Penelope Cruz — “Volver” (2006)
It felt like both a chastisement and a vindication when Penelope Cruz showed up and blew us all away in Pedro Almodovar‘s masterpiece “Volver”. A chastisement because we’d nearly given up hope on her and remained slightly baffled as to why Hollywood kept trying to make the Spanish actress “happen” (“Vanilla Sky,” “Catain Corelli’s Mandolin,” “Sahara,” “Bandidas“). A vindication in that when she finally did truly impress, it was not in one of the cookie-cutter roles she was being offered in the States. Instead, in a film purpose-built for her and tailored to her strengths, Cruz is a revelation as Raimunda, the center of a Almodovar’s gusty, lusty tale of ghosts and farts and chopped tomatoes and bodies stored in chest freezers. She’s so refreshingly good, full of life, sex, passion and energy. While we’ve tried to avoid moaning too much about who won in any particular year, and instead focused on celebrating the nominees, the fact that Cruz was beaten out by Helen Mirren in the gray and constipated “The Queen“, feels like some sort of travesty. As does the fact that when she finally did win her Oscar, it would be for the infinitely less nuanced take on “crazy, passionate Spaniard” she delivered in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
Ingrid Bergman — “Autumn Sonata” (1978)
Times change and opinions mature and one should always be wary of judging a film’s contemporary critics too harshly, given they do not have the benefit of hindsight. All that said, what in Jesus’ name was wrong with the reviewers of 1978 who greeted Ingmar Bergman‘s astoundingly brilliant “Autumn Sonata” with tempered praise at best, and more generally with a kind of shrug of indifference? The story of a famous, worldly mother coming to visit the daughter(s) she neglected in favor of her career as a classical concert pianist, it’s an incredibly raw and brave piece of work. Especially from Ingrid Bergman, who by then was already a three-time Oscar winner, with one of the most glittering of Hollywood careers under her belt. “Autumn Sonata” both trades on and plays off of her star persona: the character she plays is, as she was, world-famous and glamorous on a level that her practical, goodhearted and level-headed daughter (Liv Ullman) cannot quite comprehend. But there is so much more going on here than a mere “price of fame” story. This is a film about ego and motherhood — two concepts very rarely considered related — and it plunges neck-deep into the riveting central mother/daughter relationship to expose truths that other similarly themed films scarcely skate over.
Sophia Loren — “Two Women” (1961)
The first-ever Oscar win for a performance in a foreign language film went to Sophia Loren for Vittorio de Sica’s harrowing “Two Women,” just one year after Melina Mercouri scored the first such nomination for Jules Dassin‘s Greek-language “Never on Sunday.” It marked a change-up for both director and star, as De Sica had moved away from neo-realism in his last few titles, while Loren’s persona as the glamorous seductress she would go on to play so often, was already under construction. But “Two Women”, though it undoubtedly benefits from a luminosity that no amount of straggly hair or ragged clothing can obscure, presented her with a real acting challenge to which she rose with aplomb. Apparently mining her own personal experiences as a child during the war, she plays the mother desperate to protect her young daughter from the violence and starvation endemic to war-torn Italy. It’s a stark and unforgiving story of hardship, rape and alienation. And though she goes through the heights of ecstasy and the depths of tear-stained grief, there’s a steely naturalism to Loren’s performance (in details like how she wipes her chin after being kissed) that show just how strong of an actress she was, a fact her gorgeousness sometimes made it easy to overlook.
Fernanda Montenegro — “Central Station” (1998)
Walter Salles‘ deeply moving two-hander was a nominee for the Foreign Language Oscar back in 1988 (like every other film made in the world that year, it lost to Roberto Benigni’s unstoppable “Life is Beautiful“), but it feels like it hasn’t had quite the subsequent profile that it deserves. Perhaps it’s that on paper it seems like a relatively familiar tale, as a young boy bonds with an embittered, but gradually thawing older woman on a road trip to find his father. But then, on paper, there’s no real way to communicate the warmth and loveliness of that central relationship, between wonderful first-timer actor Vinícius de Oliveira and established Brazilian star of TV, theater and film, Fernanda Montenegro. What’s particularly remarkable in her performance, is that her character’s trajectory is quite an obvious one: she begins as a lonely and cynical retired schoolteacher who works as a letter writer for the illiterate, but her anger gradually thaws into a melancholic sort of optimism when she takes a motherless boy reluctantly under her wing. And yet Montenegro’s performance makes this well-worn story glow from within — and not by stripping it of sentimentality, but by embracing it, giving it her whole heart. Almost as much as Gwyneth Paltrow did to her acceptance speech, when she beat out Montenegro and won, for “Shakespeare in Love,” smdh.
Max Von Sydow — Pelle The Conqueror (1987)
The lugubrious, saturnine features of Max von Sydow are so familiar to us from Ingmar Bergman movies, that it feels strange that he’s not on here for one of those. But Von Sydow is one of those cases where the Academy, short of not nominating him at all, could not have got it more wrong. Of all the films in which he’s been the riveting, magnificent pole star, he’s been nominated for “Pelle the Conqueror” and — wait for it — “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close“, our vote for the least good of the 122 films nominated for Best Picture this century. Bille August’s parable about intolerance and discrimination in 1850’s Denmark is nowhere near as mawkish and turgid as Stephen Daldry‘s 9/11 pie-splat. But nor do we believe it deserved the Palme d’Or for anything other than Von Sydow’s beautifully soulful and simple performance. As the good-hearted but overwhelmed father to the titular Pelle, it is his travails that cut deepest. When his relationship with Pelle shifts helplessly from one of protection to one of dependence, as the boy adapts to their harsh new life better than he does, he might just break your heart.