Leading Actress 1992

I swear I'm not dead! Just get bogged down with life and then stuck on watching certain films or stuck having to write about them. I've seen none of these films so I'm eager to see what they are exactly since I'm not really familiar with any of them. Let's get to it.

1992 Best Actress

Emma Thompson - Howards End

I have always liked Emma Thompson as an actress and I've stated that in my other reviews for her. She is just a thoroughly charming and pleasant actress who makes her craft look effortless. We got exactly that for this performance, but for some reason it just never grabbed me like her others did. I'm glad that she is an Oscar winning actress (and writer!) but I was very underwhelmed by this performance. She plays a middle class woman who becomes friends with Redgrave's character and is promised Howards End (an estate) when she dies but the children of Redgrave block that and then Anthony Hopkins' character falls in love with her and marries her and dies and Thompson gets Howards End after all. There's a lot of class stuff going on and Howards End is meant as a representation of what the different classes are all aspiring to. Maybe I had too high of expectations for her but I was really left wanting more from her and the film itself. Like I said she's her usual great self, making her character look completely effortless. The big thing I like about her acting is that it's as if she's coming up with her words on the fly or as if she was the one who wrote them. She's very natural in that respect which impresses me greatly. Other actors look as if they have memorized lines and are only reciting them and make it look labored and too much like acting. Thompson makes you forget she's acting and just a character speaking from a script. So all of that is found in this performance but I don't feel like Thompson ever took over the film and gave a truly marvelous performance. It's solid but not amazing. She's clearly done better work since which isn't fair to compare to her work in this one. I really thought I was going to react a lot differently to her Oscar winning performance than what I'm writing here but I can't find the motivation to say anything other than she's a great actress who gave a good, not great performance. Maybe it's because I've seen better performances from Thompson that I'm so underwhelmed or that I thought this was going to be a truly great all time winner but I'm a bit disappointed. Without having seen any of the other nominees yet, I'm already okay with her win and she seems like the obvious choice for a winner but we will see as I watch the others.

Catherine Deneuve - Indochine

This was a little bit of a struggle to find with English subtitles. It was plenty easy to find the French version, though. I've been getting more and more into foreign films, sprinkling them in among the Oscar films I watch for the project and it's been a nice change of pace. This film fell directly in the middle of both those wheelhouses and I was intrigued about what kind of film it would be. It's about a French woman who is raising a Vietnamese princess in Vietnam and the woman, Deneuve, falls for a French Navy officer and they bone but then the officer saves the Vietnamese girl and they fall in love and they eventually find each other out in a remote area and then bone. It's very French. It's also not that great of a film. It's somewhat hokey at times, or at least forced to try to provide drama. Deneuve's character is the owner of a rubber tree plantation and seems to have the respect of her local laborers. Deneuve is good in this aspect, portraying someone that's lived there her whole life and is comfortable as a female boss to Vietnamese workers. It's good and capable and doesn't pander to any stereotypes of a lesser woman or a super heroine. Meaning she just exists as she should in the role. My beef is that the film makes her fall almost instantly for the Navy officer without any real reason for her to do so. He confronts her at an auction and kinda tries to woo her and then she just gives herself to him and it's all done so quickly and sloppily that it drags the performance down. It's completely unbelievable. On the plus side, the relationship between Deneuve and her Vietnamese adopted daughter is very believable. They have a very natural relationship and it doesn't feel like white woman with minority kid. It makes for a more realistic performance minus the absurd romance part but it's only a decent performance, nowhere near great. I think the Academy wanted to take the opportunity to reward Deneuve with a nomination as they seem to love to do with certain French actresses. I understand it's place here and don't begrudge it. This was a lot better than some previous Best Actress nominees.

Mary McDonnell - Passion Fish

This is another review that I already wrote but then somehow Blogger ate it and it disappeared after I worked on it for like a couple hours. It's always pretty cool when that happens. Anyway, I had no idea who Mary McDonnell was when I finally got to this year. I know that's going to happen more and more as I go back in time but it's still a little jarring to not know who they are but also exciting at possibly finding a hidden gem. The beginning of the film McDonnell's acting is very labored and TV movie like, but she does eventually settle into the role. Those first few scenes, though, are really, truly awful displays of acting which makes me not want to vote for her based on that alone and because Alfre Woodard is by comparison immensely better. McDonnell plays a TV soap opera star who gets in an accident and is paralyzed and goes to her home in Louisiana. She goes through a bunch of nurses before getting stuck with Alfre Woodard and the two eventually come to respect each other after a rough start. The biggest thing about this performance is that it's fine and all but Woodard is so much more interesting and compelling as a character. I'd even say she's a co-lead and should have been nominated here instead of McDonnell. It's just plain as day when you watch the film. Woodard has just as much, if not more of, an arc than McDonnell and makes the most out of her performance. It's bad acting to start out with that settles into an average performance and somehow it got nominated over a much more deserving Woodard. Maybe McDonnell was riding the wave of goodwill from Dances with Wolves two years prior, I don't know. Not to say McDonnell is horrible by any means, the beginning issue is a very small part of the whole performance. The two actresses actually have really good chemistry and you warm up to McDonnell's cold, callous woman right along with Woodard. I just don't see how anyone that watches this film doesn't gravitate more toward Woodard for being the better performance and actress. I'd love to hear someone give me a good reason as to why the Academy did choose her besides the disability factor. I think that Alfre Woodard would have been a much better choice and I wish the Academy would have seen it that way, too.

