Each weekday until the Oscars on Sunday, Inquirer film critics Carrie Rickey and Steven Rea will discuss their picks for the winners in one of the six major categories - best supporting actress, best supporting actor, best director, best actor, best actress and best picture.
Best Actress:
The nominees for actress in a leading role are: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married; Angelina Jolie, Changeling; Melissa Leo, Frozen River; Meryl Streep, Doubt; and Kate Winslet, The Reader.
Carrie: Absolutely the hardest category to handicap. This is supposed to be the Year of Kate Winslet, previously nominated five times for acting awards and nominated this year for the sullen eroticism of her performance in The Reader. So far this year she's won the Golden Globe and BAFTA (British Academy Awards), but Meryl Streep won the Screen Actors Guild statuette for her performance as the steely Sister Superior in Doubt – which suggests that voters in this category are divided. Much as I think Winslet is one of the finest actresses working, I don't think The Reader is anywhere near Winslet's best work. (That would be Little Children or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) I actually think Streep (who got her record 15th nomination this year) had a greater degree of difficulty playing an unsympathetic Bronx-accented nun than Winslet did as the German-accented Woman With A Secret. I am totally knocked out by Melissa Leo as the desperate single mom in Frozen River gritting teeth as she feeds her sons popcorn for breakfast, and by Anne Hathaway, kicking to the curb her Cinderella persona as the bipolar, mouthy sister in Rachel Getting Married. Angelina Jolie in Changeling? Persuasive, intermittently moving, but lacks the bottomless well of emotion that the other performances have.