Best Actress 1986

[nightwingnova]

The Morning After represented pure Jane Fonda - the best she can offer as an actress.

The movie was pedestrian. Nevertheless, Fonda brought full depth and character, and kept me fully engaged with her performance.

I agree that Matlin is a fine actress but not great.

I agree with Mister Tee. Fonda is actually very good in The Morning After.

LOL, although I can't say calling her performance "snappy" seems like any kind of a recommendation.

Well, then, let me explain it to you.

Fonda rose up, after an undistinguished starlet decade, by being the most wised-up chick in the room. In They Shoot Horses and Klute, she took crap from nobody; if somebody tried out a line on her, she cut them off before they were halfway done. She was the first aggressive American actress of the feminist era. This quality carried over into her Lillian Hellman in Julia...though there signs she was softening a bit.

And then, with the power to direct her own career, she began casting herself, time after time, in movies where she re-enacted the process by which she had become politically radicalized. To do this, she created gauzy, unconvincing naifs who had to be "educated"; to me this is the period when she tried earnestness, and it simply didn't suit her (and even her post-transformation personae failed to match her early work). I think she was miscasting herself consistently during this period. (The only case where it worked reasonably well was in The China Syndrome, because her ignorance was pretty much limited to the subject of nuclear power; in other areas she was an earlier-era Fonda skeptic) The trend reached its nadir when she played a backwoods-woman in the TV movie The Dollmaker -- with all the condescension only a rich Hollywood liberal can provide.

Thus, for me, The Morning After represented a refreshing return to form. I don't see how anyone could call the performance earnest; she was a conniver from the get-go. And the snappiness of her line deliveries -- that Fonda cynicism that I'd loved so much a decade or more earlier -- played a large role in why I responded so much more deeply than I had to her string of pious half-political tracts.

Sadly, it was a short-lived revival. In Old Gringo she was actively terrible doing the innocent school-marm act (unfortunately burying Gregory Peck's fine late-career work in the process). After the painfully sincere Stanley and Iris, audiences had just had enough of her, and she was pushed into essential retirement. A shame.

But I celebrate this one moment when she seemed to be her old self again. Sorry so many of you don't see it my way.

[mayukh]

I wanted to briefly chime in and say that I'm astonished that so many gravitated toward Turner in this race. I mean, I really like Turner, too. Rarely enough for a nomination, but I do (in recent years her presence seems to have gained a weight, a force, that has apparently worked well in things like Virginia Woolf that I haven't seen). And I think she's terribly miscalculated in Peggy Sue Got Married. The film's lousy, too, and totally unwatchable. Turner was certainly a very intelligent actress. I'd appreciate the sense of irony so many point out in this performance but she overemotes so damn much that she fails to project a sense of humanity within her character. It’s kind of unfortunate? I don't know. I found her expressions absolutely grotesque, her wit never quick enough to have any bite, her whole performance exhausting. No, this isn't a good nomination at all.

Crimes of the Heart was shallow, obviously, but mildly pleasant. Spacek was okay but her line readings were sometimes painful, getting to the point that you can point to exactly how she memorized them, where they are on the page, etc. She is her usual fluid self but she also exposed the clear staginess, and rather overt phoniness, of the source material.

I think the absolute world of Jane Fonda, and her earnestness is sometimes her best asset – Gloria, Bree, etc. were all such memorable characters because her quick wit and toughness masked a certain, very affecting sense of vulnerability. But earnestness could also be one of Fonda's greatest downfalls (see On Golden Pond, of course). Lumet was so wrong the director for this kind of material, and her performance is at times comical, unintentionally so.

You know, I actually thought Marlee Matlin really showed promise. She had a very, VERY beautiful face – I would say that it was almost erotic – and she really photographed like a dream. But of course she was heavily inexperienced at that time, not very capable of conveying a wide range of expression, and the film she was in certainly did not mask that. Haines was not the kind of director who could have made something special out of her, and Matlin's amateurishness as an actress was exposed by the rather one-note nature of the role. (I will say, though, that that one moment when she enacts what a wave sounds like is affecting.) Still, had she not become such a harmless feel-good PR story, I sometimes think Matlin would've had a better career. But even in Seinfeld and shit like Desperate Housewives she seems so terribly domesticated.

This is kind of a shitty year if you think about it. Weaver is great, though – clearly the work of a very intelligent actress, always, with a certain transparency, exposing the fear and paranoia and vulnerability of a character our culture has gotten away with by lazily labeling "heroic". Her presence itself is so much like the young Jane Fonda's – a strength, threatening feminine strength that is totally feral, tempered by a very palpable sense of vulnerability. A wonderful performance.

