1993: Holly Hunter for The Piano

Holly Hunter plays a mute Scottish unwed mother in the 1800s who is sent to New Zealand to marry a man she's never met. Her new husband makes very little effort to connect with her, even refusing to bring her cherished piano from the beach where she landed to their house. He doesn't understand that she uses the piano as an extension of herself, playing it as a substitute for speech. But another man can see how she feels about the piano, and watching her play causes him to fall in love (lust?) with her.

Okay, first of all, this movie is really weird, and also really awkward to watch with your parents. I'm still not sure if I like it or not. I do think it's pretty cool that it was nominated for 8 Oscars, and 7 of those nominees were women, since that basically never happens. Jane Campion became only the second woman to be nominated for Best Director, which she did not win, but she did win for Best Original Screenplay. Eleven-year-old Anna Paquin became the second youngest Best Supporting Actress winner, and also the second youngest winner of a competitive Oscar, for her portrayal of Holly Hunter's daughter. And of course, the film's third and final Oscar went to Hunter herself, so let's talk about that.

Before watching this movie, I knew that Hunter's character didn't speak, but that did not prepare me for the type of performance I was about to witness. Past winners that had little to no dialogue (Jane Wyman and Marlee Matlin come to mind, in addition to Janet Gaynor's performances in silent films) were always very expressive with their faces, so the audience could usually tell what they were thinking and feeling even when they weren't signing. That is not the case here. For most of the movie, Hunter's face is pretty blank, and consequently we have no idea what her character is thinking or feeling. I thought this made it a bad performance until I realized that it must have been a conscious choice, since it serves at least two purposes that I can think of. First, it helps give the impression that she's just 1000% done with her crappy life and has stopped letting herself feel much of anything. The only thing she really cares about is her piano. And that's the second thing: the only time you can really tell what she's feeling is when she's playing the piano. All her expression is in her music. She has basic communication with her daughter through signing, and with others through writing, but communicating her feelings is mostly her piano's job. Her blank face the rest of the time emphasizes her expressiveness when she's playing, thus conveying to the audience how desperately she needs the piano. Her husband refuses to let her have the instrument and then complains to everyone else that he has no connection with her, while the other man gets her and the piano into his house under the pretense of music lessons. Any guess as to which guy she falls for? Personally, I thought the other guy was kind of creepy, but at least he knew how to win her over, while her husband (who was also creepy) had absolutely no clue. If it's a choice between two creepy guys, go with the one who sort of understands you. I guess. Anyway, this was a very unusual performance, but a fascinating one, so even though I'm not sure how I feel about the movie, I'm glad she won the Oscar. I always like seeing new and different things getting recognition. It's also worth mentioning that Holly Hunter did all her own piano playing, which is both unusual and impressive.

This was the first, and so far only, year in which two actresses were each nominated for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Hunter was one of them, receiving her supporting nomination for The Firm, but losing, of course, to Anna Paquin for this movie. The other was the previous year's Best Actress winner Emma Thompson. I'm not even going to try to speculate why this happened, but I think it's very interesting that it did. Anyway, Hunter was nominated for one Oscar before this year, for 1987's Broadcast News, and one after (so far), for her supporting role in 2003's Thirteen. She's a very talented actress, and ironically one of my favorite things about her is her speaking voice (Elastigirl might be my favorite Pixar character ever), but she clearly doesn't even need that.

Next up: Jessica Lange

1992: Emma Thompson for Howards End

Emma Thompson plays a middle class woman in early 20th century England who lives with her brother and sister. The film chronicles the development of relationships between her family and two others: one from the upper class and one from the lower class.

This was the first time I'd watched this movie, and I'm not sure that I can sufficiently convey my feelings about it in a blog post, but I'll try. First of all, I don't think it's possible to overstate Emma Thompson's fabulousness, just in general, but especially in this performance. Secondly, this movie was way more fascinating than I expected it to be. I didn't really know much about it, and I was certainly not anticipating so many plot twists. At the very beginning, I couldn't understand why Thompson won the Oscar, since it seemed to be focusing more on Helena Bonham Carter (who also gave a fabulous performance, by the way), but it didn't take too long for Thompson's character to establish herself as the protagonist. From that point forward, I was enthralled with her performance, when I wasn't too distracted by the thoroughly engaging and unpredictable story. The funny thing is, if I hadn't been watching specifically for Emma Thompson's performance, I don't think I would have appreciated what a great job she does because it's so subtle.

