The 2012 Best Actress Race Was Meryl Streep Vs. Viola Davis, But The Winner Should Have Been Neither
(Welcome to Did They Get It Right?, a series where we take a look at an Oscars category from yesteryear and examine whether the Academy's winner stands the test of time.)
Awards season constantly creates scenarios where a certain category will come down to one or two people, and everyone just accepts this is the way it should be without actually being invested in — or even liking — the options put in front of them. Think of Renée Zellweger winning her second Academy Award for "Judy." She was the frontrunner for over six months and ultimately won it, yet you'd be hard-pressed to find someone loudly stumping for that performance, let alone enough people to award her. The awards race machine just made her the only option, and the voters succumbed.
One of these races is the Best Actress category in 2012. That night, Meryl Streep won her third Academy Award for "The Iron Lady," her first win since "Sophie's Choice" 29 years earlier. No one is happy about this. She's maybe the greatest female actor in the history of the medium, but "The Iron Lady" is one of the most perfunctory, uninspired works in her filmography. Her win wasn't a foregone conclusion, and that's because she was in a battle against Viola Davis in "The Help," which propelled her from talented character actor to full-on leading lady. In retrospect, it's good that Davis didn't win that year for a performance in a film that sees her character in a rather condescending way.
When we look back at this award though, we still see it as Meryl Streep vs. Viola Davis. The constructed race still informs our memory. Those two may have been positioned as the contenders, but the field was much greater and featured a far more exciting possible winner.
The overdue narrative
People win acting Oscars for a variety of different reasons, and rarely is it because of the agreed upon quality of the performance. One of my least favorite reasonings is that an actor is perceived as overdue for winning. Either the actor has never won or has not one in a long time, and based on their career, the absence of hardware becomes incredibly notable. Meryl Streep is pretty universally considered one of the best — if not the best — living actor, and "The Iron Lady" was her 17th nomination. Basically, every other year she would get nominated for an Oscar and lose. She won two very early in her career, and for awhile, her nominations became perfunctory. Another year, another nomination. Then around the time of "The Devil Wears Prada," the perception changed. People came to realize that they were perhaps taking this acting titan for granted, and she needed to win another Oscar.
For the next few years, she was bumping against women who had their own overdue narratives, but they had never won before: Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet, and Sandra Bullock, all of whom starred in Best Picture nominees. (There was an overdue actor this year as well, which I will get into in a bit). In 2011, the lane to victory for Streep was far more open than usual. Plus, she had the benefit of playing an extremely recognizable real person in Margaret Thatcher, and the Academy loves to award a biopic performance. They like seeing the technical skill of replicating another human being they already know because they can easily see the transformation. Having an overdue narrative with a biopic performance? You are set up for glory.
The Academy gets it right later
Because the actual love for Meryl Streep in "The Iron Lady" was low, the popular consensus was that Viola Davis should have won for "The Help." The film was a massive box office hit and nominated for Best Picture. Along with Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Jessica Chastain also received Best Supporting Actress nominations for their work, with Spencer actually winning the award. Clearly, the film had quite a bit of support all around.
To this day, only one woman of color has won the Best Actress award, and this was a chance to acknowledge one of the most respected actors in a role that actually centered her in a movie instead of being someone who showed up for a couple of scenes. On that level, I understand the desire for Davis to win. That being said, with hindsight being what it is, I'm glad this wasn't where she won her Oscar. "The Help" has all of the hallmarks of a film that thinks it's progressive when it comes to race in America (and is awfully proud of it) but doesn't realize just how retrograde and pandering it actually is with its kindly, somewhat condescending portrayal of Black domestic workers in the 1960s. This is in the tradition of "Driving Miss Daisy" and "Green Book," which nobody is happy about.
Viola Davis would win an Oscar five years later for her work in "Fences." Though it was partially informed by her own overdue narrative at that point, her work in Denzel Washington's adaptation of the classic August Wilson play is far better representation of her immense talent, range, and ability to maneuver incredibly complicated material. Nobody looks back at that win and thinks that was a mistake in slightest. The Academy shockingly got this right.
