The Best Actress Nominations: The More Things Change…

The 2012 Oscar nominations are out.

Am I the only one who looks at this list of nominees and immediately feels tired?

I saw quite a few movies this year that were interesting, thought-provoking, and immensely entertaining. Except for Bridesmaids, none of those movies are reflected anywhere in the 8 major categories (picture, director, the four acting categories, and the two screenplay categories).

In fact, for the first time in my recent memory, I haven’t seen a single one of the Best Picture nominees. More importantly, the only one I actually want to see is The Artist. There are a few others, such as The Help (because of the amazing cast) and The Descendants (because the Dean from Community co-wrote the screenplay), that I’m mildly interested in seeing, but I just can’t be arsed to care about the rest of them. Maybe I’m too critical or maybe I’ve seen too many movies and they all jumble together in my head, but so many of them – particularly Moneyball and War Horse – seem like stories I have seen a million times already and don’t need to see again.

Now, I don’t expect to be on the same page as the Academy about a lot of issues. They were never going to nominate The Muppets for Best Picture no matter how much I thought it deserved a slot (and it does). But Tilda Swinton’s last-minute snub for We Need to Talk About Kevin surprised me and got me thinking about the types of roles that were nominated for Best Actress this year.

The nominees for Best Actress are Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs, Viola Davis for The Help, Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, and Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn.

In other words: a cross-dressing character, a black character in a movie that has a white woman saving the day, a kickass woman with a history of brutal sexual abuse, a real-life political figure, and a real-life actress.

Really, the only surprise is that I’m at all surprised.

I have not seen any of these performances and will likely only see Viola Davis’s in The Help, so my snarky commentary is not meant to dismiss or denigrate the work of these actresses or the quality of their performances. I just can’t help noticing that their nominated performances are all for roles that fall into the Academy’s favorite categories for women: gender benders, real-life people, long-suffering nearly saintly black women, and abuse victims.

One could argue that these roles simply represent the types of movies that are being made and the types are roles that are offered to women, but that argument doesn’t hold up as well in the same year that offered us Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Melancholia, Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Charlize Theron in Young Adult, and Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids.

Melancholia gives us two lead actress roles in the same movie: two sisters named Justine and Claire, who first prepare to survive Justine’s wedding, and then prepare to survive the end of the world (spoiler alert!) In the first half of the movie, Justine is the one falling apart and Claire is the one trying to hold her sister together, but their roles reverse by the end of the film. I saw this movie with my boyfriend, and while I liked it, he was mostly bored and thought the characters were suffering from too strong a case of “white people problems.” That comment made me chuckle, but at the very least, I appreciated Melancholia for telling a different type of story than I usually see (and including a gorgeous, visually arresting prologue), and for showing a parallel relationship between two women – even if I didn’t understand why one sister was American and the other was English.

We saw We Need to Talk About Kevin a week later, and Tilda Swinton plays another character that you don’t see very often onscreen: a mother who deals with the aftermath of her son’s murder spree at his high school. The movie gives us a complex, fascinating, twisted relationship between the mother, Eva Khatchadourian, and her son Kevin, where the two are locked in a game of one-upmanship and share rather disturbing similarities in their outlook on life. You walk away wondering if Eva could have done something differently while she was raising Kevin or if he was doomed to be a sociopath no matter what, and no one is left with a clear-cut, easy answer.

Then we have Young Adult, which has a bitter, misanthropic, rather nasty piece of work at its center. Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a ghostwriter for a Sweet Valley High-esque teen novel series, who decides to make a play for her ex-boyfriend, who is married and has a child. She is a highly unpleasant person whose misanthropic diatribes and cutting comments inspire an interesting variety of emotions in the viewer: disgust, secondhand embarrassment, envy, and sometimes, a secret wish to be as blunt as she is.

Finally, we have Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, a woman whose life is falling apart right as her best friend is getting married. She clings to her best friend but feels increasingly desperate when another bridesmaid seems to be edging her out. I loved her character because her struggles were sympathetic and the audience is encouraged to feel for her, but we also see how some of her problems are of her own doing: she doesn’t take enough action in her life and plays the victim card too often (as Melissa McCarthy’s character points out to her late in the film). Wiig and her writing partner Annie Mumolo received (deserved) screenplay nominations and Melissa McCarthy received a (deserved) supporting actress nomination, but Wiig was overlooked for a nod in leading actress. This isn’t surprising, as the Academy is biased against comedy and tend to only throw comedy a bone in the supporting actor/actress categories or in screenplay (Juno being the most recent exception in my memory), but it’s still a shame. If McCarthy stole the movie, Wiig still had to carry it, and she did it marvelously. She was frequently hilarious and poignant, doing great physical comedy while also showing humanity and vulnerability.

All of these actresses were lauded by critics for their performances in those films, but none of them earned a Best Actress nomination – not even Tilda Swinton, who had earned a SAG and Golden Globe nomination.

I can’t pretend to know exactly why the nominations are what they are. I’ve only seen female performances that were snubbed, not the ones that were nominated. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen this story play out many times before.

One (seemingly) common thread between the Best Actress-nominated roles is a story about a woman struggling against adversity in some way – Glenn Close against sexism, Viola Davis against racism and sexism, Michelle Williams against sexism and perception, Meryl Streep against sexism and political discrimination, Rooney Mara against sexism.

As a feminist, I know I’m supposed to want to see movies about women struggling against THE PATRIARCHY AND STEREOTYPES or whatever.

But sometimes, I get seriously tired of those stories. I want more stories about characters like Eva Khatchadourian and Mavis Gary and Annie Walker, who aren’t struggling against THE SYSTEM so much. Rather, they’re locked in battles with another person, or even with themselves. Their stories aren’t grand, sweeping statements about The Way Women are Perceived in Society – those elements are slightly at play but don’t make up the main thrust of the story.

I want more movies about women who are allowed to fuck up as much as men do, who are not particularly likable, and who are partially responsible for creating their own pain.

In a strange way, I think a story not having an explicit feminist statement can be the most feminist statement of all.