It is a remarkable shame that when this awards season is all said and done, only ten actresses will be left standing with Oscar nominations, and only two with actual Oscars. Because while last year at this time Kathryn Bigelow’s potential directing Oscar had the blogosphere declaring 2009 “the year of the female director,” it seems that 2010 has subsequently become the “year of the actress.” Just take a look at indieWIRE‘s year-end critic’s poll, where 10 of the top 13 “lead performances” come care of women.
If this year in cinema should be remembered for any one thing, it’s the incredible wealth of roles that have been bestowed upon actresses. It’s unfortunate that despite this, the year’s Oscar race seems heading for a mano-a-mano type showdown between two films that at their core are about the inter-personal relationships between men: “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech.” And while it’s great that female-centric films like “Black Swan,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “Winter’s Bone” seem headed for best picture nominations, and that the wildly deserving likes of “Swan”‘s Natalie Portman, “Kids”‘s Annette Bening, and “Bone”‘s Jennifer Lawrence are all very likely Oscar nominees, as are similarly worthy Nicole Kidman (“Rabbit Hole”), Michelle Williams (“Blue Valentine”), Hailee Steinfeld (“True Grit”) and Jacki Weaver (“Animal Kingdom”), that still is a far cry from a full representation of how substantial 2010 was for the female actor – not just in America, but around the world. Though clearly it’s never going to happen, a one-year-only extension of the best actress category to ten nominees is not as silly an idea as one might think.
As for the performances themselves, these women have collectively given us a extraordinarily complex set of cinematic characters. There’s scary, overbearing women with very questionable parenting skills (“Dogtooth”‘s Michele Valley, “Black Swan”‘s Barbara Hershey, “The Fighter”‘s Melissa Leo, and aforementioned Jacki Weaver), there’s women with very little parenting skills (“Nowhere Boy”‘s Anne-Marie Duff, “Fish Tank”‘s Kierston Wareing), there’s women desperate to protect their children (“Mother”‘s Kim Hye-Ja), women desperate to have children (“Mother and Child”‘s Kerry Washington), and women struggling to get over the loss of a child (“Rabbit Hole”‘s Nicole Kidman).
And that’s really just scratching the surface… So when Natalie Portman is likely the woman who takes the stage at the Kodak Theater come February, Oscar in hand after being proclaimed “the best actress of the year,” hopefully she will recognize the plethora of opportunities for actresses in 2010 that she is representing, including the sixty listed below.
The 60 Women That Defined “The Year of the Actress”:
Amy Adams and Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska, The Kids Are All Right
Jane Birkin, Around a Small Mountain
Helena Bonham Carter, The King’s Speech
Alice de Lencquesaing, Father Of My Children
Jeon Do-yeon, Secret Sunshine
Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas, Nowhere Boy
Elle Fanning, Somewhere
Greta Gerwig, Greenberg
Lesley Manville with Ruth Sheen in “Another Year.”
Rebecca Griffiths, Katie Jarvis and Kierston Wareing, Fish Tank
Ann Guilbert, Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet and Sarah Steele, Please Give
Kim Hye-Ja, Mother
Rebecca Hall, Please Give, Red Riding: 1974, and The Town
Sally Hawkins, Rosamund Pike and Miranda Richardson, Made in Dagenham
Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, Charlotte Rampling, Ally Sheedy and Renee Taylor, Life During Wartime
Isabelle Huppert, White Material
Zoe Kazan, The Exploding Girl
Nicole Kidman and Dianne Wiest, Rabbit Hole
Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Natalie Portman and Winona Ryder, Black Swan
Jennifer Lawrence and Dale Dickey, Winter’s Bone
Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen and Imelda Staunton, Another Year
Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Vincere
Birgit Minichmayr, Everyone Else
Chloe Moretz, Let Me In and Kick-Ass
Carey Mulligan, Never Let Me Go
Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni and Michele Valley, Dogtooth
Lucy Punch, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Noomi Rapace, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Paprika Steen, Applause
Tilda Swinton in “I Am Love”
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
Emma Stone, Easy A
Tilda Swinton, I Am Love
Sylvie Testud, Lourdes
Kerry Washington, Mother and Child and Night Catches Us
Naomi Watts, Mother and Child and Fair Game
Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
Olivia Williams, The Ghost Writer