1. Barbara Hershey, Hannah and Her Sisters (I thought she was absolutely leading and absolutely spectacular)
2. Cathy Tyson, Mona Lisa (see above)
3. Marie Riviere, The Green Ray
4. Molly Ringwald, Pretty in Pink
5. Melanie Griffith, Something Wild

I have Laura Dern winning in '85 for Smooth Talk.

[Damien]

Children of a Lesser God was the only play I ever walked out on after intermission -- a friend and I went to the bar next door while the others endured it in its entirety. Years later I walked out on a musical, Avenue Q.) Other then for the presence of Piper Laurie, the movie was just as bad. Marlee Maitlin seems like a nice woman.

Crimes of the Heart, on the other hand, was delightful and moving on stage, but Bruce Beresford's adaptation coarsened and flattened the material. I never understood why any of these three actresses received a nomination (or NY Film Critics award or Golden Globe), and I thought Spacek's overly broad performance exemplified what was wrong with the entire film.. (Mia Dillon was so enchanting on Broadway, I was sure she'd become a star.)

Jane Fonda in that thing? Sheesh!

Sigourney Weaver -- Nice abs, nice intensity, not very interesting performance.

Kathleen Turner is delightful and utterly convincing in Peggy Sue even though the movie's a bit all over the place. And the moment when she answers the phone and it's her long-dead grandmother, the combination of amazement, love, grief and sense of loss expressed by her facial gestures is all by itself worthy of an Oscar. (And, let's be honest, had it not been for Matlin's human interest story, Turner would have won in a walk.)

She easily gets my vote, although the best performance by a lead actress that year was Laura Dern in Small Talk (as well as Blue Velvet), followed by Julie Andrews in That's Life! And an absolutely hilarious Bette Midler in Down And Out In Beverly Hills, Lori Singer in Trouble In Mind, and Helen Shaver in Desert Hearts.



Edited By Damien on 1259814081

[flipp525]

The trend reached its nadir when she played a backwoods-woman in the TV movie The Dollmaker -- with all the condescension only a rich Hollywood liberal can provide.

I watched "The Dollmaker" as a child at my cousin's house in Montpelier, Vermont (I was about 6 years old) and was incredibly scarred by it. If I recall correctly, there's a scene where Fonda's daughter ends up smashed between two railroad carsa and there's blood everywhere. It gave me nightmares for years!

Marlee Matlin is fine in Children of a Lesser God, but the role is rather limited and her sexual and educational awakening must come at the hands of a benevolent "hearing" person. The deaf community is not a huge fan of this movie and, frankly, neither am I (although, Piper Laurie is great in it).

Weaver is fucking badass and incredibly confident in her role as Ripley. She created one of the most enduring characters of the entire genre and reconstitutued the sci-fi hero. Why anyone would deride the Academy for recognizing that performance is just beyond me. Do you pee while sitting as well? Kidding.

Sissy Spacek is just about the only thing that works in Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, but there's not a lot to work with. It's rather fun watching her go around and around the house failing at suicide attempts. Diane Keaton is uniformly awful and, my god, was Jessica Lange on a role back then or what?

So, it really comes down to Kathleen Turner and Jane Fonda for me. I think Fonda's dazed, yet conniving drunk is fabulous. You can just tell how much cotton-mouth she has when she wakes up in a blacked-out stupor, that's how perfect she is in the role And even when the script fails her, she has a wiliness that never abandons her performance. Likewise, Turner's totally believable turn as a woman thrust back into high school as a grown-up is probably some of her best work. There's a scene in the beginning, when Peggy Sue is already in the past and she hears her dead grandmother on the phone. The look on her face of joy mixed with sadness and disbelief is simply perfection. Because, I can't vote for her elsewhere, she definitely gets my vote here.

In all the "shouldabeens" folks have been throwing around, I haven't heard Mia Farrow mentioned. She turns in one of the best female performances of the year as the there-for-everyone-but-herself former actress and locus of MY best picture of the year, Hannah and Her Sisters. Barbara Hershey was ridiculously snubbed as well (for the likes of, um Tess Harper?!)

These polls need to SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. Especially with all the holiday madness now. I feel like some great discussions are going to be sacrificed if we zip along through the rest of the century by New Year's.



Edited By flipp525 on 1259784620

[Mister Tee]

I agree with Mister Tee. Fonda is actually very good in The Morning After.

