By Lesley Goldberg
Get your Oscar ballots out, because March 7 is just around the corner and you’re going to want to have the inside track in order to win your Academy Awards pool. While we here at Female FYI may not be experts, we fashion ourselves very much as the film snobs when it comes to Hollywood’s lovely leading ladies.
When nominations were announced bright and early Feb. 2, the biggest smile in Tinseltown was on Kathryn Bigelow’s face. The helmer of “The Hurt Locker” — which tied ex-husband James Cameron’s “Avatar” for the most nominations overall with nine— stands clear to make history as the first female director to take home the Oscar for her Iraq War drama.
Bigelow’s directing competition, meanwhile, includes Cameron; the openly gay Lee Daniels for “Precious”; Quentin Tarantino for “Inglourious Basterds”; and Jason Reitman for “Up in the Air.” It’s a challenging category for sure when “Avatar’s” massive technical achievement in motion capture performances from Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver are factored into the equation.
Meanwhile, in the race for best actress, Sandra Bullock continued her unlikely march to Oscar glory when she picked up a nomination for her role as a Texas mother who goes above and beyond for a troubled teenager in “The Blind Side.” Bullock, who picked up the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award for the part, faces stiff competition in what’s being considered a two-woman race in Oscar heavyweight Meryl Streep, who was nominated for playing kitchen diva Julia Child in “Julie & Julia.” “The Last Station’s” Helen Mirren, “An Education’s” Carey Mulligan and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe in “Precious” round out the category.
In another surprise nomination, “Crazy Heart’s” Maggie Gyllenhaal picked up her first career Oscar nom in the supporting actress category, nudging out “A Single Man’s” Julianne Moore in what was considered a lock for the venerable actress. The category “Nine’s” Penelope Cruz as well as “Up in the Air’s” tag team of Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga. But this category is the closest thing to a lock this year as Mo’Nique’s turn as an abusive mother in “Precious” has garnered the former stand-up comic nearly all the hardware in Hollywood this season.
In the meantime, the best picture race leaves much to be debated as the category was expanded from five films to 10 for the first time since 1946. While some in the industry expected the boys-behaving-badly comedy “The Hangover” to sneak in, Bullock’s Southern charm snuck the unlikely “Blind Side” into the best picture race, where it will square off against a pair of sci-fi films in “District 9” and the worldwide blockbuster “Avatar”; Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker”; Tarantino’s revisionist World War II take “Inglourious Basterds”; Daniels’ “Precious”; Reitman’s “Up in the Air”; Pixar’s animated crowd-pleaser “Up”; the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man”; and the Carey Mulligan starrer “An Education.”
So who will you be pulling for come March 7? Streep or Bullock? Bigelow to make history or Cameron to continue his rein as king of the world?
