Well, Emma Stone didn’t get an Oscar nomination. Shocker. It’s unfortunate because – get this – I think she gave a better performance than Annette Bening AND Jennifer Lawrence, both nominated actresses this year.
It’s just another tough year for comedic actresses, who fare only slightly better than Christopher Nolan nowadays. A truly comedic performance is rarely nominated, probably around once or twice a decade. We technically classify some performance as comedic – Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Alan Arkin in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Keira Knightley in “Pride and Prejudice,” Kate Winslet in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” to name a bunch – but these are really just light-hearted dramatic acting in movies with some laugh.
There were only a few that charted with the Academy over the last decade: Robert Downey Jr. in “Tropic Thunder,” Ellen Page in “Juno,” Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and Renee Zellweger in “Bridget Jones’ Diary” are the only nominated performances of the last decade that I consider to be truly comedic actor. I’m willing to debate a few others, but all of those are heavily tinted with dramatic shades. These comedic actors get, in the words of Rodney Dangerfield, “no respect.”
In my Oscar Moment about “Easy A,” I didn’t offer any hope that Emma Stone would be nominated; in fact, I didn’t even ask the question in my poll. I defended the award-worthiness of comedic actors and actresses, saying that they excel in a very different kind of acting that requires a different but still challenging set of skills. My poll asked voters whether they thought comedic actors deserved to receive Academy Award nominations.
The results were overwhelmingly in favor of actors like Stone receiving nominations. Nearly 90% of voters replied that they think that comedic actors ARE deserving. I don’t think that Emma stone’s snub represent a sort of “last straw” for audiences in the consistent overlooking of comedic actors, but I do hope that the unofficial policy gets some serious thought soon.
