One Category at a Time: Actress

Can we call a moratorium on Best Actress always being called a "weak" category? More often than not this kind of talk stems from people who are too lazy to search for talented leading ladies flying well below the mainstream radar, and who balk at the notion of an awards-caliber performance coming from a less-than-awards-caliber film.

Yet nearly every year the Academy comes up with five terrific nominees, and if it seems like the pre-nomination field is thinner than that of the leading men on the other side of the gender divide, it certainly speaks more to the systemic male dominance of the film industry than to the quality of the lesser seen -- though not necessarily fewer -- Oscar-worthy female performances.

In fact, having a category in which the multi-nominated Oscar heavyweights don't figure in as prominently as they would in, say, Best Actor, can be a blessing, as it forces audiences and Academy members alike to seek out titles that could use the exposure. If this crop of nominees can encourage a few more people to go see Wild or Two Days, One Night, then it aught to be celebrated rather than dismissed as "weak".

Review - Gone Girl

“You don't know what you've got 'til it's...” the tagline for Gone Girl ominously forebodes. That common phrase takes on twisted new meaning in this hotly-awaited thriller from David Fincher, which opens with the voiceover of a man confessing how he wishes he could know what his wife's thinking; pick her brain; see what's on her mind – all worded with a queasy skull-cracking metaphor designed to unsettle us right off the bat. He truly won't know what he's got until she's gone, and when he finds out, he'll wish he never asked.

Like the vanished woman to whom the title refers, Gone Girl has quite a lot – too much, in fact – on its mind. Based on the best-selling pulp novel by Gillian Flynn (who also adapted it for the screen), it's a movie that aspires to be many movies at once, but does not fully succeed at being any of them.