Best Actress: Slum Queens Cate Blanchett Cate Blanchett has the most vexing relationship to the Oscars. By early 2008, as I'm writing this, in advance of the ceremonial verdict on her double-dip nominations for the execrable Elizabeth: The Golden Age and the exquisite I'm Not There, Blanchett has assumed the status of a perennial nominee, a classy standby option for filling out a vague or thinnish race even when regard for the performance has hardly been stratospheric (certainly the case with the Elizabeth sequel but also for her demoted lead in last year's Notes on a Scandal). What is especially frustrating about this, besides the unadventurous discounting of superior work like Emily Blunt's in The Devil Wears Prada or Angelina Jolie's in A Mighty Heart, is that Blanchett has somehow wandered into this "default nominee" status after a long and more creative period of her career when she couldn't seem to get nominated for anything. Has any actress ever been so widely characterized as a cheated loser as Blanchett was after losing for the first Elizabeth and then, despite almost constant work in well-reviewed performances in an enormous gamut of films, waited six whole years for a We Owe You nomination—and never, until this year's strange circumstance, in the lead category? She was the male Ralph Fiennes in the late '90s and early '00s: admired by critics and revered by fellow actors, almost always hailed for work that somehow couldn't escape the late-December glut and thus never had much chance to catch on with AMPAS. For Fiennes, this rut of worthy non-starters began with Oscar and Lucinda, where Blanchett enjoyed her first real lead, and contined with The End of the Affair, Onegin, Spider, and The White Countess. Blanchett is droll and cagey but not quite potent enough in Lucinda to have made a real bid, especially against a heavily foregone roster of five, but it's a shame that her superior supporting turn in The Talented Mr. Ripley (still, perhaps, the jewel of her career) couldn't get swept along with that film's raft of technical nominations. Further lamentable omissions were doled out to her decent but creepy psychic in The Gift and to her soured, hard-shelled frontierswoman in The Missing, a vocal and physical exercise in creative anachronism in the Daniel Day-Lewis vein, even if the range and depth of the part limit the potency of the performance to its fascinating surface technique. Both movies were terrible drudges to sit through, but Blanchett redeemed them, or at least herself, and others would make similar arguments for her Resistance fighter in Charlotte Gray, her tarty dancer in The Man Who Cried, her terrorist reborn in Heaven, her irredeemable slag in The Shipping News, and her riff on Dietrich, studious but inert, in The Good German: most of them late December releases, none of them on Oscar's radar. Returning to her latter-day career as a regular inamorata of Oscar, her 2007 nods embody her worst nominated performance and her best (more praise of Blanchett's Dylan dissection here), but I'm wondering how long it will take for her to score a nomination for a performance as subtle and plausibly soulful as her Ripley gal or her Gift seer or, in my favorite of Blanchett's least stylized performances, her unsteadied political wife in An Ideal Husband. Indeed I wonder, now that she's so "prestige" and so justly lauded for her technical capabilities, how many of these kinds of parts casting directors will even think of her for, even if they seem to think of her for everything these days. (Cate Blanchett in Indiana Jones?) Watching Paradise Road in the theater in early 1997, I liked Blanchett but was much more stirred by Jennifer Ehle, whom I would have bet money as the Girl Most Likely to follow Blanchett's subsequent trajectory into middlebrow superstardom and Streepian inheritance. I wonder whether Blanchett's best option for restoring the fascination she engendered six or seven years ago—unless I'm the only one who's starting to doze a bit—would be to walk the route Ehle has in fact walked so successfully, to the tune of two Tony awards. Blanchett on stage? Blanchett in one movie every two years? Blanchett as subdued and direct as Ehle tends to be, for better, as in Sunshine, or for worse, as in Possession? Christabel LaMotte, Ehle's under-explored character in that misbegotten film, needed more of Blanchett's penchant for the uncanny, especially visible when she's working in period contexts. Hollywood, meanwhile, needs more of Ehle, perhaps even in Indiana Jones; as it happens, she already played "Empress Zita of Austria" in a long-ago episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. So: I believe I have hit on a sublime compromise. Who out there is listening? FAQs |