being "the manager", I suppose.

Personally, I liked how the discussions for previous years were allowed to steep a bit, leading to some, oftentimes, fascinating tangents.




Edited By flipp525 on 1269976225
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Post by ITALIANO »

In the end, I picked Laura Linney - a talented, unshowy actress in a movie which I found surprisingly good. She and Philip Seymour Hoffman play people who are in their late 30s or early 40s, so more or less my age, and I think The Savages is very perceptive about the doubts of what once was known as "middle age". (When is "middle age" today? It seems to go directly from young to old).

I was, of course, tempted to vote for Julie Christie (who wouldn't be?). And then Mister Tee's post convinced me not to do it - the performance is certainly great, and I'm glad to see her winning here, but she's maybe too radiant, too beautiful, too much a movie star (even by the end of her movie, when she's supposed to be very sick) to be totally realistic. But it's the only possible flaw in an otherwise excellent turn.

And yes, I'm one of those who weren't so shocked by Marion Cotillard's Oscar. First of all, it was, by today's standards, something close to a surprise - very rare nowadays. And Cotillard has proved elsewhere that she's a generally good actress (maybe not in her American movies, though even in the bad Nine she was still the best of the cast members), with a very expressive, very French face. Plus, her movie was far from a masterpiece, and frustratingly episodic, true, yet her performance hold it together. Very "grand", in the best French tradition, but for once not superficial.
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