1986: Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God

In her film debut, Marlee Matlin plays the graduate of a school for the Deaf who is still working there as a janitor. She becomes romantically involved with a new hearing teacher, but his belief that Deaf people need to learn to speak and her refusal to do so constantly threaten their relationship.

This win is a big deal for several reasons. So far, Matlin is the most recent of only four people to win a Best Actress Oscar for her feature film debut (the others being Shirley Booth, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand). She also became the youngest person ever to win this award, breaking the record set by Janet Gaynor in the very first ceremony, and remains the youngest winner to date. And she is also the first, and so far only, Deaf actress to win this award.

I have mixed feelings about this win. I really enjoy Matlin's performance at the beginning of the movie, but by the end I'm less impressed. She starts out full of bitterness, anger, and fear, masking her vulnerability with sarcasm but allowing the audience glimpses of the pain within. It's beautiful to watch and masterfully done. But then by the last scene the performance has deteriorated so that it basically only consists of pining glances at William Hurt. Maybe it's more that I just don't like the direction the story goes at the end, because I really don't want them to end up together since he was such a jerk, but I feel like she's not the same person in those scenes as she was earlier. Yes, she is supposed to have changed a lot, so this was probably intentional, but I would have liked to have seen at least some of the woman she was at the beginning still there at the end. But again, a lot of this is probably the story's fault. For at least 80% of the movie she does a very good job, and her performance is easily the best aspect of the film, so overall I'd still say she earned this Oscar.

Relatively few Hollywood films have Deaf characters, and even fewer have cast Deaf actors to portray them. That's one of the many aspects that make this movie unique. It also means that there aren't many opportunities in movies for Deaf actors, so it's not too surprising that this has been Marlee Matlin's only Oscar nomination so far. She has appeared in other films, but most of her work has been in television, which seems to offer a much wider variety of roles than movies. Hopefully this will not always be the case, and someday Matlin might get another chance to give an Oscar-worthy performance. She's certainly talented enough to do so.

Up next: Cher

1985: Geraldine Page for The Trip to Bountiful

Page plays an old woman living in Houston with her son and extremely obnoxious daughter-in-law. All she wants is to visit her hometown of Bountiful once more before she dies, so she runs away to do just that.

I think this is one of the most frustratingly boring movies I've ever seen. I spent most of it wanting to punch the horrible daughter-in-law in the face and wondering why the son couldn't just take his mother on a trip back to her hometown. The movie isn't that long, but it could have easily been much shorter if it didn't drag so much. It didn't really seem to have much of a point, except maybe if all your aging mother talks about is wanting to see her childhood home, you should probably take her there. But as the movie shows, even if you don't it will all be okay, so don't even worry about it.

That being said, Geraldine Page's performance was pretty good. She was very convincing as an elderly woman, which is particularly impressive given that she was only about 60 at the time. I still don't really understand why she wanted to go back to Bountiful quite so badly - although I certainly get why she wanted to get away from that awful woman - but I never questioned that it was something she felt she desperately needed to do. She did a very good job of coming across as a friendly, harmless, terribly homesick old lady; in other words, she completely embodied the character. Several times she seemed on the verge of breaking down, giving the impression that the only thing keeping her sane was the thought of her childhood home. I particularly liked the way she progressively got more emotional when talking about Bountiful the closer she got to it.

Page's performance was by far the best aspect of this movie, but it still wasn't that exciting. Personally I think an Oscar-winning performance should have a lot more to it than this. I haven't seen all the other nominated performances from that year, but I definitely think Whoopi Goldberg's performance in The Color Purple deserved to beat this one. They both did a very good job, but Goldberg's role was much more complex, and therefore I found her performance much more impressive.

Part of the reason Page won has to be because she'd been nominated so many times before that people probably felt she had earned a win. Between 1953 and 1984 she was nominated for a total of 7 acting Oscars - three for leading roles and four for supporting roles - without ever winning. This was her final nomination, and she died of a heart attack a little over a year after receiving the award. Apparently many people consider her one of the best American actresses of all time, so I guess it's good that she ended up winning this Oscar, since it turned out to be basically her last chance. But this is not a movie I'll be revisiting anytime soon.

