To celebrate Oscar week, we’ll be bringing you essays all week arguing for the movies or performers we think deserve success this weekend. To kick off the series, here is why Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years should win the award for Best Actress.
The Case for Charlotte Rampling as Best Actress
I remember talking about the film 45 Years at a Christmas party this holiday season. My conversation partner was around my age, but he had yet to see the movie. I was trying to describe just how good it was to him when I heard myself say the sentence “Charlotte Rampling is exquisite.”
Now, I like to think I have a passable vocabulary, but “exquisite?” What the fuck is that? Even at the time, I think I followed it up with a quick “sorry.”
But that embarrassing adjective is perfectly indicative of just how strong Rampling’s subtle, overwhelming performance in that movie truly is. It’s the kind of turn that makes you struggle for the right word to describe it, that sends your mind riffling through positive adjectives until it lands on something silly like “exquisite.”
Unlike some of the favorites in this category (Brie Larson, in particular), Rampling is not handed much to work with. There is no high drama in director Andrew Haigh’s script and no scene of distinguishable intensity that must be manifested. Rampling simply plays one-half of a married couple approaching their 45th wedding anniversary. In the weeks before the party, the marriage is tainted by one small part of the past, a memory, that resurfaces.
From there, Rampling is nothing but brilliant. Each of her scenes requires the right balance of restraint and emotion to show both what is on the surface and what is bubbling beneath. Tom Courtenay is wonderful as well, but this isn’t so much a movie about the two of them. Often the camera rests squarely on Rampling in an exchange and it’s clear her wavering strength, her quivering commitment, is the focus of the film. Such focus means Rampling is the one that carries 45 Years to the heights that it reaches. And for that gargantuan accomplishment, to carry an entire movie with simple glances and empty stares, she deserves to win Best Actress.
–Michael Errigo
The Case for Michael Fassbender as Best Actor
Steve Jobs wants the computer to say “hello.” But with the launch minutes away, one of his underlings, Andy Hertzfeld, finds the face of Apple and tells him that probably won’t happen. Hertzfeld, played by the actor Michael Stuhlbarg, tells Jobs, Michael Fassbender, that the “hello” bit has a 1 in 6 chance of working.
“Five in 6 is your chance of surviving the first round of Russian roulette, and you’ve reversed those odds,” Jobs growls. “So unless you want to be disgraced in front of your friends, family, colleagues, stockholders and the press, I wouldn’t stand here arguing; I’d go try and get some more bullets out of the gun. … Do it, Andy.”
Hertzfeld scurries off and joins a group getting on the elevator. As the doors close and Jobs starts to walk away, he turns around and decides he’s not done.
“Andy?” he asks with subtle menace.
The poor tech junkie looks up. As the doors begin to close, Jobs holds a finger pistol to his head and raises his eyebrows ever so slightly. There are no other words exchanged, and the elevator doors meet.
It’s one of the best moments in the film, which is a funny statement when you consider how much of Steve Jobs‘ strength is predicated on the actors speaking its masterful script. But Fassbender does more than deliver Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay with pride. Whether it is an accurate portrayal or not, Fassbender creates a Jobs of extreme complexity in completely public situations. There are not many moments in the movie where we see the tech innovator alone, contemplative or even with his guard down. But somehow, in little details like the finger pistol or a pause or a look, a complete character is created.
I should mention that Leonardo DiCaprio, the heavy favorite in this category, is certainly deserving of the award. His performance in The Revenant is nothing short of herculean, and everyone knows he is due. But, if the academy decides to take things in another direction, Fassbender has to be the guy. For reasons unknown, Steve Jobs did not make much noise when it was released in October despite receiving stellar reviews. Rewarding Fassbender for this performance of not only power but also impressive endurance (he’s in every scene and kills it in just about all of them), would be a worthy recognition for one of the year’s best movies. The Revenant will be rewarded enough.
-Michael Errigo
The Case for Eddie Redmayne as Best Actor
This year’s Oscars celebrate nuance.
The actor and actress nominees, from top to bottom, are craftsmen and craftswomen who can break hearts, incite fear and elicit longing with subtle movements, quick words or expressive faces.
None, however, can do this with more devastating accuracy than Eddie Redmayne, whose performance in The Danish Girl nabbed him a Best Actor nomination.
Redmayne plays — a better word would be becomes — two people, or rather, one person whose physical profile does not match their mental identity. Though the transgender woman Lili Elbe is soft, demure, vibrant and excited, her former identity, painter Einar Wegener, is self-conscious, guarded, weary and even afraid. Redmayne had to be all of that and more.