Unlike many of the other great Oscar winning performances I've blogged about, her character is given no detailed tragic backstory, no big emotional scenes, no calculated schemes. She's just a kind, intelligent middle class woman trying to survive in a world built for and run by wealthy men. When bad things happen to her, or to people she cares about, she does what she can to make it better, but then moves on when she feels there's nothing more she can do. This provides a sharp contrast to her sister, who holds on to everything and keeps fighting even when it becomes hopeless. However, through very subtle facial expressions and mannerisms, we can tell that Thompson's character feels things much more deeply than she's letting on. And that's my favorite thing about this performance: it initially appears simple, but is in fact extremely complex. My second favorite thing is the way Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter interact; they're such believable sisters, and I wish they had more scenes together. My least favorite thing is Thompson's "romance" with Anthony Hopkins, who is much less creepy in this than in the last movie, but no less despicable. But her scenes with Hopkins, though painful, are intentionally so, and provide ample opportunities for subtleties, so even those contribute to my appreciation of her performance.

This was Thompson's first Oscar nomination. The following year, she was nominated twice: for Best Actress in Remains of the Day and Best Supporting Actress for In the Name of the Father. Unusually, she didn't win either, possibly because she had just won this year. Two years after that, she was again nominated for two Oscars in the same year: Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, both for Sense and Sensibility. That time she did win the screenplay Oscar, but Howards End remains her only Best Actress winning performance. I think she should have at least been nominated for Saving Mr. Banks, but what do I know?

Coming up next: Holly Hunter, who was also nominated for two acting Oscars that year...was there a sudden actress shortage?

1991: Jodie Foster for The Silence of the Lambs

In this Best Picture Winner, the third and most recent winner of all five major Academy Awards (picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay), Jodie Foster plays an FBI agent in training sent to interview a notorious incarcerated serial killer in order to gain insight into an at-large serial killer's motives.

As I said when I blogged about it before, this movie terrifies me, but it's also really good. Since I'd watched it before, I was a little less caught up in the suspense this time, so I was able to better appreciate just how well made it is. But it was still difficult to focus solely on Jodie Foster's performance. Anthony Hopkins, though he has relatively little screen time, completely steals the entire movie. He's what people remember about this film. Even people who haven't watched it know the name Hannibal Lecter; not nearly as many remember Foster's character's name (it's Clarice Starling). I think it's difficult to recognize hers as a great performance because it's not the great performance of the movie, so it's a little surprising that she won the Oscar. But surprising in a good way.

In both this and Foster's other Oscar-winning film, The Accused, her character is in an almost constant state of emotional turmoil. But while in the other film she is very expressive with her emotions, in this one her character is desperately trying to conceal them. She doesn't want Hannibal Lecter to know that he's getting to her, and she also doesn't want to appear weak in front of other FBI agents. But given the horrors she witnesses and the mind games she's subjected to, she would seem positively inhuman if she wasn't disturbed by it all, and the audience desperately needs someone to relate to and sympathize with. She plays this so well that I didn't really notice it during my first viewing. I knew I liked her character, but I didn't realize how emotionally charged the performance was, how quickly she goes from overly confident to falsely confident to barely holding it together. I find this movie exhausting to watch because it's so suspenseful and creepy, but what I hadn't noticed before is that Clarice is right there freaking out with us the whole time. However, while we in the audience can freak out however much we want, she has to at least attempt to appear unaffected. I can only imagine how draining that must have been to portray. So while Foster doesn't define this movie the way Hopkins does, she certainly earned her Oscar just as much as he earned his, if not more so, just in a somewhat less noticeable way.

Since this win, Jodie Foster has only been nominated for one more Oscar, for 1994's Nell. She hasn't been in too many movies lately, but regardless, she will always be noteworthy as one of the few child stars who were able to maintain successful film careers as adults, and as the winner of two very deserved Oscars.

Coming up next: Emma Thompson

1990: Kathy Bates for Misery

Kathy Bates plays Annie Wilkes, the self-described #1 fan of famous author Paul Sheldon. So when his car goes off a cliff, she rescues him and nurses him back to health. Unfortunately for Paul, Annie has some psychotic tendencies, and what initially seemed like a miracle turns out to be nothing short of an absolute nightmare.