LOL, although I can't say calling her performance "snappy" seems like any kind of a recommendation.

Well, then, let me explain it to you.

Fonda rose up, after an undistinguished starlet decade, by being the most wised-up chick in the room. In They Shoot Horses and Klute, she took crap from nobody; if somebody tried out a line on her, she cut them off before they were halfway done. She was the first aggressive American actress of the feminist era. This quality carried over into her Lillian Hellman in Julia...though there signs she was softening a bit.

And then, with the power to direct her own career, she began casting herself, time after time, in movies where she re-enacted the process by which she had become politically radicalized. To do this, she created gauzy, unconvincing naifs who had to be "educated"; to me this is the period when she tried earnestness, and it simply didn't suit her (and even her post-transformation personae failed to match her early work). I think she was miscasting herself consistently during this period. (The only case where it worked reasonably well was in The China Syndrome, because her ignorance was pretty much limited to the subject of nuclear power; in other areas she was an earlier-era Fonda skeptic) The trend reached its nadir when she played a backwoods-woman in the TV movie The Dollmaker -- with all the condescension only a rich Hollywood liberal can provide.

Thus, for me, The Morning After represented a refreshing return to form. I don't see how anyone could call the performance earnest; she was a conniver from the get-go. And the snappiness of her line deliveries -- that Fonda cynicism that I'd loved so much a decade or more earlier -- played a large role in why I responded so much more deeply than I had to her string of pious half-political tracts.

Sadly, it was a short-lived revival. In Old Gringo she was actively terrible doing the innocent school-marm act (unfortunately burying Gregory Peck's fine late-career work in the process). After the painfully sincere Stanley and Iris, audiences had just had enough of her, and she was pushed into essential retirement. A shame.

But I celebrate this one moment when she seemed to be her old self again. Sorry so many of you don't see it my way.

[Aceisgreat]

Went with Sigourney Weaver.

[ITALIANO]

Voted for Turner. Not too enthusiastically, but in this very, very bad year she gave the best performance among the nominees, and her movie, while certainly not the director's best, was watchable and at times even enjoyable.

Back then, we all knew Matlin would win; not just because she was a disabled actress, which of course helped alot, but also because she was the only one from a Best Picture nominee, and she was having this much talked about affair with her famous costar, and again this costar would present the Best Actress award. It was pleasant when all this happened, but we werent stupid, we knew that it wasnt an amazing performance and that Matlin herself wasnt the most expressive actress. Still, for once a sentimental win wasnt so terribly disappointing; none of the nominees unfortunately was much more deserving.

Weaver was better than Fonda and Spacek though, and since they usually dont nominate actors from THAT kind of movies, her presence in the race was at least a nice surprise. But Fonda was miscast and her movie not good, and as for Spacek, Crimes of the Heart was the typical film version of a (bad) American play where even usually good actors (and especially actresses) seem to forget the basic rules of decent acting; in this case there were three of them, and they were trying to upstage each other all the time, so you can imagine the result.



Edited By ITALIANO on 1259764709

[Reza]

I agree with Mister Tee. Fonda is actually very good in The Morning After.

LOL, although I can't say calling her performance "snappy" seems like any kind of a recommendation. And it was Fonda who brought this sorry property to Lumet in the first place. ???

I agree with everyone that the ''property'' was crap. However, Fonda overcame what she had to play with and created a complex and flawed character. She did stand out in the film and by no means was it a bad performance.

[Uri]

I like Turner. She has intelligence, sense of irony and ability to simultaneously portray a character and commentate on it (an alienation devise which, I guess, my be seen to some as non committed, or not deep acting), not to mention her easy going sensuality. And she managed to exhibit all those qualities perfectly in PSGM, successfully clearing the hurdles put in her way by the Coppola clan (Francis's laziness, Nicolas being his usual self). She gets my vote.

Fonda's movie didn't work on any level – not as a straight thriller and not as a self aware trash fest it could have been had its director and star been less earnest (in the worst sense of that word). Unfortunately, poor Jeff Bridges didn't learn his lesson and didn't stay away from vanity projects by aging Divas

Matlin was amateurish, in the best (ok, a reasonable) sense of this word – her performance worked the way the rest of her film worked – good intentioned and pleasantly klutzy. She really had nothing to do with acting, not humanitarian, awards.

