Original title: After all, they supported this year's Oscars.
The first round of Oscar nominations this year revolves around "women", as "Barbie" was not nominated for Best Director and Best Actress. The overall conservative choice and the long outpost selection have made the audience tired: the best actor will be selected between Cillian Murphy of "Oppenheimer" and Paul Giamati of "The League of Stay", and the French female director Justin Trier, who directed "The Falling Trial", is likely to have difficulty breaking through the "blockade" of Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan and Ergus Lansmos, a group of old boys, and many people are looking forward to the absurd comedy "America**" that ridicules American ethnic politics with a lively mentality The upset became the best picture, but it was more akin to the "mission impossible" joke. After the initial turmoil, the final suspense of this year's Oscars still revolves around "women" - for the rest of the awards have become boring "unproblematic questions", only the single category of Best Actress is still full of unavoidable drama. After all, it was the actresses who supported this year's Oscars.
Regarding the nominations for the four awards in the acting category this year, mainstream reviews in the United Kingdom and the United States believe that white actors, who account for seven to eighty percent of all nominations, have a monopoly on familiar roles. After last year's Oscars for Asian-American actors, this year's "Past Life" star Greta Lee failed to appear in the Best Actress nomination, and the structural racial inequality of the entire Hollywood system** remains stubborn. In "Past Life," written and directed by Korean playwright Celine Song, 40-year-old Greta Lee played the lead role for the first time in many years in the industry, and she repeatedly mentioned in interviews: "Past Life" gave me the opportunity to play a role that was usually played by a white actress in the past, a heroine who has experienced growth and trade-offs, and who is disappointed in the face of different choices, can also be played by Asian." ”
Carey Mulligan, who played Mrs. Bernstein Felicia in the movie "The Master", was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress for the third time. In the latest issue of Vogue magazine, the American edition of Vogue magazine described this as the inertial choice of the Hollywood industry. Carey Mulligan and her role as Felicia are, as Greta Lee summed it up: women who are always played by white actresses, who go through growth and trade-offs. The actress who shines in front of the camera, playing the legendary woman who sinks in a stressful marriage, always sticks herself to take responsibility after her heart is torn apart. Carey Mulligan or Emma Stone, who is even more popular because of "Poor Things", are both top students made by Hollywood stars. Their "high quality" can be "cultivated" with regular skills.
Rather, it is a veteran actor who has been nominated four times but has not won an award, that is, Annette Bening, the heroine of "Ned". Benin, 65 years old, has been nominated four times in the past 34 years for "Deadly Gambling", "American Beauty", "Being Julia" and "Children Are All Fine". Benin's "Ned" is a biopic in which the heroine Diana Nyder regains her youthful wish at the age of 60 by swimming 160 kilometers from Cuba to Florida, a feat she accomplishes in 52 hours and 54 minutes. The main actor and the biographer are the same age, which creates an emotional tension between art and reality. Benin's actions and forms in front of the camera are so low that they tend to be "zero-degree performances", and when she appears with the archetype in the end of the film, she shows the audience that the best performance is more like a "family image" than a documentary, and she performs the silent stubbornness behind a magnificent legend, her simplicity and hardness, and the extravagance of Hollywood's stereotyped performance.
Every scene of German actor Sandra Wheeler in "The Falling Trial" can make Hollywood actors refresh their imagination and cognition of "performance". In the movie, the heroine played by Wheeler gives a self-defense speech at the trial, in which she questions the prosecutor and the testimony psychiatrist about her marriage and relationship, and she says in a calm but trembling voice that the truth of life, the truth of intimacy, cannot be summed up by words. It is a passage where the cuckoo weeps blood, and Wheeler's performance is a strange combination of Trier's filming, with Trier's grim depiction of a "murderous suspicion" in the tradition of male writers' films, while Wheeler's performance presents the rift between the pain of the mortal womb and the system of expression. Wheeler is an actress who straddles the European film industry and theater, and her ability does not need to be proven by an Oscar, and her appearance on the screen is a plus for the Oscars.
Of course, the most promising to make history is Lily Gladstone, the heroine of "Killer of the Flower Moon", a 37-year-old Native American actor. How do Indigenous people get on the big screen in the United States? How do Aborigines play Aborigines? How do today's indigenous people bring back their ancestors who have disappeared from history through performances? Lily Gladstone gives a quiet and powerful answer in front of Scorsese's camera. The most touching passage of "Flower Moon Killer" appears when the male protagonist is invited to the heroine Molly's house for the first time, the rainstorm suddenly arrives at night, the man wants to close the window, and the woman says, sit down, let's sit together and listen to the rain. The white man was at a loss, scratching his ears and cheeks, and the Indian woman looked at him without saying a word, and then, quietly staring ahead, looking at the off-screen camera — we know that Scorsese, the director behind the camera, is also white. Critic Richard Brody said that this scene is the soul of "Killer of the Flower Moon," and that Gladstone and her character Molly, no longer objects that exist in the white gaze and narration, reclaim the subjectivity of the Indians in American history with a quiet gaze, even though their subjectivity is presented as silence on the screen, and this "silence" is deafening. In the story of "Killer of the Flower Moon", the surviving Molly is still silent. So in a few days on the stage of the Oscars, will Gladstone have a chance to make a voice?
The suspense of the ownership of the Best Actress is not only a professional battle for the performance, but also a topic outside the performance. (Wen Wei Po reporter Liu Qing).
*: Wen Wei Po.