More lackluster nominees
So, if the winner shouldn't have been Meryl Streep or Viola Davis, who should have taken home Best Actress? Frankly, the other nominees aren't all that inspiring either. For another biopic, you have Michelle Williams in "My Week with Marilyn." Today, Williams is someone with her own overdue narrative, having been nominated five times and never winning (which includes when she will inevitably lose this year for "The Fabelmans"). Her and Amy Adams are the two right now who just can't seem to get a foothold in. In her four other nominations, you could make an incredibly strong case for Williams. For me, I'd have pushed Viola Davis to lead for "Fences" and give Best Supporting Actress to Williams for "Manchester by the Sea." "My Week with Marilyn" is the one nomination you forget about because that movie makes very little of an impression and doesn't let her fully inhabit this Hollywood icon with the complexity we know she's capable of.
Then you have the perpetually overdue Glenn Close for "Albert Nobbs." I have already gone into why she didn't win this year, and frankly, it just boils down to "Albert Nobbs" being even more bafflingly received than "The Iron Lady" and coming from a distributor that didn't have much of an infrastructure to get someone to the finish line. Out of the many overdue wins the Oscars have given out over the course of their existence, Close winning for "Albert Nobbs" would be one of the most egregious ones. That means four out of the five nominees this year were less than ideal choices to win. Best Actress has often been a category that lacks imagination when it comes to nominations, but even this is a remarkably low percentage. However, the field had plenty to offer.
Bring in the alternates
You would almost never know that 2011 featured a ton of excellent leading female performances from that list of nominations. You might think they were struggling to find contenders. Couldn't be further from the truth. For one, you have the person everyone expected to get a nomination after being recognized by the Golden Globes, SAG, BAFTA, and Critics' Choice awards: Tilda Swinton in "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Swinton still only has one Oscar nomination (which she won), and despite whether or not Lynne Ramsay's brutal picture works for you, it's so hard to discount the unthinkable, complex colors she has to play.
Beyond Swinton, Charlize Theron in "Young Adult" was another Oscar-worthy performance, deftly playing an incredibly unlikable character to hilarious effect. Considering the fifth and yet unmentioned nominee from this year, they clearly aren't entirely opposed to harder edged material, and these would have fulfilled that wonderfully. The same goes for Kirsten Dunst in "Melancholia," who took home the Best Actress prize from the Cannes Film Festival, or past-winner Anna Paquin for the long-delayed "Margaret."
Perhaps they wanted to anoint new stars, which is something the Oscars are totally fine doing for female performers. That year's Sundance Film Festival had several wonderful contenders with Felicity Jones for "Like Crazy," Adepero Oduye for "Pariah," and Elizabeth Olsen for "Martha Marcy May Marlene." For international contenders, you had Elena Anaya in "The Skin I Live In," Juliette Binoche in "Certified Copy," and Yoon Jeong-hee in "Poetry," who won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association prize. I would personally make a strong case for Keira Knightley in "A Dangerous Method." The point is that the Academy could have easily avoided settling for a slate of pretty milquetoast nominees.
Who should have won
Throughout this piece, I have been talking around the fifth nominee for Best Actress at the 84th Academy Awards. My displeasure at the nominees is obvious, but in this case, not only did they absolutely nail one particular nominee by choosing someone for the kind of performance the Academy almost never recognizes, they gave the nod to the woman I would have chosen to win this category given a slate that includes all of the alternate choices I presented as well. I'm obviously talking about Rooney Mara earning her first nomination for David Fincher's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."
Mara sliding into this slate was a bit of a surprise, as she only received a Golden Globe nomination prior. Even the Critics' Choice Awards didn't go for her. We all went into this film with our arms folded, wondering why we needed this English-language remake when the original made Noomi Rapace internationally recognized. Not only is the film just better made than the Swedish adaptation, Mara finds a whole new path with this charaacter we thought we knew that is daring and indefinably strange in a way that could only come from such a singular performer.
Yes, I find her to give the most textured performance in the category, but the Academy would've had a narrative too. They like to crown an ingénue. Unfortunately, Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander is basically the anti-ingenue. She was always running in fifth place. The surprise weirdo at the table never gets the win. Even though the person that history would obviously look back on as the lightning bolt was right there, the machinations of the race had already been set. Not even Lisbeth Salander could hack it. It had to be Meryl or Viola. And it was.