The Oscars are my Super Bowl and World Series combined. It’s a tsunami that consumes me from December to March of every year - I sprint from one movie theatre to another to see all the movies which could possibly be nominated; I voraciously devour all the Oscar-related news, speculation, gossip, and prognostications, both online and in print. I have also been very fortunate that over the past six years, one of the people who occupy the top tier of my life’s “gush list”, the divine Ms. Jennifer M., has been sharing this passion with me. Jennifer, who possesses razor-sharp wit, an elegant writing style, impeccable artistic taste (well, maybe I should temper that one a little bit, since she did vote with the Academy on Crash over Brokeback Mountain a couple of years ago), and the uncanny ability to quote both Vanity Fair and InTouch in the same breath, has been partnering with me to write two Oscar notes: one before the big show where we unveil our picks for the winners, and one on Monday after the ceremony, giving our observations on the winners, the fashions, the show, and anything else that’s fair game at the Kodak theatre. For the past six years, we have made these notes available to a select distribution list (not because we like exclusivity-well, maybe we do-but because we’re apprehensive that Renee Zellweger’s publicist stumbles across the writings and starts thinking, ah, uhmmm, lawsuit), but with the unveiling of “From the Ledge”, I think we’re now ready, actually eager, to come out as bona-fide Oscar bloggers to the world at large. We’re now ready for our proverbial close-up.
Jen and I are still in the process of deciding on how we are going to write our series of Oscar blog posts, but I’d like to start writing about the films that I think are going to get strong consideration for the 2008 nominations. Margot at the Wedding, the first of these films, certainly has great Oscar pedigree: Nicole Kidman, of course, won the Best Actress Oscar in 2002 for her prosthetic-nosed Virginia Woolf in The Hours, and director-writer Noah Baumbach, received a Best Original Screenplay nomination two years ago for The Squid and the Whale. The movie is about Margot (Kidman), a successful fiction writer, traveling with her son, Claude (Zane Pais), to attend the wedding of her estranged sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to an unemployed, depressive musician-artist, Malcolm (Jack Black). Margot is that one relative that all of us have, whom we wished we could have de-selected as part of our family gene pool. Caustic, mean-spirited, manipulative, and judgmental, in a passive-aggressive way, she always finds the right, sock-it-to-the gut, method to make the people around her feel really bad about themselves, whether it’s telling her son that he was more graceful when he was younger, or insisting that her sister is settling by marrying a man beneath her intellectually. Kidman is magnificent as Margot. Always soft-spoken, but also always ready with a perfectly timed bitter and cutting riposte, her Margot is undeniably reprehensible. I think it’s a brave performance, especially for someone of Nicole’s star wattage, because there is nothing really redeeming about Margot, in my mind- in the scene when she shows off to her family and climbs up this tall tree and cannot come down, I’m sure everyone in the audience is rooting for her to stay there, stuck. But it is also an honest, grounded performance that we can recognize - how many family members do we have where we struggle to find a sympathetic or kind trait but ultimately can’t? And how guilty and afraid are we to say so out loud, because he or she is family, because “blood is thicker than water”?
Kidman’s towering performance is surprisingly matched by Jennifer Jason Leigh’s. I have to be honest that Leigh gave, in my mind, one of the most atrociously bad performances ever committed on film - an unintelligible, highly mannered Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (where she acted and sounded like a bad, drunk, Bette Davis drag impersonator who just got her molars taken out). I tried to like her when I went to see her in the Broadway revival of “Cabaret” (she replaced Natasha Richardson), but was horrified to see a Sally Bowles who nearly got eaten up alive by the set (and Alan Cummings), and who limped through an off-key rendition of one of my most favorite musical-diva songs of all time, “Maybe this Time”. There must have been something in working with her husband, Baumbach, that gave her the ability to come up with an emotionally honest, and accessible performance. No annoying mannerisms or acting tics for this Pauline- she is vulnerable and neurotic, suffering and vicious at the same time. Her scenes with Kidman radiate a true-to-life-ness that is satisfying- one knows that after they tear each other to bits, with all the real and perceived resentments of being sisters, they can rebound quickly back to fondly laugh and cry together over their shared life experiences. In addition to these two performances, the screenplay also makes the movie. The family situations feel very real, the conflicts are engaging, and what other film this year would contain this classic: ” I am the walking emotional version of bad feng shui!”?
Jennifer Jason Leigh has already been nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Independent Spirit Awards. Look for her and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay to get serious Oscar notice. I am cautious on Kidman right now, just because she has a lot of movie-star baggage that the Academy tends to look down on, but with a weak year like this year (seriously, Amy Adams, as Best Actress, for Enchanted?), one never knows.
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