The Oscar Quest: Best Actress – 1991
1991 is actually one of the strongest Best Picture years of all time. Not everyone would think of that off the top of their head. But between The Silence of the Lambs, JFK, Beauty and the Beast and Bugsy (not The Prince of Tides), this is a top five Best Picture category of all time.
The Silence of the Lambs wins Best Picture, Best Director for Jonathan Demme (talked about here), Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins (talked about here), this category, and also Best Screenplay. Always need to mention when a film wins the Big Five. Best Supporting Actress for this year was Jack Palance for City Slickers. My thoughts on that can be found here. And Best Supporting Actress was Mercedes Ruehl for The Fisher King (talked about here), which was a good decision in what was one of the weakest Best Supporting Actress categories of all time.
And then there’s this — Clarice Starling. Boom. Done.
BEST ACTRESS – 1991
And the nominees were…
Geena Davis, Thelma and Louise
Laura Dern, Rambling Rose
Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs
Bette Midler, For the Boys
Susan Sarandon, Thelma and Louise (more…)
Oscars 2011 Update: Best Foreign Language Film Shortlist
The Academy announced today that nine films were shortlisted for Best Foreign Language film.
Keep in mind that this is a category, much like Best Documentary, that’s so fucked up with their restrictions and voting process. Less so than Best Documentary, but close. Both involve subcommittees voting down for all the films. I’m pretty sure, in both cases, voters are not required to even see all the films, which is how in some cases, films routinely don’t even get shortlisted (I’m pretty sure half the great documentaries of the year people talked about weren’t even on the Documentary longlist). So after all the rules restrictions, theres a set of committees for this category that go out and do a secret ballot and then create the shortlist. Then, a committee of like 35 people gets together and creates the nominees. Then there’s that thing where, in order to vote on the category, you need to see all five of the nominees.
Anyway, all of that aside, here are the nine films shortlisted for Best Foreign Language Film this year:
- Bullhead, Belgium
- Footnote, Israel
- In Darkness, Poland
- Monsieur Lazhar, Canada
- Omar Killed Me, Morocco
- Pina, Germany
- A Separation, Iran
- Superclásico, Denmark
- Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, Taiwan (more…)