Next: Marlee Matlin finally breaks the record for youngest winner that was set in the very first ceremony

1984: Sally Field for Places in the Heart

In her second Oscar-winning performance, Sally Field plays a mother living in Texas during the Great Depression whose husband, the sheriff, is accidentally shot and killed by a black teenager. Desperate to keep her house and support her children, she hires a black vagrant to help her plant cotton.

This is one of my favorite movies for several reasons. The story is beautiful, and masterfully told. It conveys several powerful messages - forgiveness, racial reconciliation, etc - without shoving them down your throat. I could write an entire blog post analyzing the story (actually I could write an entire blog post just analyzing the last scene), but I'm here to talk about Sally Field's performance so I'll try to stay focused on that.

Field is very believable in this role. Her character initially appears simple, but is actually very complex and layered. In the beginning, you can tell that she wants to mourn her husband, and she barely manages to put on a brave face for her children. She initially appears rather weak and naive, but when she finds out she will probably lose her house and her family will be split up, she demonstrates more strength and determination than one would have thought she possessed. In some ways, this is very similar to her previous Oscar-winning performance in Norma Rae. Her characters are in very different circumstances, but they both find an inner strength that no one, including themselves, knew they possessed. Sally Field is very good at portraying this transformation realistically, and as subtly as possible, so that I didn't even notice this similarity between the characters until just now.

I also really like the way Field interacts with her co-stars, particularly Danny Glover, who plays the vagrant worker who helps her with the cotton, and John Malkovich, who plays her blind lodger. Given the racial tensions in the South, particularly at that time, and the fact that her husband had just been killed by a black kid, one would expect Field's character to be loath to work with a black man, but she recognizes that he's offering her the only viable solution to her problem. Field does a very good job of showing slight hesitation at first, but letting her determination overcome it almost instantly, and she eventually allows herself to become his friend. Similarly, she really doesn't want to take in the unpleasant blind man, but decides to make the most of it when she's basically forced to, and eventually becomes friends with him as well. The three of them bond over being societal outcasts, as a widow, a racial minority, and a handicapped person. They all had to give very believable performances and have good chemistry for this to work, and it ended up working extraordinarily well.

I think it's kind of unfair that Field was the only one who won an Oscar (although John Malkovich and Lindsay Crouse, who played Field's sister, were both nominated for supporting Oscars) because the whole cast is spectacular, and it's the ensemble, rather than Field's performance alone, that really makes this movie, at least for me. Don't get me wrong, it's still a remarkably good performance, and I think she deserved the Oscar; it's just that I feel like there is so much more to the movie than Field's performance. This is all a very good thing, but I think it makes this performance stand out less than some of the others that have won this award. At the same time, it reflects well on Field that she's able to let other actors share her spotlight when appropriate instead of insisting on dominating the whole movie.

Sally Field has only been nominated for two Best Actress Oscars and won both of them, although she was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress for 2012's Lincoln. As she pointed out in her acceptance speech for Places in the Heart, she hasn't had an orthodox career, but personally that's one of the main reasons why I like her. And by the way, in her acceptance speech she never actually said, "You really like me," she just said, "You like me" twice.

Coming up next: Geraldine Page

1983: Shirley MacLaine for Terms of Endearment

In this Best Picture winner, MacLaine plays an overbearing mother who can't seem to stop criticizing her daughter's life choices until some very dramatic events force her to re-evaluate her world view.

Wow, I just re-read my post from when I watched this nearly 5 years ago, and I guess I really did not like this movie the first time I watched it. I think I liked it better this time, although I still found the beginning rather obnoxious, particularly Shirley MacLaine's character. But just because I could hardly stand her character doesn't mean I didn't thoroughly enjoy her performance. MacLaine truly, completely embraces her character, with all her flaws, and makes everything she does totally believable. Very often she's completely unreasonable, but she's so self-assured that you can't help believing that she actually thinks she's acting for the best. She and Debra Winger have remarkable chemistry, and you never doubt that they're actually mother and daughter. She has really weird chemistry with Jack Nicholson, making their relationship rather uncomfortable, but that's kind of the way it's supposed to be, so even that works.

