The Beatrice Straight effect: Rooney Mara's and Blake Lively's Oscar chances

When Judi Dench gave her acceptance speech after winning the Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love in 1999, she anticipated disapproving comments on account of the brevity of her part in the film by saying: 'I feel for eight minutes on the screen, I should only get a little bit of him'. 

Many uninformed commentators and media hailed Dench's turn as the shortest ever to earn an Academy Award. They were wrong. In reality, Beatrice Straight holds the record for her Oscar-winning performance as William Holden's wronged wife in the 1976 classic Network. Judi Dench's Queen Elizabeth appears on screen exactly 7 minutes and 58 seconds, while Beatrice Straight's performance clocks in at a mere 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Only 2 minutes separate both performances, and yet the cases of Dame Judi Dench and Beatrice Straight are hardly comparable.

Judi Dench had been nominated the previous year for portraying another British monarch, Queen Victoria, in the film Mrs. Brown. She lost to Helen Hunt, who played a  desperate single mother trying to make ends meet as a waitress in As Good As It Gets, but many thought Dench should have won. Moreover, she was already a renowned performer with an impressive resumé on stage, film and television. She was not, admittedly, the extremely popular actress she is today. Although she had already played by then the part of M in the James Bond series once and had starred in relatively successful films like Henry V and A Room With A View, Judi Dench's is a curious case of belated stardom. It was after her Oscar win that she truly became a universal household name, not least because she was to be nominated for the Academy Award on four other occasions. Nevertheless, the deliberately showy role of Queen Elizabeth was tailor made for her and she enjoyed special 'and Judi Dench' treatment both in the poster and in the credits of the film, so the nomination (and indeed the win) were not really a surprise.

Beatrice Straight was no newcomer in 1976, but it certainly felt she was coming from nowhere when she won the Academy Award. Mostly a stage actress, she enjoyed a successful career on Broadway, where she had even received a Tony for her role in The Crucible in 1953. The most notable film role until her victory in the Oscars was arguably a brief appearance in Fred Zinnemann's The Nun's Story. 

Having recently watched Network again for the research for this article, it is worth mentioning that, contrary to general popular acceptance that Straight's is a two-scene performance, she actually appears in three scenes during the film. In the first one, of around 40 seconds, she gets up from the bed she shares with husband William Holden just to discover that Peter Finch, who has spent the night at their apartment after the television incident, has disappeared. She appears later in the film in a brief mid-shot of the living room with her back to the camera and, of course, in the famous five-minute scene with William Holden in which she is confronted with her husband's infidelity. It was this moving scene that effectively earned her the Academy Award (clip available in YouTube).

It is certainly extraordinary that such a short performance could end up winning an Oscar. The part, like the rest of Paddy Chayefsky's daring, premonitory screenplay, was wonderfully written, but it was not a stellar role made for a special guest performer, like it was the case with Judi Dench's Queen Elizabeth. The opening credits in Network only feature the four main players of the film (Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch and Robert Duvall) and, although information about the film tends to upgrade her billing status on account of her Oscar win, the original final credits of the film relegate her to inconspicuous territory together with performers that have merely a couple of lines in the film.

Straight herself acknowledged in the acceptance speech that she was the dark horse of the race, and it might well be true, but getting the most ballots among a group of five actresses should not be considered as big a surprise as having been shortlisted in the first place. The miracle was not the victory, but the nomination.

Many factors determine an Oscar winner, but the only one that should really matter, the achievement in acting, is usually overlooked when talking about Beatrice Straight's sensational triumph in the Academy Awards. For all the brevity of the part, Straight delivers a memorable portrayal of a wounded human being and displays the whole range of emotions encompassed between sheer outrage and painful acceptance. 

Two other reasons, however, explain Straight's success at the Oscars: the competition in the category and the general nature of Academy membership.

Paradoxically, big surprises at the Oscars don't take place in weak categories; on the contrary, upsets in a certain category usually occur in fiercely competitive years (I have already mentioned this in other entries of the blog and Emanuel Levy's excellent Oscar Fever elaborates on the question).