And he did it, in the most spectacular fashion.
Almost as though he internalized both personas, Redmayne portrays both Einar and Lili with guarded eyes, a quick, blooming smile and a delicately placed hand. He allows both to be present at every moment, fighting each other for realization in a world completely ignorant to their struggle. Redmayne’s performance is seldom vocal (he conveys more with movement than dialogue), but it pays beautiful homage to the woman who risked everything to give transgender people a physical presence and predecessor. Against Alicia Vikander’s valiant supporting role (which might get a shoutout later this week, so stay tuned), he is able to honor a story both painful and inspiring with equal measures of each.
No other has done that. No other should win.
-Danielle Ohl
The Case for ‘Amy’ as Best Documentary Feature
Every generation has a tragic hero, a celebrity whose public life isn’t a roller coaster but a constant downward drop. Amy Winehouse’s struggle with her own demons and the effects of fame remains one of the most public, well-documented of these downfalls, one that unfolded in real time on the TV sets of the millions of fans who would mourn her death sooner than they imagined.
One might assume that what Amy sets out to do has already been done. After all, a quick search of her name finds any number of posthumous records, books and documentaries. And at what point do the details of her misery lose their morbid allure and become simply upsetting?
But somehow, Amy finds the balance between the dark and delightful, searching through the disturbing tales of drugs and depression to find the smile of a the young girl who wrote songs for herself and her friends. It’s a masterfully created documentary, sewing together 128 minutes of behind-the-scenes video, intimate interviews and, of course, Winehouse’s music to paint a portrait of the woman behind the winged eyeliner.
There’s no denying that the portrait is a sad one, but Amy doesn’t milk the story just for tears. Make no mistake — it likely will make you cry, if not during the movie, then hours later when you’re rediscovering the magic of her soul-tinged balladry. The documentary, if anything, proves how remarkably honest Winehouse was as a songwriter. “Rehab” will never seem even deceptively cheery again when you realize the rehab clinic in question could have saved her life.
Perhaps the most gripping part of Amy , though, is that it doesn’t try to portray Winehouse’s situation as unique or even particularly remarkable. Unlike her music, Winehouse’s experience wasn’t one-of-a-kind. In fact, she’s not even the only person in the documentary struggling with drug addiction and depression. Interviews with family and friends make the message even clearer: They didn’t lose Winehouse the star, but Amy, the girl who always seemed to be dealing with too much.
Amy Winehouse’s story deserves to be remembered for generations, and her music for even longer. But Amy is a work of art in its own right, easily the most captivating, brutal and sensitive documentary to grace screens this year. It deserves, at the very least, one Oscar this Sunday.
-Patrick Basler
The Case for Anything But The Revenant as Best Picture
Maybe it’s negative to decide what you don’t want to win rather than what you do want to win. Yet when faced with the question of which film should receive the Best Picture award at the Oscars this year, my only thought was, “Dear God, anything but The Revenant.”
It would be ignorant to say everything about The Revenant is bad. The film captures breathtaking shots of nature in ways that easily rival BBC One’s Planet Earth. You can tell that director Alejandro Iñárritu went to great lengths to ensure he captured the wilderness at only the golden hours of the day. Each scene is just as well lit and beautiful as the next, and the framing of shots and diversity of footage makes for a captivating and realistic portrayal of the rugged beauty of the American wilderness.
But that’s about where the positives end.
If you watch any interview in which star Leonardo DiCaprio talks about the film, you’ll hear him wax poetic about how he almost died while braving the elements and eating raw meat out of a carcass to accurately portray what it would have been like to survive as an 1823 frontiersman left for dead in the wild. This is all well and good, although I’m sure DiCaprio could have just pretended to be eating raw bison meat (a timeless tradition known colloquially in the film community as “acting”), but that’s neither here nor there.
The problem with DiCaprio’s huge role in the film is that, on some level, it just seems like one enormous Oscar grab, as though DiCaprio’s agent got so distressed he commissioned someone to direct the most seemingly challenging film just so the academy would throw poor Leo a bone.
While the obvious attempt at an Oscar is irksome, it’s not at all surprising. It wouldn’t anger me so much if it didn’t turn into a platform for DiCaprio to try to pretend that his role in this film was somehow sending a message about the treatment of Native Americans.
When it comes down to it, The Revenant isn’t about native people; it’s about DiCaprio in a cool costume seeking revenge. To spin a movie that revolves around a tired plotline centered on white male aggression to be a beautiful message about the treatment of Native Americans seems like a selfish ploy for good publicity.