Spacek was the brightest spot of CotH, but only by default. It was the kind of contrived showcase in which every actor operates in her or his cocoon and there is never a sense of real interaction, a genuine sense of familial or communal structure, which is what it was supposed to be. So Spacek, in the most screwballish part, had a chance to kind of spoof the dreamy, naïve lost child with a twist persona which she demonstrated brilliantly in Badlands, Carrie, 3 Women or Coal Miner's Daughter. And it was fun, but strangely, while she was able at 30 to believably convey a 13 year old in CMD, she was less successful as a 36 playing 26. She was too obviously actressy here.

Weaver was everything her role called for and her nomination was a nice validation of the groundbreaking elements of her turn as Ripley.

I whish Melanie Griffith would have got her only career nomination for her lovely work in Something Wild instead of the safer one she eventually got for the more tame (if perfectly nice) performance in WG. And there was another second generation Hollywood girl (seems like an ongoing theme this year, for better or worse). Laura Dern was very delicate and complex beyond her years in Smooth Talk, and I would have love to see her being recognized too.



Edited By Uri on 1259737710

[Big Magilla]

I agree with Mister Tee. Fonda is actually very good in The Morning After.

LOL, although I can't say calling her performance "snappy" seems like any kind of a recommendation. And it was Fonda who brought this sorry property to Lumet in the first place. ???

[Big Magilla]

Do you mean Jane, Magilla?

No, I mean Sissy who is Rip Torn's cousin and who spent some time living with the Torn Pages when she didn't have a nickel to her name.

[Big Magilla]

Does no one else find it outrageous that Geraldine Page, a star in four decades is subjected to such venom for daring to win her only award here on the eve of her death while her talented, though arguably less so, cousin by marriage is poised to win her second award in a scant seven years with many more opportunities down the pike with nary a whimper of protest?

No because it's a message board poll, and not worth getting outraged over.

I'm so glad I changed the word "outrageous" to "ironic" before anyone had the chance to read the post. :;):

[Reza]

Voted for Sigourney Weaver.

What a weak year though.

My top 5 performances of the year:

Sigourney Weaver, Aliens
Kathleen Turner, Peggy Sue Got Married
Julie Andrews, Duet for One
Marlee Matlin, Children of a Lesser God
Sissy Spacek, Crimes of the Heart


I agree with Mister Tee. Fonda is actually very good in The Morning After.



Edited By Reza on 1259727565

[Snick's Guy]

Had to go with Turner --- Sad she missed out on nominations in '81 for Body Heat, '84 for Crimes of Passion and '85 for Prizzi's Honor.

She had reached her peak in '86 with this fine, multi-layered performance.

After '86 it was kinda down hill for her, though I did enjoy her in '89 in War of The Roses and '94 in Serial Mom.



Edited By Snick's Guy on 1259724626

[Mister Tee]

I'm going to be contrarian here -- not on the issue of the year's overall quality, which, like most of the mid-80s, was quite low; but on my ultimate choice.

Weaver's nomination floored me, and showed how desperate voters were for candidates. Julie Andrews in That's Life would have been more deserving.

Marlee Matlin, like Phyllis Frelich who played the role onstage, had enough sentimental pull to win the top acting prize from a weak field. But the play/movie is mediocre, and the performance only good enough, not special.

Going into awards season, I was pretty certain Kathleen Turner would sweep the critics' prizes -- her Peggy Sue performance had been far more wildly acclaimed, star-is-born fashion, than any of the other candidates. But, come December, only NBR followed through; she could have sued critics for breach of promise. I can't say the situation displeased me much, however, since I'd continued, even in Peggy Sue, to see her as a perfectly agreeable star presence but not a terribly deep actress.

The NY critics chose Spacek, and I don't much know what to say about that. I'd avoided Crimes of the Heart on stage because almost everyone I trusted told me it was the most overrated evening of theatre they'd experienced in years. (One friend, who'd settled in an uninspiring but well-paying job on the grounds it could finance his theatre habit, told me it made him question his entire life strategy) So the movie was my first encounter with the material, and it rather baffled me: I couldn't tell whether the tone was totally off, or if what I was seeing was what I was supposed to be seeing. In any case, none of it moved me, including the performances, despite my long-time affection for all three actresses.

You can maybe see where this is going. That leaves me with Jane Fonda. I won't waste ten seconds defending the lame murder mystery (or the excruciating supporting performance from Raul Julia). But, for one who had despaired at seeing Fonda give one limp performance after another re-enacting her radicalization, it was a tonic to see her back to her old snappy self. The part is minor -- clearly not a patch on Klute -- but to me Jane was an actress who deserved a second Oscar, and in this dreary field, I gave it to her then and give it to her now.