Friday, February 11, 2011 at 12:43 2011 Oscar countdown: worst Best Actress winners in Oscar history
Following our entry about the best Best Actress winners in Oscar history, we offer now our juicier pick of the worst Oscar-winning performances in the category. In this case we also offer an alternate choice that, in our opinion, would have made a more deserved winner for any given year.
Same rules apply as in the best of entry: out of the 83 Oscar winners, only three are not taken into consideration (Mary Pickford's in Coquette (1928/9), Marie Dressler in Min and Bill (1930/1) and Glenda Jackson's in A Touch of Class (1973)) for the simple reason that we haven't seen the films.
Make your comments and offer your own choices.
10. Katharine Hepburn in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Katharine Hepburn is doubtless one of the greatest screen performers of all time, but two of her four Oscar-winning performances (which make her the most successful actor in Oscar history) rank among her worst work. Leaving aside her sentimental win for On Golden Pond (Parkinson's disease was too advanced to allow for a truly good performance), her victory for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is hardly understandable. Her portrayal of a seemingly progressive woman confronted with unknown prejudices when her daughter announces her engagement with a black man (Sidney Poitier, could there ever be a better son-in-law?) seems today as phoney and shallow as the character itself. We prefer to remember her for her unforgettable performances in Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, Summertime or Long Day's Journey into Night.
Should have won: Anne Bancroft in The Graduate
9. Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernardette (1943). When Jennifer Jones won the Oscar for her portrayal of Bernardette Soubirous, she famously apologized to Ingrid Bergman, who was nominated for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bergman supposedly answered that Jones' Bernardette was better than her Maria. I don't think so, but who cares? None of them should have taken home the Oscar that year anyhow.
Should have won: Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier.
8. Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God (1986). Maybe the best example of a sympathetic vote. She was not that bad, but her win was undeserved, especially taking into account the competition she was facing.
Should have won: Sigourney Weaver in Aliens
7. Kate Winslet in The Reader (2008). Berrhard Schlink's excellent novel was turned into a flawed, painfully accented film featuring Winslet's worst performance ever. She had been nominated five times and they decided it was her time to win. The final scenes in the jail are especially excruciating. Make-up artists in Absolutely Fabulous did a better job on Patsy than those of The Reader on Winslet. Was Gloria Stuart still alive when they made this? She plays old Winslet much better than Winslet herself.
Should have won: Meryl Streep in Doubt
6. Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 (1960). Taylor has the honour to make the cut both in the best and worst Best Actress winners lists. We chose her turn in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among the top ten best Oscar-winning performances, but her first win as the high-class hooker in Butterfield 8 has necessarily to be included here. It is well known that her victory was mainly due to a sympathetic vote on account of the recent death of her husband Michael Todd and her near-fatal illness, for which she even had to be subjected to a tracheotomy. Years later Shirley MacLaine, who was the favourite nominee for her role in The Appartment, was to say: 'I lost out to a tracheotomy'.
Should have won: Deborah Kerr in The Sundowners
5. Cher in Moonstruck (1987). People usually argue that Cher's Oscar was justified by saying that 'she's never been funnier'. Well, that's not much for a woman that lost any sign of facial expression a couple of decades ago and that, up to that point, was best known as an actress for her roles as the mother of a severely disfigured boy and as the roommate of a woman contaminated with plutonium radiation. The Comedy Golden Globe would have been enough. Olympia Dukaki's win as her mother was much more deserved.
Should have won: Sally Kirkland in Anna
4. Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love (1998). For years now I've been trying to come to terms with this performance, especially because I really like the film and still think it deserved the Best Picture Oscar over Saving Private Ryan (a 30-minute masterpiece followed by 2 hours of unremarkable war filmmaking). It has finally dawned on me that there's nothimg wrong in Paltrow's performance, but nothing particularly good, either. That, and her terrible acceptance speech, is enough to include her here.
Should have won: Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth
3. Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968). Barbra Streisand has always taken herself for a better actress than she actually is, which might be due to the Academy's early recognition for her film debut in Funny Girl, one of the worst biopics ever (the musical numbers are quite all right, though). She obtained exactly the same number of votes as Katharine Hepburn, thus providing for the only tie in the category in Oscar history.
Should have won: Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter (as sole winner)
2. Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins (1964). The most annoying nanny for the most annoying, old-looking pair of siblings in cinema history. The following year she was to be nominated again for playing another nanny called Maria in the same kind of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious performance in The Sound of Music.
Should have won: Kim Stanley in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (and, buy the way, watch this film if you haven't yet)
1. Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side (2009). Only one year after it happened, Sandra Bullock's win at the Oscars is one of those embarrassing moments only the momentum of an Oscar campaign in a certain moment can explain. In that, one has to admit it, she was perfect, showing that mixture of modesty and genuine interest in the victory so appealing to Academy voters. That Oscar is very much about a good campaign these days has been clear for years, but there's a minimum level of quality one should expect in an award that, for better or worse, still has such an impact in viewers around the world. Bullock's performance in The Blind Side is generally mediocre and occasionally dreadful (probably in those moments that Blind Side fans found especially uplifting). Bullock is very good in physical comedy (stumbling naked into Ryan Reynolds, for instance), but she is not and she'll probably never be an accomplished dramatic actress (The Blind Side is so hilariously bad that I don't even consider her turn in the film a dramatic performance). Moreover, I'm afraid the Oscar can be as damaging for her career as it was for Helen Hunt's after As Good As It Gets. The recognition has inevitably generated expectations she won't be able to live up to. A win for The Proposal would have been less outrageous than this. She is, in our opinion, the worst Best Actress winner in history.
Should have won: Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia or Carey Mulligan in An Education
Reader Comments (2)
Loved this post and the previous one about the best Best Acress winners in Oscar history. Some of your examples today made me think of the Marisa Tomei /Vanessa Redgrave situation back in 1993... who deserved that Oscar???
Trivia: Sandra Bullock also won a Razzie for Worst Actress for All About Steve and even went to the award show to accept the award. The following night she won Best Actress at the Oscars.