During the course of the movie, MacLaine's character has a couple of major turning points that completely change her life, so the audience's view of her changes a lot by the end. Yet the way she reacts to everything is always consistent with our first impressions of her. Throughout the whole film, we know that she loves her daughter more than anything, but has essentially no idea how to express that love in a way that doesn't drive her daughter totally crazy. Their relationship does evolve somewhat, but that aspect remains constant, and MacLaine does a tremendous job of conveying that. I can't imagine anyone playing this role as well as she does. Her character is one of my least favorites that an actress won this award for, and this movie is certainly not one of my favorite movies, but this is definitely one of the better Best Actress winning performances. Not anywhere near as incredible as the previous year's winner, but that isn't saying much.

Interestingly, Debra Winger was also nominated for Best Actress for this movie. It seems like Winger is in more of the movie than MacLaine is, but I understand why MacLaine's was still considered a leading role, since she's certainly a driving force throughout the story. Winger also does a very good job, but I think MacLaine deserved to win over her. This was not the first time two actresses from the same film were both nominated for this award (it was actually the fourth of five times so far), but it was the first, and so far only, time that one of them actually won when that happened. Usually it seems like two actresses nominated in the leading category for the same film split the vote for that film, and they end up both losing to someone else. I think there were two main reasons why that didn't happen this year. First, Shirley MacLaine did a remarkably good job, and second, I think a lot of people felt that it was about darn time that she won an Oscar.

Legendary Shirley MacLaine has had a very long film career, beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing to this day and beyond. She's been nominated for Best Actress five times, and for Best Documentary once. Terms of Endearment is her most recent nomination, and her only win. Her first nomination was for 1958's Some Came Running, and two years later she was nominated for the Best Picture winner, The Apartment, which, let's face it, she should have won. While I'm still glad I was introduced to the amusingly awful BUtterfield 8, Elizabeth Taylor did not deserve to beat Shirley MacLaine that year by any means. But I digress. After being robbed that year, MacLaine was nominated again for 1963's Irma La Douce, then for Best Documentary for 1975's The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, and then for Best Actress again for 1977's The Turning Point, alongside previous Best Actress winner Anne Bancroft. So when two people from the same film have been nominated for Best Actress, Shirley MacLaine has been one of them 40% of the time. Interesting.

Next up: Sally Field is back, because we really like her

1982: Meryl Streep for Sophie's Choice

Meryl Streep plays Sophie, a Polish Holocaust survivor living in Brooklyn in 1947, trying desperately to forget the unforgettable horrors she experienced at Auschwitz, and to escape the guilt she feels for surviving when so many did not.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the most incredible, powerful, moving performances ever captured on screen. No performance that I've blogged about thus far so thoroughly deserved the Oscar as this one. Streep's flawless Polish accent alone would be Oscar-worthy, not to mention the fact that she actually learned to speak German and Polish for the role. Add to that the way she expertly handles the incredible complexity of her character, revealing emotions exactly when they need to be expressed, and her performance almost defies description. She's simply amazing.

When people talk about this movie they mainly focus on the heart-wrenching climax. This is completely understandable; it's an extraordinarily powerful, horrendous scene, and Streep was able to emotionally insert herself into that horror so completely that she was only able to film it once and never voluntarily watched it afterwards. But it's not just that scene that makes her performance one of the best. Sophie's coping mechanism consists of lying and concealing her past. The way it's ultimately revealed to the audience is by peeling away one layer at a time. When we first meet her, we have no idea of the depth of terror in her past, but she does. At all times, Streep has to keep track of what the audience is allowed to know, still allowing what we don't yet know to inform her character's actions and emotions without revealing anything too soon. Considering that movies are filmed out of sequence, this must have been ridiculously difficult to keep straight in her mind, and a few minor slip-ups in consistency would have been very forgivable. Granted, I've only seen this movie twice, so it's possible I might have missed something, but as far as I can tell her performance is completely consistent, and as close to perfection as possible throughout. I would be curious to hear from a native German speaker how convincing her German was. Could you tell she was American, or did she sound like a native German speaker, or did she go all the way and speak German with a Polish accent? Regardless, I'm still impressed that she could convincingly pull off so many raw, emotional scenes in a language that she doesn't even really speak.

