The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has proclaimed this to be the “year of the woman,” though wishing may not make it so.
It is, in fact, hard to remember a year when the Academy had to scramble so undecorously to fill out its roster of five nominations in the Best Actress category.
Of the five actress nominees, not one belongs to a mass market hit. The casual filmgoer likely will recognize Susan Sarandon in “Lorenzo’s Oil,” but probably won’t have seen the movie; “Howards End” might ring a bell, if only because it has been playing downtown for so long, but Emma Thompson-by far the favorite in this category-is by no means a marquee name in the wider world.
“Love Field,” with nominee Michelle Pfeiffer, played a handful of clandestine engagements around the country; “Passion Fish” with Mary McDonnell is hanging on at the art houses. Of “Indochine,” with nominee Catherine Deneuve, it’s enough to say that it’s three hours long and in French.
The irrelevance of the Best Actress category is only a slightly exaggerated reflection of the increasing irrelevance of the Oscars as a whole. The criteria for winning an Oscar nomination haven’t changed in 60 years, while the movies themselves have changed almost beyond recognition.
Even by its own standards, Hollywood no longer produces the kind of films it considers worthy of honor, or at least not in sufficient number, or with sufficient conviction, to have much meaning for the mass audience.
The large number of independent and foreign films represented in every category this year demonstrates just how extreme the situation has become. The Hollywood establishment, in the august person of the Academy, now presides over a flashy annual event celebrating a segment of the industry that it barely has anything to do with.
If the disparity between the nature of the industry and the honors it has proposed seems more extreme in the Best Actress category, it’s because women’s roles have suffered most from the major shift in demographics that has occurred since the Academy was founded in 1927.
A medium that once enjoyed almost universal support, cutting across lines of gender, age and social class, has become, since at least the late ’70s, largely the property of young white males, whose interest in strong women’s roles can be presumed to be minimal (unless those strong women are Sharon Stone).
Most of the actress nominees for this year, in fact, reflect the slow emergence and growing importance of a minority audience-of slightly older women who are attending movies on their own or with female friends. This is the audience that is propping up “Howards End,” “Enchanted April,” “Passion Fish” and “Indochine”-too small to influence mainstream Hollywood production, but large enough to keep the independent distributors happily in business.
As indicated by the accompanying chart-a highly unscientific sample of the female performances that the Academy has considered Oscar-worthy, derived decade by decade from the list of the nominees-the qualifications for Academy consideration have remained remarkably constant over the years.
Dispensing for the moment with the convenient but insupportable fiction that acting talent has something to do with getting nominated for an Oscar, we can go down the list of this year’s nominees and identify the historical precedents-indeed, the eternal Oscar ideals-behind each selection.
Michelle Pfeiffer in “Love Field”: One of the most important Oscar principles is at work here. In order to be nominated for an acting Oscar, you must be seen to be acting-a standard that could, of course, serve as a textbook definition of a performance that has failed.
Historically, one of the most effective ways around this Catch-22 is to be cast against type-as here, where world-class beauty Pfeiffer plays a frumpy Dallas housewife. She has to be acting; how else could she wear those clothes? Precedents on the chart include brassy Bette Davis as the drab spinster of “Now, Voyager,” all-American girl Lee Remick as a broken-down alcoholic in “Days of Wine and Roses” and goody two-shoes Julie Andrews as a sexually ambiguous nightclub performer in “Victor/Victoria.”
Susan Sarandon in “Lorenzo’s Oil”: Oscar does like strong women, though preferably when their independence can be balanced by traditional roles as a wife and mother. As the suburban mom frantically committed to finding a cure for her son’s rare disease, Sarandon perfectly embodies the Stand by Your Man principle, in which heroic extremes of female behavior can be justified and even admired, as long as they come in the woman’s capacity as care-giver.
Precedents include Greer Garson’s “Mrs. Miniver,” seeing the British middle class through the first years of World War II; Teresa Wright in “Pride of the Yankees,” watching husband Lou Gehrig die; Shirley Booth coping with her alcoholic husband in “Come Back, Little Sheba”; Anne Bancroft in “The Miracle Worker,” teaching Helen Keller to speak; Cicely Tyson in “Sounder,” prompting son and husband to success in the racist South; Sissy Spacek in “Missing,” searching for her vanished husband in a Latin American police state.
Mary McDonnell in “Passion Fish”: A corollary of the “against type” rule-acting can also be noticed when the performer is playing a mentally or physically handicapped person. For McDonnell, her role as a soap opera star who turns to the bottle after losing the use of her legs is a perfect double dip; she’s both a heavy drinker (Bette Davis in “The Star,” Geraldine Page in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” Lee Remick in “Days of Wine and Roses”) and physically challenged (Susan Hayward in “With a Song in My Heart,” Anne Bancroft in “The Miracle Worker”).
A related syndrome, never quite as popular, is drug addiction (Katharine Hepburn in “A Long Day’s Journey,” Diana Ross in “Lady Sings the Blues”); Jessica Lange’s “Frances” got some similar mileage out of schizophrenia.
This is McDonnell’s second nomination (after a supporting actress nod for “Dances With Wolves”), and though she seems unlikely to win this year, she will certainly be back. McDonnell represents a physical type-flinty, angular and vaguely feminist, with little overt sex appeal-that Oscar has been in love with since Katharine Hepburn in “Morning Glory.”
Her cousins include Greer Garson, Rosalind Russell (“My Sister Eileen”), Anne Bancroft and Meryl Streep (“Sophie’s Choice”).
Hepburn’s true heir, however, will probably prove to be Jodie Foster, whose two Best Actress Oscars to date seem only a beginning. Like Hepburn, she confers a sense of importance and commitment on anything she appears in; she is a lady, lending her presence to a lowly medium that doesn’t quite feel deserving of it.
Emma Thompson in “Howards End”: This year’s front runner, Thompson embodies one of the simplest and most sure of Oscar principles: Be British. From Diana Wynyard in “Cavalcade,” though Greer Garson, Maggie Smith (“Travels With My Aunt”), Julie Andrews and honorary Brit Meryl Streep, the simple possession of a cultivated accent has been enough to impress and intimidate culturally insecure Academy voters (though Thompson’s performance goes far beyond that).
The British syndrome is even more pronounced on the male side of competition, which has certified U.K. actors for the last three years (Anthony Hopkins in “Silence of the Lambs,” Jeremy Irons in “Reversal of Fortune,” Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot”) and may do so again (Stephen Rea for “The Crying Game”).
Catherine Deneuve in “Indochine”: Though Deneuve’s nomination for a foreign language performance seems purely pro forma (as was Liv Ullmann’s for “The Emigrants,” or more recently, Isabelle Adjani’s for “Camille Claudel”), there’s a touching note of nostalgia behind it, a yearning for a kind of outmoded movie glamor that cuts closer to the essence of the medium than any amount of British stagecraft.
Artificially enhanced, larger than life, emotionally extravagant and constantly flirting with camp, Deneuve is a perfect example of the grande dame, a type that has fascinated the cinema since its beginnings-and which has persisted through Davis (transformed at the climax of “Now, Voyager”), Susan Hayward, Joan Crawford (“Sudden Fear”), Liza Minnelli (“Cabaret”) and Diana Ross, surviving even Davis’ enthusiastic self-parody in “The Star” and “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”
One defining feature of these roles is that they all could be, and probably all have been, recreated in drag routines. However preposterous, these are figures that haunt dreams and invest imaginations; they have a life in American culture that the more dignified beneficiaries of the Oscar will never know. But dignity is Oscar’s curse, the goal the Academy will always pursue but is doomed never to attain.