I want to say that I love this performance, but that doesn't seem quite right because it completely terrifies me. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I'm in awe of this performance. Annie is a very complicated character, and her complexity must be revealed in a very specific way for the story to work. I think it would be easy, tempting even, to ruin her, by being either too crazy at the beginning or not crazy enough at the end. But Kathy Bates nails it. At the beginning, she seems like a kind, concerned fangirl who has just been given the chance every fangirl dreams of: to save the life of her favorite celebrity. Something might seem a little off about her, probably more because the opening credits already told you it was based on a Stephen King novel than because she reveals anything unnecessarily, but you don't start getting nervous until the first time her temper flares up. She recovers from that outburst quickly, so it seems, but then in the next scene she's having Paul burn his manuscript. From there her madness escalates steadily, so you know that something bad is most certainly going to happen when she finishes his latest book and learns that he's killed off her favorite character (which was revealed to us at the very beginning). And by the end, once her character has gone completely psychotic, Bates just goes for it 100%, with a conviction that turns what could have been a totally ridiculous climax into a horrifyingly believably intense one.

I have to give some credit to the writing, of course, but Bates drives the suspense of the well-written story with the way she plays Annie. We are terrified of her, but hesitantly so, because we never know if she's going to be rational or not. She is completely unpredictable. What's so disturbing about her is that she clearly believes that everything she does is totally justified and normal. I don't know how Kathy Bates was able to get inside Annie's head enough to portray her twisted logic with such conviction. Perhaps this is why I'm not an actress, but in my defense, there are few actresses who could have pulled off this character. Fortunately, they found quite possibly the best of those few.

This was Kathy Bates's first Oscar nomination, and her only one in this category. She has also received two nominations for supporting roles, for 1998's Primary Colors and 2002's About Schmidt, though she didn't win either. She's not a typical movie star, but she's a very talented actress, and I'm sure we'll see more fabulous performances from her in the future, though it would be very hard for her to top this one.

Next up: Jodie Foster is back, in the ninth Best Picture Winner with a Best Actress winning performance

1989: Jessica Tandy for Driving Miss Daisy

In this Best Picture Winner, Jessica Tandy plays an aging widow. When she accidentally drives her car into a ditch, her son hires her a chauffeur, much to her annoyance. She is initially very rude to this chauffeur that she wants nothing to do with, but eventually comes to respect him, and even ultimately to consider him her best friend.

Tandy is thoroughly convincing as a stubborn Southern widow, which is particularly impressive given that she was actually from London and that her husband would outlive her. With the lines she's given, it would be easy to make Miss Daisy seem too mean, but Tandy smiles or gets a slight twinkle in her eye at just the right moments so you can tell that she doesn't mean most of the sharp things she says. This makes it a fun performance to watch as well as an impressive one. She definitely deserved an Oscar, but so did Morgan Freeman, who was nominated but didn't win. I felt like a lot of the time her performance was overshadowed by his, so it seems wrong that she won when he didn't. What makes the movie for me is how well the two of them play off each other, so I think they both deserved equal recognition. Her performance would not have worked if it hadn't gone together with Freeman's so well. I guess this means her win was also a win for him, except he didn't get a statue. Life's not fair. Oh well, at least one of them won.

At 80 years old, Jessica Tandy became the oldest Best Actress winner ever, breaking the record set by 74-year-old Katharine Hepburn 8 years earlier, and she remains the oldest winner to this day. In addition, she was the oldest Oscar winner in any competitive category for 22 years, until 82-year-old Christopher Plummer won Best Supporting Actor. It's impressive that at that age she was able to give such a great performance - especially since you get the feeling that Freeman's character isn't that much younger than hers, when he's actually 28 years younger than her - but even more impressive that the Academy recognized it as a great performance, given how much value Hollywood places on youth and glamour. This movie and its awards prove that sometimes even Hollywood gets it right.

Most of Jessica Tandy's work was on the stage. Her early film roles weren't very exciting, and she's mostly remembered for films she made later in her career. This was her first Oscar nomination, and her only one in this category, but she also received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1991's Fried Green Tomatoes. After that she managed to make a few more films before her death in 1994, at the age of 85. She is currently the most recent Best Actress winner who is no longer alive - not very surprising for the oldest winner - so unless something happens I'm going to have so say "so far" when talking about other wins and nominations in all my future posts on this blog.

Coming up next: Kathy Bates, who was also in Fried Green Tomatoes

1988: Jodie Foster for The Accused

In her first Oscar-winning performance, former child star Jodie Foster plays a woman who is gang-raped at a bar. She is outraged when her lawyer, without consulting her, makes a deal that puts her attackers in jail without them having to admit rape, so the lawyer decides to prosecute the crowd that was cheering them on.

