If she gains/loses 50 pounds to play a psychotic she’ll get an Oscar for sure!
In Manhattan Meryl Streep played Woody Allen’s ex-wife, the one who left him for another woman.
Michael was going to buy a case of Moet and throw a party if Meryl Streep won the Oscar; all the guests had to come as a Meryl Streep character (Karen Blixen? Silkwood? I don’t know any gay man who, when looking out to sea, doesn’t immediately turn into The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Well Sandra Bullock trod all over that party.
“That’s three years in a row,” Michael muttered. “Next year I’m not going to root for Meryl! Maybe then she’ll finally win.”
“That’s exactly what I did after The Fed lost the French Open final five times in a row,” I said cheerfully. “I ignored the French Open completely and voila!”
“But look at the characters she’s played, how different they are from each other!” Michael cried. “Anna Wintour, then the nun in Doubt, then Julia Child! And she actually hired a stylist for the Oscars!”
“Don’t worry, someday she’ll lose or gain 50 pounds to play a mentally-ill person, then she’ll bag her second Best Actress for sure!”
The moral of the story if there is one is, Don’t put too much stock in awards, they’re all riddled with human error. Do you really believe in the wisdom of crowds? (Over centuries, yes, but not over a few months.) The trick is to disdain all awards. Every time the Nobel Prize for Physics is announced I always say, Well you’re no quantum gravity equation.
To mark the upteenth consecutive year of disappointment for the Meryl Streep Fans Club, let’s do a little Streep retrospective—not her greatest performances, everybody does that, but the minor Meryl movies, the ones that have not inspired impressions at dinner parties. (My friend does the train station scene in Sophie’s Choice. In Polish.)
1. Falling In Love. Meryl and Robert De Niro, back when he was still acting and not just amassing his retirement fund, accidentally swap books at Rizzoli’s bookstore and fall in love, which is very inconvenient since they’re married to other people.
I’ll watch any movie where people fall in love in a bookstore. Except that Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan thing.
By the way, Bobby, you need to make a movie with Martin Scorsese again, pronto. Face it, you do your best work with each other, so stop being coy and just get back together dammit.
2. Postcards from the Edge. Meryl plays Carrie Fisher and Shirley MacLaine Debbie Reynolds in this film adaptation of Carrie Fisher’s novel, making it a mind-bender bender.
3. Plenty. Meryl is a heroine of the Resistance who cannot readjust to life during peacetime so she has an affair with Sting, who cannot act at all.
4. Still Of The Night. Meryl is a beautiful neurotic who narrates her fantasies to her shrink played by Roy Scheider, who should lose his license for getting too involved.
5. Prime. Meryl is totally believable as a Jewish mother who won’t let her son use Q-tips because it might damage his eardrums, and ends up psychoanalyzing the older woman he’s sleeping with.
By the way, the Academy forgot to include Farrah Fawcett in the In Memoriam montage, and Michael has a question about the big John Hughes tribute: “Did they do a tribute when Ingmar Bergman died?”
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 9th, 2010 at 03:29
River Wild, perhaps the closest to an action movie that we could ever imagine Meryl Streep appearing in. I remember reading that she truly navigated that boat like a pro in that film.
She-Devil, the first time I realized that she could do comedy as effortlessly as she does drama. (And the first time I ever saw a pink computer).
I am in awe of her in the quiet scenes where the truth of the character is revealed in the tiniest twitch of a facial muscle, the cold glint in the eye, the display of vulnerability that is there one second and is gone the next. The swing scene with Alec Baldwin at the end of It’s Complicated; the brief session with the therapist in which she asks to be told, just this once, whether she should continue having an affair with her ex or not. That part in Doubt where she discovers a pen lying on the floor and sees it as a sign of deteriorating discipline in the classroom. That scene in a posh Paris hotel room where, eyes puffy from recent crying, she informs Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada that Anne has to change dinner seating arrangements because her husband had just divorced her. The mother-daughter duet just before the wedding in Mamma Mia.
And Hilary Swank has won the Oscar twice?? :-(
March 9th, 2010 at 05:43
Cracked had a good article a couple of days ago on why the Oscars aren’t what we think they are, that is, a reward for the deserving: http://www.cracked.com/article_18460_5-reasons-oscars-matter-even-less-than-you-thought.html
I guess Meryl wasn’t as ‘due’ as Sandra Bullock (yes, this sort of terminology makes it sound like they are pregnant), though why anyone would think Bullock had tallied more karmic Oscar points than Meryl Streep is beyond me. Bullock’s career is the flophouse around the block from Streep’s Holiday Inn.
March 9th, 2010 at 07:55
FALLING IN LOVE is a favorite! Haven’t seen PRIME, I think it came and went in cinemas. Must see it on video. Yes, Sandy is charming and all, but Meryl really truly deserved that Oscar.
March 9th, 2010 at 12:15
I like Meryl Streep, I really think she should’ve won the Oscar for A Cry in the Dark. Anybody who says “A dingo ate my baby” in Aussie accent should win the Oscar. I never really got how Jodie Foster beat her on that (there should’ve been a tie that year if Jodie Foster really was due to win)
March 10th, 2010 at 00:59
Death Becomes Her!
March 10th, 2010 at 07:48
The Bridges of Madison County. I never really understood what nuance in acting meant before I saw her performance in that movie.
March 11th, 2010 at 08:32
I vote for Holocaust, because I love Meryl Streep and James Woods together. Or for her cameo in Stuck With You, doing a big musical number with Greg Kinnear. Offbeat Meryl rules!
As for the John Hughes tribute, it certainly wasn’t about film achievement, but he had a cinematic legacy nonetheless. The tribute was definitely a Oscar ceremony highlight.
March 17th, 2010 at 15:20
sandra did a good job in TBS BUT it is not oscar worthy… it’s like a routine every single year. meryl gives an excellent performance, gets nominated and loses the award to a mediocre actress who was able to give a decent performance for the first time in her life.
she was really good in out of africa and a cry in the dark. if we analyze it, she should have gotten 3 or 4 oscars (for lead actress). amazing how hillary swank has two and meryl only has one for the best actress category.
oh and the bridges of madison county is just one of her perfect performances.