(LIST) The 5 Most Ridiculous Best Actress Wins!

by Louis Virtel

I had a ball with a 10 Greatest Best Actress Victories list, and now it's time to reveal my dark side: Here are my five least favorite wins for Best Actress, and you'll notice they're all pretty fabulous actresses doing subpar work in subpar fare. Maybe I'm just mad at them for getting rewarded for the wrong work. Maybe I'm contrarian. T'any rate, here are the five offenders:

5. Jodie Foster, The Accused

 

This is not my way of damning Jodie for that cryptic, near-Dada speech she gave at the Golden Globes. This is my way of acknowledging that The Accused is unimportant Oscar bait full of teary monologues that just don't work. Jodie Foster is a commanding actress, and I consider her work in The Silence of the Lambs one of the most justified wins of the '90s. (Love the '91 Oscars so, so much. Thelma, Louise, Rambling Rose, Mercedes Ruehl, etc.) But even in the broadest description, The Accused is Lifetime material at best: A squawky client with Desperately Seeking Susan style is sexually assaulted at a bar in front of cheering patrons, and she and her tough-as-nails lawyer eventually win in court over the trio of rapists. Jodie is a ball of forced characterizations here, a nonstop medley of quirks and squawks. It doesn't help that '88 was also the year of Glenn Close's best performance (and film) Dangerous Liaisons and Meryl Streep's now-underrated work in the very damning A Cry in The Dark. Both would've been better and more unusual choices than Jodie in The Accused.


4. Grace Kelly, The Country Girl


Grace Kelly is wonderful in exactly three films, and those are Dial M For Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief. Whether or not you're nuts about Grace (which is what I call "going Mogambo for Monaco"), you have to admit that she and Hitchcock were perfect collaborators, and Grace ended up pushing herself more in those roles than any other -- including the one that got her Oscar, that of Georgie Elgin in the tawdry The Country Girl. In short, this Clifford Odets play adaptation is about how a couple's world is rocked when their child is killed in a car accident, and we soon find out the likable declining actor husband (Bing Crosby) and aloof wife (Grace) aren't the people we think they are. He's a cad, and she's his stalwart, resilient wife. Except Grace isn't powerful enough as either the surface Georgie or the true Georgie, and by the time the movie's over we're asleep anyway. Meanwhile, 1954 was also the year of -- say it with me! -- Judy Garland in A Star is Born and Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones. While Georgie is at least a multi-dimensional role, the performance is obviously not a tour de force. Judy's life-or-death urgency in A Star is Born is clearly superior, and thus I can't reflect on 1954 without wincing. (Even though my girl Eva Marie Saint walked off with the supporting trophy, thank God.)

3. Jane Fonda, Coming Home


Your eyes do not deceive you. Yes, this is AfterElton's resident Jane Fonda hyper-shill Louis Virtel. This is real life. This isn't an absinthe-induced nightmare, though I'm sorry if this inspires one in you.

Jane Fonda is not just a fabulous actress in everything from They Shoot Horses, Don't They to her recent stint on The Newsroom, but a very important actress too. Her unadorned, yet self-aware work in films like Klute felt like the dawn of a new type of female in film, the thinking, articulate, fearsome, yet admittedly flawed distaff protagonist. By the time she snagged the lead in Coming Home, she had three Oscar nominations and one win to her name, and her work opposite Jon Voight does not live up to that streak. In Coming Home, she's essentially a boring love interest to the film's central character, and Jane adds little dimension to what little characterization she's given. No one would call this one of Jane's great performances. I certainly didn't. To make matters worse, this was the year of three excellent Best Actress-nominated performances: the immortal Geraldine Page in Interiors (in a performance that saves that whole dreadful movie), Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, and Ingrid Bergman in her greatest role of '70s in Autumn Sonata. I'd have given Jane the win for Julia in '77 (sorry, Diane Keaton!) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They in '69 (sorry, Maggie Smith), but not for this weirdly forgettable role.

2. Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
 

What the hell happened in 2009? I guess Oscar voters figured Meryl Streep was too expectedly great in Julie and Julia and Carey Mulligan and Gabourey Sidibe were too young for consideration, because Sandra Bullock garnered an Oscar for one of the softest, least complicated leading lady roles in Academy history. Leigh Anne Tuohy may be a noble person, but The Blind Side's plot reduces her to a friendly mama bear who experiences almost zero emotional arc. She tears up while hugging her adopted football player? She can tolerate Tim McGraw as an actor? None of it justifies an Oscar. We simply like Sandra Bullock, and that's what won her the trophy. Meanwhile, here's some news: Meryl is effing flawless in Julie and Julia. The woman should have closer to six Oscars, and she should certainly have one for this delightful, brilliantly realized performance -- particularly when her leading "competition" is a just a pleasant do-gooder with a twang.

1. Elizabeth Taylor, BUtterfield 8
 

Taylor said it herself: "It still say it stinks." BUtterfield 8 is a movie whose opening sequence of events should tell you exactly how inane it was. Quoth the ol' Movieline magazine: "Taylor awakens alone in her married lover's bed, wraps herself in only a sheet, lights a cigar, slugs back a glass of whiskey, discovers her torn dress on the floor, brushes her teeth with booze, finds an envelope with $250 cash, scrawls 'No Sale' in red lipstick across a mirror, leaves the money, steals the absent wife's full-length mink coat, calls her answering service, and hails a cab to the apartment of...Eddie Fisher, who greets her 'Sunday morning, and there's scotch on your breath.'" Ridiculous from start to finish, and Taylor won the big award for surviving a health crisis the preceding year. Guess who she beat out? JUNTA-BUSTING GODDESS Melina Mercouri, who is perhaps one of the coolest Oscar nominees/celebrities/people ever, and the notoriously shunned Deborah Kerr and Shirley MacLaine (in The Apartment, no less).
I also have minor issues over Sophia Loren beating AfterElton fave Geraldine Page in Summer and Smoke (Tennessee W.! Our boy!) and the frightfully wonderful Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass. Guys, can I please choose that for Best Movie Ever? Would you read it? I am OBSESSED with that movie. I think about it all the time, and not just because Warren Beatty has 2x4s for cheekbones. Natalie makes me forgive her for West Side Story twenty times over in Splendor.

Anyway, thank God Liz Taylor was fabulous in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or her Oscar legacy would be forever bleak. Phew.

Are these your choices for worst ever too? If not, why? Why would you hurt me?