The CampChuck Reviewer

Often, Academy Awards stories go beyond a single performance. Best Actress this year has two.

Sandra Bullock, a gifted, appealing and well-liked actress, often makes less than impressive film choices. She carved a career out of chasing box office success and has faired well commercially.

With The Blind Side, Bullock once again puts fun on the screen but in a way that helps her peers take her seriously. This role also confirms that she’s primed for bankable middle aged characters – not an automatic Hollywood transition, sad enough to say.

Bullock plays an upper class, well-connected, bundle of constructive energy. She knows her own loving mind and makes things happen. This includes taking in a talented but otherwise wholly disadvantaged Black teen. She nurtures him into forging academic growth, sports prowess, and a deep sense of family.

Good as Bullock is, it’s a strange dynamic that makes a favorite to win Best Actress from a standard challenge in a fairly straightforward formula film.

Meryl Streep, often mentioned as the best actor ever, seems to be evaluated on a separate chart. She is so routinely excellent that, when a role seems not to measure against her own best work, she receives an Oscar nomination but is denied her third Oscar win.

The most Oscar-nominated actor ever (16) is the all time Oscar also-ran (14). Look for the hail of the season when an actor averaging an Oscar nomination every other year makes a “comeback” to Oscar Gold after 26 years.

Playing the quintessential television chef, Julia Child, in Julie & Julia, Streep takes another marvelous turn, and once again extends her variety of acting challenges. She and her story about Julia are so good, the Julie half of the movie drags the total down some (still satisfying though).

It’s fair to suggest this Julia Child part is merely a jaunty impersonation, but Streep puts wonderful humanity into a beloved figure. Whether it rates an Oscar for this particular role or not, it’s time to say to Meryl Streep, “Bon Appetit,” for her just desserts.

Perhaps the excitement is a bit less charged, but the battle for Best Actress swirls wider than the Avatar / Hurt Locker showdown.

Helen Mirren stars in The Last Station, perhaps the most curious film on the awards landscape. She and Christopher Plummer inject a theatrical tone into a historical drama about author Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace) and his wife in the last months of his life.

Does the film The Last Station work well? Yes, although it may not click with the clear momentum people prefer. It’s about a strained, loving marriage, an enduring love, an end of life love. Does Helen Mirren work well in the film? Yes, she is perfect for this woman, whose husband’s changed definition of life repeatedly knocks their love into a corner.

In contrast to Mirren or Streep or Bullock, Carey Mulligan is a new face. In An Education, about a high school girl coming of age, she balances the tricky overtones with poise, elegance, and intelligence. Though she is the focal point of the film, it’s probably fair to say that this fine showcase makes you want to project your eye to her future. An Oscar nomination is enough here.

The toughest nomination to talk about this year is Gabourey Sidibe, playing the title role in Precious. It would be tough in any year. It’s not just how raw the movie is. It’s about a disadvantaged teen, made a mother by her father and pregnant again by him. She’s a daughter under the thumb of her vile mother.

Should it not be said? Sidibe, as Precious, is an ugly looking person. Not gorgeous Charlize Theron playing Monster ugly. Not even Mo’Nique (the mother in Precious) who doesn’t start from gorgeous but who definitely risks it all acting such an ugly part. Sidibe, mostly from being grossly overweight and looking like she’s ghetto trash, is at least as much a casting coup as an acting triumph.

The indelicate point made, Sidibe makes the camera comfortable with her. Constantly on screen, Sidibe makes it possible to experience a life circumstance most of us have no clue about and don’t want to know about. She makes it possible to feel her hopes and dreams, to feel her life can be better. It sounds like Oscar talk, but it doesn’t work that way.