This is pretty much the polar opposite of the previous year's winning movie, Moonstruck. That was a romantic comedy, and the Best Actress winner didn't really get to do very much that stood out. This is a deeply disturbing drama, and the Best Actress winner has to do so much. The audience is shown so many different sides of her character: we see her before, during, immediately after, and quite a while after the rape. She acts very differently in all these scenarios, but she always seems like the same person. She powerfully conveys a wide range of raw emotions, and every reaction she gives is consistent with the last. I think it would be extremely difficult to pull off a performance that's so emotional yet so controlled, but Foster manages pretty much flawlessly. Her character is so different from me that I can't really relate to her at all, yet I still manage to feel empathy for her because Foster makes her so real. And she makes it look so effortless, like this is just the way she is, when obviously that's not actually true. She's just an insanely talented actress.

I feel like I've talked about accents a lot on this blog, and I have to do it again because that's the one criticism I have of this performance. The location is never specifically mentioned, but based on the license plates and the state flag in the courtroom, it's supposed to be the state of Washington. So why does everyone, especially Foster, sound like they're from the east coast? I found this very distracting throughout the movie, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that I'm from the state of Washington and have never heard anyone talk like that here. I think the movie's based on a true story that happened in Massachusetts, so maybe their accents were in tribute to that? But then why not just set it in Massachusetts? Anyway, it doesn't really matter, and it's still a fabulous performance, but I think it's interesting that she beat Meryl Streep and her impressive Australian accent in A Cry in the Dark (although maybe I wouldn't think that if I was from Australia) by playing a Washingtonian from New England.

Jodie Foster has had an intense career, earning her first Oscar nomination for playing a 12-year-old prostitute in 1976's Taxi Driver. This was her second nomination, and her first for a leading role. She would go on to win for her next nominated performance in the Best Picture Winner 3 years later, so I'll be talking more about her soon. But first, Jessica Tandy will set a new record for oldest Best Actress Winner, in the eighth Best Picture Winner with a Best Actress winning performance.

1987: Cher for Moonstruck

 

Cher plays an Italian-American bookkeeper from Brooklyn who is burned out enough to say yes when her boring boyfriend proposes, only to almost immediately fall for his much more intriguing brother.

Moonstruck is one of those rare romantic comedies that is so well done that the Academy couldn't help but recognize it. It was even nominated for Best Picture, though as always the long epic won. But besides The Last Emperor, Moonstruck was the only movie that year to win multiple Oscars, also snagging Best Supporting Actress for Olympia Dukakis and Best Original Screenplay. The reason I'm mentioning all of this when I'm supposed to be talking about Cher's performance, besides the fact that I love it when rom coms get recognition, is because while I'm utterly convinced that this movie deserved the other two Oscars, I'm less sure about Best Actress.

I really like Cher's performance; I just don't think it stands out very much. This is very much an ensemble picture, and I find the supporting characters more interesting than the leads. She does a good job of fitting into the cast and playing off the other actors when called for; I just don't feel like she gets to do very much. Olympia Dukakis steals every scene she's in, while Cher kind of blends in, which is not something I ever thought I'd say about Cher. She does quite a bit of yelling, but so does everyone else, so even that doesn't make her stand out. It's still a very good performance; just not an outstanding one. Now that I'm thinking about it, though, that is consistent with her character. She's used to blending in and just kind of being there; hence she agrees to marry that guy because she doesn't think anything more exciting will ever happen to her. So I guess that works. And she does start to stand out a little more when she falls in love with Nicolas Cage, although I would have liked to see more of that.

I think my biggest problems with this win are that I'm more interested in the supporting characters than in her character, and that I don't believe that she and Nicolas Cage are actually in love. But the latter is mostly due to the ridiculousness of both Cage and his character. Otherwise, I do think Cher is surprisingly believable in the role, especially since she is neither Italian nor from Brooklyn, and also considering that most people don't think of her as an actress. I certainly don't begrudge her this win, and I thoroughly enjoy this movie, even though it lacks many of the qualities I've come to expect from a Best Actress Winner. It's good to have some variety, absolutely, but it's hard to agree that the performance of the leading role is Oscar-worthy when the main aspects that recommend the movie are the script and the ensemble.

Cher is mostly considered a singer, so I think many people are surprised to learn that she has an acting Oscar. This is the only leading role she's been nominated for, although she was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress for 1983's Silkwood. Her career has been so unpredictable that I don't even want to attempt to guess whether she'll receive more nominations or not. I wouldn't be a bit surprised either way.

Next up: Jodie Foster's first of two (so far)