The race for this year’s final slot turned out to be unexpectedly competitive: Jennifer Aniston and Amy Adams made surprise surges for films disregarded by critics, but it was an arthouse darling widely perceived as too refined for Academy tastes who beat them to the punch.
And the award goes to Julianne Moore
Nevertheless, Julianne Moore essentially won this race five months ago, when Still Alice premiered with quiet confidence at the Toronto film festival in September. She’s eminently deserving of recognition for her restrained, emotionally complex portrayal of an English professor slipping into early-onset Alzheimer’s, but she’d be the frontrunner even if she wasn’t.
Moore has had a banner year, winning best actress at Cannes for her contrastingly unhinged performance in Maps to the Stars, and appearing prominently in the latest instalment of The Hunger Games franchise — 2014’s highest-grossing release in the US.
Add to that the widespread perception that an Oscar is long overdue for Moore: an actor’s actor, she has four previous nominations, should certainly have several more, but has yet to win. This perfect storm of factors in her favour has already netted her the Golden Globe and Screen Actors’ Guild award, among others.
Meet the nominees...
Felicity Jones
Still, we’ll start with the performance that, in a year’s time, everyone is likeliest to have forgotten was nominated in the first place. Not that Jones isn’t a perfectly deft and disarming screen partner for virtuoso Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything — but for all the marketers’ insistence that it’s the extraordinary story of Stephen and Jane Hawking, it never feels much like her film. (We learn that Mrs Hawking studied Spanish poetry, was into choir-singing and... well, that’s about it.)
Though Jones has enough presence and screen time to justify the categorisation, few eyebrows would have been raised had she been fudged into the supporting field instead — where she might have stood a chance of winning at least one award on the precursor trail. As it is, this is the year’s only best picture nominee to score a best actress nod — a tellingly back-handed achievement in a year when Academy voters haven’t seemed greatly interested in female-driven stories.
Rosamund Pike
For months, many insisted that David Fincher’s Gone Girl would be the second, conveniently ignoring the Academy’s usual lack of regard for chilly airport-thriller entertainment. Those who argued for the film as a daring post-feminist satire of American marital mores didn’t seem very clued in to Oscar voters’ favourite genres.
Despite formidable box office — it’s grossed $167 million (Dh613 million) Stateside, more than the other four nominees combined — most voters weren’t as jazzed, with even Gillian Flynn’s seemingly assured screenplay nomination falling by the wayside. Its lone nomination turned out to be for Pike’s gleeful, dry-ice turn as malevolent antiheroine (or straight-up villain, depending on your take) Amy Dunne: this is now the one area where the film’s fans can block-vote, but how many of those are there?
If Glenn Close couldn’t win in 1987 for terrifying the men of America into submission, the British first-time nominee surely can’t — particularly with her recent pregnancy having kept her away from the publicity circuit. The sizeable career boost stateside is her reward; she’ll probably be back soon.
Reese Witherspoon
Then again, that’s what we said about Witherspoon when she collected best actress for a charismatic elevation of a borderline supporting role in Walk the Line. Few would have guessed it’d take nine years for America’s sweetheart to be invited to the dance, but few would have guessed her career would slump quite so drastically following her triumph.
Credit to Witherspoon for engineering her own recovery, however: edged out of Rosamund Pike’s role in Gone Girl, she went ahead and produced the film anyway, developing an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s gritty salvation-by-hiking memoir Wild into the bargain.
Her self-casting instincts are strong: the role of Strayed is a canny one for her, tapping into the steel-magnolia persona that has underpinned her best parts to date, while revealing a sense of wear, tear and tiredness less familiar from her. It’s a welcome return to form, and if the industry had embraced Jean-Marc Vallee’s film half as warmly as it did his Dallas Buyers Club last year, she’d be in a better position to win.
Marion Cotillard
Like Witherspoon, Cotillard has scored a second nomination this year several years after a well-earned win, but hers is no comeback narrative. Rather, the not-entirely-expected nod for her subtly wrenching turn as a laid-off Belgian factory worker in the critics’ pet Two Days, One Night feels like the Academy catching wise to a rich, under-rewarded run of recent form.
If anything, she’s even more deserving of the nomination this year for James Gray’s stunning The Immigrant, sadly still awaiting a UK distributor; the New York Critics’ Circle and the National Society of Film Critics cited her for both films. With this nomination, Cotillard has beaten the odds in a number of pleasing respects: recognition for foreign-lingo performances is rare enough as it is, while the Dardennes’ film suffered a setback when it wasn’t even shortlisted for best foreign-language film.
Finally, Cotillard has barely been present on the campaign trail — a pointed contrast to the season she won for La Vie en Rose, when the then little-known ingenue was dragged to every ribbon-cutting ceremony in town. Just sometimes, the work speaks for itself, albeit with a strong accent.