Meryl Streep is such a talented actress that it feels like she gets nominated for an Oscar every year, but she makes acting look so effortless that she hardly ever wins. To date, she has been nominated for a record 19 acting Academy Awards - 4 Best Supporting Actress and 15 Best Actress - and I will be extremely surprised if she doesn't receive several more, but she's only actually won three times. Before winning for Sophie's Choice, she had received two of her supporting nominations, winning for 1979's Best Picture Winner, Kramer vs. Kramer, and one leading role nomination for 1981's The French Lieutenant's Woman. She was then nominated 12 more times - 1 for supporting, 11 for leading roles - without winning, until she finally won one more Best Actress Oscar for 2011's The Iron Lady. I haven't seen that yet, and I've heard it's not one of her best, but regardless I think that by then it was high time she won again. I'll let you know more when I get there. But first, I'm going to talk about Shirley MacLaine, in the seventh Best Picture winner to feature a Best Actress winning role.

1981: Katharine Hepburn for On Golden Pond

In her fourth (!) and final Best Actress winning role, Hepburn plays the female half of an old married couple who plan to spend a quiet season at their summer home as usual, when they receive a letter from their essentially estranged daughter that she's coming to visit them with her latest boyfriend. Hepburn's character is delighted at another chance to improve her relationship with her daughter; her husband, much less so.

Hepburn's not quite as fabulous in this as she was in her previous win for The Lion in Winter, and she's kind of secondary in importance to her co-star Henry Fonda, who won Best Actor, but I'd still call her performance Oscar-worthy. Her unrelenting cheerfulness in the face of Fonda's grouchiness could have easily been overplayed and annoying, but she makes it delightful. In fact, delightful pretty much sums up her entire performance. My very favorite scene is when she's gathering wood while dancing and singing an old camp song. She really gets into it, and I could not stop laughing. What's so wonderful about it, though, is that it seems like exactly the kind of thing her character would do, as evidenced by her daughter's reaction when she sees it. You can tell that Hepburn had a lot of fun with this role, and that's exactly the way it needed to be approached.

She also had great chemistry with Henry Fonda. I had no trouble believing that they were actually an old married couple. Hepburn and Fonda were both legendary actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood, but this was the only film they were in together, and they reportedly hadn't even met before. Yet watching her with him is almost like watching her with Spencer Tracy in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Emphasis on almost. Still, the fact that she could even approach the same level of emotion for a man she had never worked with before and had just met as she did for a man she'd made 8 other movies with and had been madly in love with for decades demonstrates that she's a better actress than I gave her credit for when I talked about that movie. Would Guess Who's Coming to Dinner  have been as good with Fonda instead of Tracy? Probably not. Would Hepburn have still won an Oscar? Quite possibly.

It is kind of interesting that this was her second Best Actress winning performance in a movie that ended up being her co-star's final theatrically released film. Tracy died only a few weeks after Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was finished filming. Fonda was in a TV movie that aired after On Golden Pond was released, but he passed away the following year. So this was both the only time he worked with Hepburn and the only time he worked with his daughter, previous two-time Best Actress winner Jane Fonda, who played their daughter in the film. While it probably wasn't much of a stretch for Henry Fonda to play her father, it reflects well on Hepburn that she was so convincing as her mother, given that she had no children of her own and reportedly despised Jane Fonda. So while this still isn't my all-time favorite Katharine Hepburn performance, I think she deserved this Oscar.

Katharine Hepburn lived much longer than Henry Fonda did, and she continued working for over a decade after this, mostly in TV movies. This was her 12th and final Oscar nomination. She died in 2003 at the age of 96, which at the time was the longest a Best Actress winner had ever lived. She's since been passed up by Luise Rainer (104), Olivia de Havilland (still alive at 99), and Joan Fontaine (96, just a few days older than Hepburn was), but that's still an impressive lifespan.

