Un-American Actresses

The first thing I noticed about the Academy Award nominations when they were announced this week was the list of best actress nominees. And the nominees are. . . Helen Mirren for The Queen, Judi Dench for Notes on a Scandal, Penelope Cruz for Volver, Kate Winslet for Little Children, and Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada. Notice anything special about this list? Except for Streep, every actress on this list is a foreigner, three Brits and a Spaniard. This is the Academy's not-so-subtle way of insinuating that if you want to look for great female acting talent, you have to send out for it.

Hollywood has long given actresses short shrift. When they're young they're cast in lightweight roles in forgettable movies. It says a lot that the the two youngest actresses among this year's Best Actress nominees are both from Europe; Kate Winslet and Penelope Cruz may be eye candy, but they're thinking man's eye candy. When American actresses get older, they tend to find less work and less relevance. It's a miracle if an actress like Meryl Streep lasts long. But then American actors, male or female, tend to be more show business folk than cinematic artists, so great does Hollywood put emphasis on appearance over actuality. This means that most American movie actors aren't encouraged to hone their craft so much, as it impedes the ability of Hollywood to "put on a show." British actors, by contrast, take their acting seriously from the start, with rigorous training and schooling to allow them to play anything in any medium. This allows Helen Mirren and Judi Dench to play three English queens between them with such accuracy and gives them the ability to play a police investigator, as Helen Mirren has done, or play a businesswoman on a BBC sitcom, as Judi Dench did for nearly a decade. Many if not most American actors are incapable of achieving such a wide range, and this not only includes second-tier character actors but also some of Hollywood's biggest stars. Tom Cruise, anyone?

This is what makes the Razzie Awards, which "honors" Hollywood's worst movies, so entertaining. The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation just gave the Sharon Stone movie Basic Instinct 2 seven Razzie nominations, including a worst actress nod for Stone. (She's already won two Razzies.) Among the other worst actress nominees were Hilary and Haylie Duff, Lindsay Lohan, and Jessica Simpson, undertalented twentysomethings who have collaborated in helping to make early-twenty-first-century American civilization all the more painful. Also receiving seven Razzie nominations was the latest movie from the Wayans Brothers, who see themselves as the black Marx Brothers but who have one fatal flaw: they're not funny. Little Man, their aforementioned flick, was notable for ripping off the plot line of a 1954 Bugs Bunny cartoon - a midget robber poses as a foundling baby to retrieve his ill-gotten booty from an unsuspecting couple and escape detection from the police, and he gets himself taken in by the unsuspecting couple, who takes the place of Bugs Bunny here.

By the way, the reason this idea was originally made into a Looney Tunes cartoon 53 years ago is because back then it wasn't considered good enough to be a movie!