There were a lot of notable snubs this year - Laura Linney, Maria Bello, Scarlett Johansson, Shirley MacLaine and Gong Li.
The nominees for Best Supporting Actress in 2005 were: Amy Adams in Junebug as "Ashley" Catherine Keener in Capote as "Nelle Harper Lee" Frances McDormand in North Country as "Glory" Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener as "Tessa Quayle" Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain as "Alma Del Mar"
My Ranking: 1. Adams - I don't think you'll meet anyone who doesn't agree that Adams gave the best performance of these five. She juggled both the comic and dramatic aspects of the character with a sense of balance, and her big scene in the hospital was a tour-de-force.
2. Weisz - I was pleased with Weisz's win. She gave a powerful performance and she had excellent chemistry with Ralph Fiennes in one of the best pictures of 2005.
3. Keener - A much-derided nomination, but I thought Keener was impressive in her tiny, subtle role. She catches the eye from the edges of scenes, and her shock at being noticed for her own work at Capote's party near the end of the film is a wonderfully acted moment.
4. McDormand - McDormand has a role that almost overdoes the Oscar-baitiness (accent, sickness, strong woman, deglam) and she's definitely the weakest here (although I haven't seen Williams). It is more of a filler nomination than a deserved one.
-. Williams - haven't seen the film.
My Personal Ballot: 1. Amy Adams in Junebug as "Ashley" 2. Rosamund Pike in The Libertine as "Elizabeth Malet" 3. Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener as "Tessa Quayle" 4. Juliette Binoche in Hidden as "Anne Laurent" 5. Taraji P. Henson in Hustle & Flow as "Shug"
"Notorious was nice, but it’s not in the color purple range" "Angels and Demons may get nominated for cinematography the imagery was profound" "District Nine will definitely win for best foreign film it made money and everyone loved it" ~ 8movies
Posts: 2714 | Location: nz | Registered: January 12, 2009
01. Adams 02. Weisz 03. Williams 04. Keener 05. McDormand
My ballot:
01. Amy Adams, Junebug 02. Laura Linney, The Squid and the Whale 03. Corinna Harfouch, Downfall 04. Emily Mortimer, Match Point 05. Maya Sansa, The Best of Youth
#1. Amy Adams, Junebug -I wasn't so impressed with the movie but Amy Adams won the hearts of many of us on this site as the very charming and loveable Ashley. She made the movie and she deserved to win the Oscar that year (although she had close competition).
#2. Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain -A small performance but she owns every scene that she was in. That one scene where she sees Ennis and Jack at the botton of the stairs is a wonderful moment for her when you see her shock and pain in just seconds. I would not have objected an Oscar win by her either.
#3. Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener -First of all, I honestly do not get why some people think this was a leading performance. She was gone like halfway through the movie and I think she had no more than a half an hour of screentime, maybe like 20-25 minutes, and I think she definitely belonged in Supporting. Like Reese in Lead that year, it was a good performance but she had two more worthy people ahead of her.
#4. Catherine Keener, Capote -This has got to be one of the most complained about nominations in the past 20 years (up there with Brenda Blethyn in "Little Voice"), and while I personally wouldn't have nominated her for this (she was more worthy in "The 40 Year Old Virgin"), she did have some nice moments and for the size of the role, she did do a good job with what she was given.
#5. Frances McDormand, North Country -I honestly don't have much to say about this nomination. I remember little from her performance and she has definitely given better performances (Mississippi Burning, Fargo, Almost Famous, to name three).
Posts: 1293 | Location: WV | Registered: October 23, 2005
Adams was radiant. Weisz is one of my favorite actresses, and "Gardener" was my favorite film of the year, so I'm happy she won. Williams did a great job, but I don't think she was the revelation many thought she was; I think she did comparable work on "Dawson's Creek."
Bottom two is less impressive. I love McDormand and Keener, but I wasn't that impressed by McDormand's role, and Keener ... what the hell did Keener do in that film? It's not that Keener is a limited actress but that the role of Harper Lee as written gave her nothing to play. It was barely a character. It's not surprising that every single list in this thread ranks these two at the bottom.
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"A movie is not good because it arrives at conclusions you share, or bad because it does not. A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it: about the way it considers its subject matter, and about how its real subject may be quite different from the one it seems to provide." - Roger Ebert, from the introduction to "Awake in the Dark" (2006)
Weisz has a LOT of impact in her film, I say bump her to lead and make way for someone else since she seemed destined from the Golden Globe win.
Juliette Binoche in Cache, Zhang Ziyi in 2046 and Tilda Swinton in Narnia, Thumbsucker or Constantine (YES!) would've rounded out a fantastic category in place of Keener, who did next to nothing in Capote and McDormand, who was clearly filler and has done way better.
If Gong Li's role in Memoirs of a Geisha had been performed in Japanese instead of that distracting, accented and broken English, she would've been my winner hands down. As is, she gets you only halfway there.
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Posts: 1181 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: May 08, 2003
1. Taryn Manning (HUSTLE AND FLOW) 2. Summer Glau (Serenity) 3. Catherine Keener (THE 40-YEar-Old Virgin) 4. Rachel Weisz (THe Constant Gardener) 5. Maria Bello (A History of Violence)