Speaking of records, this was a pretty historic win for several reasons. At 74, Hepburn shattered the previous record for oldest Best Actress Oscar winner that had been set by 63-year-old Marie Dressler exactly 50 ceremonies earlier. Hepburn would not hold this record nearly as long as Dressler did, since it was broken merely 8 ceremonies later, but to date she remains the second oldest winner of this award. Hepburn also became not only the first person to win 4 Best Actress Oscars, but also the first person to win 4 acting Oscars period, a record that has still not even been tied 33 ceremonies later. Even if she hadn't won this year, she would still be the only actress with 3 Oscars for leading roles. She was also the first person to be nominated for this award 12 times, but that record was broken when Meryl Streep received her 13th Best Actress nomination for 2009's Julie & Julia.

Appropriately enough, Streep won her first Best Actress Oscar the year after Hepburn won her last, so I'll be talking about her next. I'm not really looking forward to re-watching that movie because it's very sad, even though Streep is beyond amazing in it, but the movie after that one is overdue at the library so I'll probably try to watch them both today (I watched On Golden Pond last night). I have a feeling I'm about to have an emotional breakdown, but it will be worth it because overall I'm loving this project. I lost some momentum last month, and it's hard to keep it going during Noirvember, but I'm going to keep it going the best I can.

1980: Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner's Daughter

In this biopic, Sissy Spacek plays Loretta Lynn, from her humble beginnings in a small coal mining town through several obstacles to her eventual success as The First Lady of Country Music.

Spacek was the perfect choice to play Loretta Lynn, which makes sense given that she was handpicked by Lynn herself. She does a tremendous job of capturing her speaking voice and character, and her singing is spot-on. Equally impressive is her ability to realistically portray a naive 13-year-old growing into an overworked middle-aged singing star. Spacek was in reality about 30 at the time, and yes, she does look older than 13 at the beginning, but it doesn't take too much imagination to believe she's that young because she does such a good job of acting like it. Her transformation is gradual, as she gains a little more self-confidence with each success, which must have been difficult to pull off, but she manages brilliantly. She also has good, albeit kind of weird, chemistry with her co-star, Tommy Lee Jones, which works perfectly because their relationship is kind of weird, particularly at the beginning. In short, every aspect of her performance is utterly believable, which is crucial to the film's success. Without a sympathetic, realistic portrayal of Loretta, the movie would not have worked. As it is, the film has become one of Hollywood's most beloved biopics. Of course it helps that it's an engaging story with a well-written script, but it's Spacek's performance that brings it to life. It's unquestionably one of the better Best Actress winning performances, and certainly well worth watching.

This was Spacek's second of six (so far) Best Actress nominations, and her only win. She had previously been nominated for 1976's Carrie. Since Coal Miner's Daughter she has been nominated for 1982's Missing, 1984's The River, 1986's Crimes of the Heart, and 2001's In the Bedroom. She's mostly been working in television lately, which seems to happen to most screen actresses over 60, but she still works in the occasional movie, so it's possible that she'll receive another nomination, or even another win. But she is almost 66, and up to this point only two actresses have ever won this award when they were older than that.

One such actress is the following year's winner, Katharine freaking Hepburn who, at 74, not only finally beat the record for oldest winner that had been set by 63-year-old Marie Dressler 50 ceremonies earlier, but also beat her own record for most Best Actress Oscar wins. So stay tuned for that.

1979: Sally Field for Norma Rae

Sally Field plays the title character, a poor textile worker who helps fight to unionize her mill, despite fierce opposition from the people in charge and apathy from her fellow workers.

