Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

OscarGuy wrote:Why is Michelle Dockery on this list? She's hardly an ingénue having been working for over a decade and being 36 years old.

I included anyone fitting the bill born from the 80s on, except for Emily Blunt who's too established on both screens and the stage and has never really met this 'type' anyway - Dockery has primarily been a TV actress and has only recently started doing movies in earnest.

This was an easy choice. Claire Foy. Remarkably striking in a number of roles on television - "Little Dorrit", "Upstairs Downstairs", as Anne Boleyn in "Wolf Hall" and her star making performance in "The Crown". She has lead roles in upcoming films. I think she has the potential to make it big - the upcoming second season of "The Crown" is bound to give her a higher profile.

To be honest I have never heard of most of these actresses.

I voted for Gemma Arterton (on the strength of Their Finest & Gemma Bovery), Lily Collins (on the strength of Stuck in Love aka A Place for Me) and Gugu Mhatha-Raw (on the strength of Belle).

Honourable mention to Felicity Jones for A Monster Calls & Like Crazy.

Why is Michelle Dockery on this list? She's hardly an ingénue having been working for over a decade and being 36 years old.

Note - I voted for Sophie Turner, whose performance on Game of Thrones is interesting enough that I dread the kind of beige roles she's liable to be offered in movies, Olivia Cooke who is already making some laudable forays into the indie sector and Talulah Riley simply because having been married to Elon Musk for so long she must have the life experience and material to inform a fascinating performance at some point.

As most aspects of the world and the industry are engaged in either a hardcore acceleration or a massive atavism, I've had my eye on recent casting trends and what they say about the sociopolitical, economic and industrial context they arrive in. With women this is always an interesting cultural study, as so many of the tensions facing a society and industry are represented and codified in the way actresses fit into their media systems, as sex symbols, mother figures, girls-next-door or something more human and interesting. It's an ancient strain of sexism that runs through the industrialised form of any artistic medium. While the States, Ireland, Canada, Australia and elsewhere are producing a relatively dynamic range of young talent, mainland Europe and especially the UK are going in a drastically different direction. I guess the most obvious basis for this is that with mounting social divisions and major geopolitical fault lines like Brexit and the migrant crisis further fragmenting national identities, both subconscious efforts at and propaganda towards consolidating an outdated national culture that is fraying rapidly have resulted in the rapid ascent to domestic and trans-Atlantic stardom for a group of English Roses with personas so boring you have to go all the way back to Anna Neagle and the wartime Madonnas to see a cultural-industrial narrative so specific and archetypal (even Jean Simmons was far too versatile to stay boxed in to this niche).

In Britain there is definitely a parallel generation of ingenues who may be more versatile, idiosyncratic or - debatably - talented and interesting, but probably much less marketable (Jessica Brown Findlay, Gemma Chan, Alice Englert, Georgie Henley, Carey Mulligan, Imogen Poots, Bel Powley, Florence Pugh, Andrea Riseborough, Juno Temple, Maisie Williams, Ruth Wilson et al). But I'd like your input on these trends, not just because they're interesting from a social standpoint but also because personally I find many of these Britannia portrait models to be charisma voids on-screen and was wondering which of the New British Boring this board's members forecast will display talent or have careers more interesting than being figureheads for Imperial nostalgia at a time when Britain's present is in flux and its future uncertain.

There's also a valuable discussion to be had in this area regarding British pop music, so feel free to discuss Adele and co. in the comments.