The Revenant is a survival movie with many Native American characters. The film could easily have been centered more heavily on Native American experiences and themes, but it isn’t — it’s centered on DiCaprio and his tireless journey.
“I want to share this award with all the First Nations people represented in the film,” DiCaprio said in his Golden Globe acceptance speech. “It is time that we heard your voice and protect the planet for future generations.”
He’s right. It is time that their voices are heard, but talking over them and receiving accolades in their place isn’t helping that cause at all.
So give the award to Spotlight, or Mad Max: Fury Road or Bridge of Spies — really, anything but The Revenant.
–Maeve Dunigan
The Case for What Happened, Miss Simone? as Best Documentary Feature
In 1963, “High Priestess of Soul” Nina Simone felt drained.
Her husband and manager, Andrew Stroud, was relentlessly pushing Simone to further her already-blooming career, which found the expressive singer forgoing her years of classical training for contemporary music. She wrote journal entries that depicted moments of Stroud’s abuse and those in which she would occasionally walk out in the middle of her concerts if she thought the audience wasn’t attentive.
Overall, she lacked a purpose.
But the Sept. 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four preteen black girls, reignited a passion in the pianist.
As the civil rights movement gained traction, her music turned political. As the country found itself divided, her message grew controversial. And as those changes took place, her career and personal life began a downward spiral — and eventual rebound — captured in the Oscar-nominated documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
From beginning to end, it’s a story of hardship caused by racial prejudice. She recounts feeling disconnected from both the white and black community at a young age. Nearly a year after the Birmingham bombing, she released “Mississippi Goddam,” a scathing rebuke of racial injustice boycotted in some Southern states.
She also rejected Martin Luther King Jr.’s principle of nonviolence.
“Are you ready to kill if necessary? Is your mind ready? Is your body ready?” she asked pleading fans at a concert.
What makes the documentary excel — and why it should win the Oscar for best Documentary Feature — is how it manages to peer directly into the soul of Simone, a highly sensitive and guarded figure, to make sense of those statements.
With the aid of photographs, concert footage and interviews with close friends and relatives, Simone’s struggle becomes so palpable that it’s easy to be swept up in the ferocious emotion of the civil rights movement. We see the years of discrimination and tireless advocacy wear down the once-impervious activist, and the reasons behind her fervent unrest become clear.
Simone’s life was far from a perfect work of art, and What Happened, Miss Simone? isn’t afraid to hide that. It depicts how, after her departure to Liberia in the 1970s — a protest of the injustice she experienced in America — she grew abusive toward her daughter. It evokes her mixed feelings about what she called her “civil rights music,” which she said was too radical to play during and after her career’s revival in the 1980s because “everybody [was] calm.” It doesn’t hide her bipolar disorder diagnosis, either.
Instead, it stitches together highs and the lows of Simone, who died in 2003, into one beautifully unkempt quilt.
“She was not at odds with the times, the times was at odds with her,” Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, said in the film. “As fragile as she was strong, as vulnerable as she was dynamic, she was African royalty. How does royalty stomp around in the mud and still walk with grace? Most people are afraid to be as honest as she lived.”
–Josh Magness
The Case for Alicia Vikander as Best Supporting Actress
Her roles in both Ex Machina and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. were nothing to sniff at, but the Swedish actress made her mark in 2015 with The Danish Girl. She’s nominated for Best Supporting Actresscq for her role in the biopic.
She plays Gerda Wegener, wife of Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), a Danish painter who lived in the early 1900s. Einar undergoes one of the world’s first sex reassignment surgeries to become her true self, a woman named Lili Elbe.
For all of her partner’s delicacy, civility and charm, Gerda supplies an equal helping of sarcasm, broodiness and unhinged emotion. Yet Gerda is strong. Her strength, unlike Lili’s very different kind of inner audacity, is outward, expressive and even explosive. No one blames her; she is fighting a losing battle for the man she loves all the while trying to support the woman he desperately needs to become. She is both Lili’s staunchest advocate and fiercest combatant.
Vikander’s Gerda is believable in her paradoxes. It would be all too easy to slip into an embarrassing or even offensive caricature of the struggling wife. Rather than succumb to an intricate and complicated script or fail to live up to the very vibrant person she is trying to convey, Vikander plays incongruity with dignity. Her tears are as believable as her smile; her weakness is as well-deserved as her strength.
–Danielle Ohl
