Oscar Index: Your Guess is As Good As Mine

The Leading 5:

1. Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

2. Viola Davis, The Help

3. Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

4. Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin

5. [tie] Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

5. [tie] Charlize Theron, Young Adult

Outsiders: Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene; Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Felicity Jones, Like Crazy; Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia

Streep just keeps winning -- as do Williams and Swinton (who had an impressive Time magazine spread this week to further lift her and Kevin's profile) -- while Davis holds the front-running momentum of both her film and her ceaseless, visible support of it. It's much muddier near the bottom: "Charlize Theron could have used a [critics' group] win to offset news of the slightly-softer-than-hoped opening of Young Adult this weekend," noted Mark Harris, "and after a burst of festival excitement, Glenn Close isn't getting the 'It's her moment' heat that she needs to stay in the mix for Albert Nobbs."

To Harris's latter point, what a difference a week makes. At the same site where Nathaniel Rogers was just keeping Close's flame alight ("[W]e still think she'll pull through by way of persistence for dream project congratulatory votes. [...] this Oscar angle has rich ancestry"), his colleague Michael C. augurs a slightly darker scenario:

[F]or all the importance placed on it I think it's fair to say "overdue" status is over-valued. It's a bump. A nudge. A tie-breaker. Did it help Alan Arkin eke out a win over Eddie Murphy? Probably. Will it be good enough for Glenn Close to beat this year's stiff Best Actress competition if Albert Nobbs' reception remains lukewarm? Doubtful. In the final tally, the greatest benefit of overdue status lies less in garnering votes and more in garnering buzz, bringing attention to performances that are worthy on their own merit.

Pretty much. It's too bad Mara can't be overdue: The 26-year-old is amazing in Dragon Tattoo, and yet she lags behind Olsen's distant head start heading into a crucial stretch of the Oscar marathon. Jeffrey Wells puts it best about Mara's precipitous tumble from the Best Actress derby after a few days of buzz and a general drought of awards-body recognition:

On the afternoon of Friday, 12.2 -- hours after seeing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo at Sony -- I posted a Best Actress evaluation piece that began with my enthusiastic response to Rooney Mara's performance as Lisbeth Salander. She was so fierce and penetrating, I figured, that she had to be a late-inning Best Actress contender. In my own book that's still true, but things have changed over the last 11 days, and now... who knows?

The tight embargo enforcement and the general feeling that Sony doesn't see Dragon Tattoo as an award-calibre film has created a feeling that the air is seeping out of the Tattoo tires, awards-wise, including Mara's own. It just goes to show how quickly things change in this racket. The wind shifts direction, the temperature cools down, the current loses strength.

Like I said, though: Heat rises. Wait and see how America responds to the film -- particularly if they're anything like Sasha Stone, whom Mara's performance moved to write one of the most insightful pieces of criticism I've read all year:

Even though we've long since known Lisbeth Salander in print, and she was put to screen beautifully by Noomi Rapace, there is something strangely exciting to Mara's performance that feels brand new. To be fully capable? To be the one you want to have your back? To never really need to be saved? To not have been sculpted to suit the unending envelopment of the male gaze? It never happens anymore. Not in American film. [...]

By the end of the film, the whole point of it comes to life. This is a movie about a girl, all right. Her hard shell finally cut through, as she encounters the one man who cares enough about her to bring her a sandwich for breakfast and stand ten feet back from her, never reaching out his hand so much as to shake hers. As Blomkvist, sweetly rendered irresistible by Daniel Craig, keeps his distance from Salander, so does the girl with the dragon tattoo want to move closer to him. To fall in love is to have the most important layer pulled back, and the softest of flesh exposed. It's a risk Salander has avoided for her own sake for most of her life. But to keep all surfaces protected means to repel everything that comes softly near. And that is an even bigger risk: to never have the sweetest thing.

I look around this year at the films that are headed for Best Picture and I'm seeing mostly movies about men. Even if Dragon Tattoo wanted to be about about a man it has been overtaken by a girl.

If Sony and Team Tattoo could bottle even a couple drops of that passion on Mara's behalf when the film opens next week, they would have all the awards juice they need heading into January. We'll see.

The Leading 5:

1. Jean Dujardin, The Artist

2. George Clooney, The Descendants

3. Brad Pitt, Moneyball

4. Michael Fassbender, Shame

5. Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar

Outsiders: Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Demián Bichir, A Better Life; Michael Shannon, Take Shelter; Woody Harrelson, Rampart; Ralph Fiennes, Coriolanus

Basically three things happened here, and they're all pretty straightforward:

1. Clooney, Pitt and Fassbender confirmed over the course of the critics' awards whirlwind that they're pretty much in, while Dujardin continued to come up short of a win while remaining firmly entrenched in virtually every pundit's top two or three for the Oscars. There's a grain of salt in there somewhere; I am too tired to look for it right now.

2. SAG -- again, the only awards body to date whose membership overlaps in part with the Academy's -- blew everything up by snubbing Fassbender and Oldman in exchange for DiCaprio and... Bichir? Which is to say: Not Michael Shannon, who'd been dancing on the bubble since October or so. Ask any of the Oscar cognoscenti before today the odds of who'd fill in on a SAG ballot for Fassbender, Oldman and Shannon, not one would have said Bichir. Nothing against Bichir, either, who's excellent in A Better Life, has been out pounding the awards pavement, and whom Summit has aggressively campaigned since sending the first awards-season screeners in September. It's just... wow. You can totally stop reading now!

3. Speaking of screeners, cheapskate crapola maestro Avi Lerner's hilarious dip into the prestige end of the distribution pool -- on behalf of Harrelson -- derailed when whatever refurbished HP laptop he's using to burn Rampart screeners apparently bugged out. The resulting letter from Millennium Entertainment to Academy voters explained: "They were compressed and replicated incorrectly which caused digital noise, artifacting, solarization, and horizontal banding lines to appear on the screener. These technical problems do not exist on the original film." For your consideration, indeed.

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