The Best Supporting Actress category in 1976 is a perfect example of a highly competitive race. Beatrice Straight competed with four extraordinary performances. Jane Alexander was nominated for another brief role in the political thriller All The President's Men. A solid performer and a former Oscar nominee, Alexander was to the 70's what Sissy Spacek was to the 80s, Susan Sarandon to the 90s or Cate Blanchett to the first decade of the 21st century. Lee Grant, a past Oscar winner and nominee, entered the race in a likable part as a Jewish refugee in the ensemble drama Voyage of the Damned. Another past nominee was Piper Laurie, who created one of the most frightening characters of the decade as Sissy Spacek's fanatically religious mother in Carrie. The last contender was Jodie Foster, who had received kudos from critics' groups for her role as the child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Confronted with such an extraordinary group of actresses, Academy members probably split their votes and Straight pulled off a surprise win.

Admittedly, the gender and age structure of the Academy also favored her triumph. Broadly speaking, the average Oscar voter is a middle-aged, conservative male. The dignity and ultimate acceptance with which Straight's character takes her husband's infidelity probably pleased many of the voters. She was, in other words, the wife many of them would love to cheat on.

But let's turn now to the object of this entry: Rooney Mara's and Blake Lively's 2010 Oscar chances for their roles in The Social Network and The Town, respectively.

Both are short performances but they rank among the best work delivered by female players in American movies last year. Their case is comparable neither with Judi Dench's nor with Beatrice Straight's. Despite the screen time, they both get relevant billing in their films (Mara's name has been, admittedly, strangely snubbed in the Best Ensemble Cast SAG nomination) and, although they are both in their early twenties, their names are well known in Hollywood. Lively is a popular television actress thanks to her leading role in the hit series Gossip Girl, while Rooney Mara has been one of the most talked about actresses of the year after it was revealed that she will play Lisbeth Salander in the American remake of the Millenium trilogy.

Rooney Mara's role in The Social Network can be compared to Beatrice Staright's in Network, not only because they both have two scenes and a half (Straight's silent mid-shot in the living room, Mara's face in her Facebook profile in the final scene of TSN) or because of the obvious similarity in the titles of the films. They both play the wronged woman. In the 70s middle-aged men left their wives for younger co-workers; in the Facebook era, Harvard nerds dump their girlfriends for an Internet application. As Erica, the betrayed girlfriend, Mara has the only truly likable role of the film. Moreover, she shares the opening (and best) scene of the movie with Jesse Eisenberg. No opening credits prepare the viewer for the vertiginously fast break-up talk, Sorkin style, between Erica and Zuckerberg. It is a memorable scene, maybe too good to digest at such an early stage of the film, that will find its cautionary resonance in the final scene, where Zuckerberg desperately updates his Facebook profile waiting Erica's response to his friend request. Mara's face on the computer screen is the last human vestige The Social Network is able to offer us.

Blake Lively's role in The Town is, like the movie itself, more conventional: the emotionally unstable, white trash junkie. In a surprising turn, Lively eludes character archetype and conveys a truly moving portrayal of a devastated human being. Her character enjoys longer screen time than Mara's in TSN (I might be wrong here, I don't have official screen times for both performances) and it plays a significant role in setting into motion the film's denouement. In a film with an excellent ensemble cast that features terrific work from Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Chris Cooper or Pete Postlethwaite, hers and Jeremy Renner's performances stand out. Her name appears high in the credits and should therefore be more accesible to Academy scrutiny.

With the award season in full swing and most nominations and winners already announced, Rooney Mara and Blake Lively have been conspicuously ignored for their individual work. Only the San Diego Film Critics Society included Blake Lively among their nominees as best supporting actress. Both have received recognition in some circles as part of the ensemble cast, but The Town failed to score a nod in the SAG while, as I said before, Rooney Mara's name has been inexplicably left out of the SAG nomination for the film. A SAG nod was, in my opinion, crucial for their chances of an Oscar nomination.

I had high expectations that one of them would be nominated for the Golden Globes, not least because this year's race in the supporting actress category is not as strong as the best actress one and because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association tends to be flexible in its choices (this year, to execrable results).

Right now, to speculate about Mara's or Lively's Oscar chances is rather a theoretical exercise. I would be delighted if any of them pulled off a surprise nomination, but I honestly don't expect it to happen. However, I am convinced that, in some years' time, their work in The Social Network and in The Town will be considered a turning point in what I expect to be long and successful film careers.