So, just give Streep a lifetime achievement award and be done with it rather than nominating her time and again. There is no way anyone can tell me Bullock was better in Blind Side than Streep was in Julia, but then Kidman got nominated over Streep in Hours, and she wasn't even the main figure in the story, much less the best actress in the movie. The "Best Actress" award has become one of the most perverted in the last 10 or so years, with some highly dubious choices.
Somehow, this didn't sink in the first time that I read it. I read it but then when MrUtley quoted it, I took it another way and I agree that Bullock may have an easier assignment in The Blind Side than what Streep made look like a lark because I would be willing to bet that she had many time considered what fun it would be to have a go at performing Julia Child.
Yet, I also have to consider that The Blind Side had an ideological element as it appeared to have in the way it was advertised in the trailers. The emphasis was on "do the right thing". At this point, we don't know what Sandra Bullock thought of the script and theme before the filming, but we do know her remarks in regard to the film post-acceptance ceremony of the Awards.
but then Kidman got nominated over Streep in Hours, and she wasn't even the main figure in the story, much less the best actress in the movie.And now it gets more complicated, believe me; and this was the part that I didn't automatically respond to because....
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274558/fullcredits#cast The Hours, borrows and I don't know whether that was because of Stephen Daldry, director --or,
Michael Cunningham, writer; but, seemingly, both Eileen Atkins (the florist in the flower shop when Streep is having the party) but also the adapting writer when Vanessa Redgrave requested that her friend (fellow actress,best seen in:
Gosford Park) adapt MRS. DALLOWAY, for Vanessa to perform. This is a novel by Virgina Woolf in which a veteran of WW1 also jumps/ lets go from a window and how that affects Mrs. Dalloway who is having a party at which there is an old lover of hers and another of their male friends. You see, I have talked about this before in Fiction at nytimes,com and,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119723/
may be the only novel by Virginia that I really like: for what it covers about the nature of humanity.
But then, when we went to see The Hours, most of us didn't know the back-story; we knew Michael Cunningham's version which he said he wrote in honor of Virginia Woolf. I thought that kind of balderdash. Was certainly not knocked out by Kidman and the prosthetic nose. Her angst was about right from everything I've read by Virginia's various friends and "relatives"; and she did particularly well with her scene involving her niece,her very moderne and painterly sister's child Angelica Bell who would later become Angelica Garnett. Aunt Virginia, and the child have a tiny burial for a bird under a tree. I think the bird may have been a robin but the importance is that Virginia was once a child like Angelica.
In a way, Michael Cunningham's/Stephen Daldry's,The Hours also deals with that aspect,"once a child", with several but noticeably it begins strongly with the child who became Ed Harris,war veteran. And consider how often does a little boy have a mother like Julianne Moore(?) who proves to have suicidal depression and yet survives whereas he does not.
Nor does Virginia played by Kidman. Who exactly was Meryl Streep but a character from a novel of Virginia Woolf who ended up in a novelette by Michael Cunningham which became a movie.
This is confusing enough when trying to trace the origins which really amounts to the depression of Virginia Woolf (and not to HIV and AIDs); and for that you have to do some fancy footwork through the annals of "feminism" to discover what really was that depression about.
I did that and then mentally remarked to myself, "Oh, right...." But then I'm the kind of person who really enjoyed the performance of Stephen Dillane as Leonard Woolf and having seen him work again with Julianne Moore appreciate his acting even more. So I tend to forget Nicole Kidman letting herself get involved with this; and I at times nearly forget that Streep was and why exactly compared to how easily Vanessa Redgrave dealt with threesomes. But then it may have obviously run in the family which seemed disposed to continue admitting that there was that. At least as much as with Virginia Woolf's family having dramas.