In my mind, this is exactly what a Best Actress Oscar winning film should be. It's a powerful story with a woman at its center, and the way the story comes across depends mostly on the way the leading actress plays her role. When you see her at the beginning of the movie, she has to be very non-threatening, to make it easy to understand why the people in charge aren't too concerned when she starts working with the union guy. Sally Field is short, pretty, and unassuming, but she can also be very intense when she wants to be, and she uses those traits at exactly the right moments in this film. Norma Rae starts out accepting that her life is always going to suck, but her journey begins when she realizes that it doesn't have to, and that there's something she can actually do about it. Field lets us see her character's frustration and anger simmer closer and closer to the surface as her temper gets shorter and shorter, until she finally snaps at the climax. This progression is executed perfectly, and I'm convinced that no one could have done it better than Field. She absolutely deserved this Oscar.

Considering that at the time Sally Field was best known for her television roles as quirky, fun characters in "Gidget" and "The Flying Nun," it's a testament to her incredible talent that she could play such a completely different type of role convincingly enough that audiences accepted her. The studio wanted a big name in the title role, but personally I think that would have been a mistake. The movie's message is that you can do anything if you fight hard enough, which Sally Field demonstrates not only in the movie itself, but also by even playing the role in the first place, thus breaking out of her stereotype and immediately changing the direction of her career. This message would have been less strong had an established star played the role. And I don't think any of the established stars who were offered the role could have played it as well as Field anyway.

This was Field's first Oscar nomination. She also won her second, for 1984's Places in the Heart, when she gave perhaps the most infamous Best Actress acceptance speech in Oscar history. Part of it was actually quoting something her character said in this movie, but very few people seemed to catch that. Anyway, I'll talk more about her soon, but in the immediate future I'll be blogging about Sissy Spacek.

1978: Jane Fonda for Coming Home

In her second Oscar winning performance, Fonda plays the wife of a marine. When her husband goes to fight in Vietnam, she volunteers at a veteran hospital and becomes involved with a paraplegic.

This was one of the first movies about the Vietnam War, another being The Deer Hunter, which beat Coming Home for Best Picture of 1978. It's interesting that Jane Fonda won an Oscar for this movie, since she was very vocally against the war. Her actions during the war, including some that turned out to be mere rumors, led many people to see her as anti-American. I wonder if that had something to do with why she made this anti-war, pro-veteran movie. Maybe this was her way of communicating that the reason she was against the war was because she thought it was a pointless waste of lives, and not because she was a Communist democracy-hater as she had been portrayed. Or maybe she really was a Communist democracy-hater and it took tremendous acting skills to convince audiences that she wasn't. I don't know, and honestly I don't really care. I know a lot of people still hate Jane Fonda, while other people strongly defend her, because of what she did and said back then. Maybe it's just because I wasn't alive, but I find it hard to get worked up about her politics 40 years ago. So let's talk about her performance.

Even ignoring the political aspect, I'm still not sure how I feel about Fonda's win. She's good, but not outstanding. Her character kind of fades from importance halfway through; the movie's more about the Vietnam vets than about her. She's mostly overshadowed by Jon Voight, who plays her paraplegic lover to perfection. I think his Oscar was more well-deserved than hers. I did like seeing her interact with the other veterans at the hospital and showing them compassion, but there aren't very many scenes like that. When we see her at the hospital, she's mostly interacting with Jon Voight's character, and once he checks out we don't really get to see her there anymore. I thought she did a better job at the hospital than in her love scenes with Voight, which were rather awkward and uncomfortable. On the other hand, I think that was kind of the point, because I'm not sure that they were actually supposed to be in love; they were both just really lonely and sad. That's what came across anyway. Overall it's a fine performance, but it could have been much better if her character had been given more to do. I think her other Oscar-winning performance, in Klute, does a much better job of demonstrating her incredible acting talents than this movie does.

This was Fonda's fourth Best Actress nomination, and her final win (at least so far). She was nominated again the following year for The China Syndrome, then two years after that for Best Supporting Actress in On Golden Pond (for which Katharine Hepburn won her fourth Best Actress Oscar, so I'll be watching that soon), and once more for Best Actress in 1986's The Morning After. She's still acting, most recently starring in the Netflix series "Grace and Frankie" (Season 1 streaming now, Season 2 streaming...soon? Please?), while also working on movies, so maybe she'll get another nomination someday.

Coming up next: Sally Field