Michelle Pfeiffer - Love Field

I have never been a Michelle Pfeiffer fan. My only explanation to that is that I don't find her attractive at all while everyone else seems to think she is drop dead gorgeous. She's not. And I feel like that's where a lot of her love as an actress comes from, her beauty first then whatever talent she has. I've never liked that when it comes to actresses. Show us what you can do despite your good looks and go from there. Of course, this is a bit unfair because Pfeiffer can't exactly help being considered beautiful, so it's not her fault. Love Field does kinda feel like the Academy loves her and wants to nominate her because she's a star at this moment. The performance is okay to me but doesn't really stand out. She's the main focus of them, sure, but that doesn't mean she's good. Pfeiffer plays a woman who is so into the Kennedy's and worships Jackie O and when the President is assassinated in her hometown, vows to go to the funeral in Washington. Ditzy blonde, which Pfeiffer has down pat, gets on a Greyhound bus and butts her way into a black man and his daughter's life because she has no boundaries. She constantly chats him up or injects herself into his life when it's clear he wants to be left alone. The bus crashes eventually and Pfeiffer notices bruises on the little girl and thinks the father has kidnapped her because he's black and that's what black people do. She calls the FBI and then sets in motion the rest of the film where they are running from the authorities because she fucked up and he really is taking her from a home where they beat her constantly and they have to hide out. They all hide out and eventually fall in love, I shit you not. It makes no sense in the grand scheme of things and they end up happily ever after and it just feels so stupid. Pfeiffer is good at being the innocent blonde woman who cares about the daughter because she lost her own child. But that revelation is just superficial. We don't learn all that much about Pfeiffer other than she's quick to leave her other life behind without too much turmoil shown and told to us. I'd say she and Dennis Haysbert have a decent chemistry but it's almost the same thing as Far from Heaven with Julianne Moore and it's still as weird and inappropriate as that film. I'm never convinced by Pfeiffer of her drastic change and it's important that I buy her abrupt turnaround because the film depends on it. Beauty and historical time frame aside, what is left to judge? Not much at all, which is why I think this performance falls flat for me. Yes, it's competent and she does fine trying to sell the romance and the concern, it's just that it doesn't feel Oscar worthy. I feel like her popularity and sex symbol status got her this nomination because there's just not a whole lot to it. I'd much rather see someone else take her place here.

Susan Sarandon - Lorenzo's Oil

When it comes to Susan Sarandon performances and films, I always end up initially thinking the premise or the woman sounds pretty meh but then I watch them and find that Sarandon is pretty strong and her character is a decent female role. Like in this film, I wasn't overly compelled to watch it based on the premise of Sarandon being a mother whose son becomes ill and she and her husband try to find a cure against all odds. You have no doubt heard of a film like this before, probably seen it countless times before, you could probably write a screenplay about one with ease. It breaks no new ground or anything and isn't all that interesting after awhile. But...I watch and realize that Sarandon gives a pretty good to great performance which is typical of her. It's almost at Meryl Streep levels where she makes undeserving roles/performances better because of who she is. It also highlights how bad a lot of the leading actress roles truly are, they lack a lot of the diversity you get with the men. In this film, Sarandon plays a mother fighting for her son's life after he gets a rare disease or disorder or whatever. It's a very strong role that Sarandon makes more interesting and less basic. She gives it her crusader, advocate, progressive spin and push. She brings that part of her life to the role and it's definitely way better for it. She mostly avoids the cheesiness that can be found in these performances and films. Just look at her husband in the film, Nick Nolte, for an example of that. His Italian accent is so distracting and cringe worthy you wish he'd shut up. Not to overly praise Sarandon, though, as this isn't an award winning role to me. It's solid and better than it needs to be but the film does her no favors. It's great that she is so convincing as the mother fighting for her son because it's exactly what you'd think a tough, desperate woman would be in that situation. It's good, not great, but very Susan Sarandon.


Go ahead and look at the films nominated on this list. Do you think the average person in America in 1992 had heard of any of these films, let alone actually watched them? How about extending that to nowadays? It has recognizable names, sure, but besides Howards End, I've never even heard of these films and I'm a big movie nut. No one talks about these films ever, so 1992 must have been just an awful, awful year for women because Oscar makes it seem that way. I'll have to read this year in my Inside Oscar book to see what else was even in the running. It's really hard to even come up with a winner because I'm so ambivalent about them all. I mean, I guess just stay with the status quo and go with Thompson but it doesn't feel fully earned here. I wish she would have wowed. Then comes Sarandon because she plays a pretty strong female character and is good but I wouldn't want that film to be what she won for, you know what I mean? Deneuve really kinda surprised me because I thought she was solid, just let down by the film. She might even be a number 2 after this all grows on me. But still, not worth a win exactly. Then comes Pfeiffer trying hard to rise above the looks but not fully succeeding for this film, which is kind of a mess anyway. McDonnell is dead last because I'd have taken Alfre Woodard over her and probably given her the win instead of these others. That would have been a great Oscar moment! Instead we are left with this ho-hum group.

Oscar Winner: Emma Thompson - Howards End
My Winner:  Emma Thompson - Howards End
Susan Sarandon 
Catherine Deneuve
Michelle Pfeiffer
Mary McDonnell