Oscar Nominees Cheat Sheet: Best Actress

We’ve already gone over the nominees for Best Picture and Best Actor, so now let’s have a look at the nominees for this year’s Best Actress Oscar.
First up is Annette Bening for her role in The Kids Are All Right. She plays Nic. Nic and Jules (played by Julianne Moore) are in a long term, commited, loving, but by no means perfect relationship. They have two teenaged children, each of them the biological mother to one of them (Nic is Joni’s bio-mom, Jules is Laser’s bio-mom). The kids are half-siblings, and when Joni is 18 and Laser is 15, the two try to find their sperm donor father. The tagline for the film states that “Nic and Jules had the perfect family, until they met the man who made it all possible.” I’ll let you figure out what that means. Bening has been nominated three times before this year for Oscars, both as Best Actress and as Best Supporting actress, but so far has not won the golden statue. Here's a clip of the film that includes some interviews with the cast.
Nicole Kidman is nominated for her role in Rabbit Hole. The film is based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, and tells the story of a couple’s life turned upside down after their young son dies in an accident. Nicole Kidman stars as Becca opposite Aaron Eckhart. She won the Best Actress Oscar in 2003 for her role in The Hours, and has also been nominated one other time for Moulin Rouge. Check out this trailer for the film.
Also nominated for Best Actress is Jennifer Lawrence, for starring in Winter’s Bone. Lawrence plays Ree in a film about an Ozark Mountain girl who works her way through the process of finding her drug-dealer father while trying to keep her family intact. While Winter’s Bone is nominated for four Oscars this year, this is Lawrence’s first nomination, which, as you probably know, makes me think she won’t win. Here's the trailer for Winter's Bone:
Natalie Portman is nominated for her role as Nina Sayers in Black Swan. She plays a ballerina whose life is completely consumed with dance. She lives wither her obsessive, controlling, former-ballerina mother. The film features Mila Kunis as the “black swan” to Portman’s “white swan,” and as the two dancers expand their rivalry for the role of both swans into a twisted friendship, Nina begins to get more in touch with her dark side. This film is on my want-to-see-it list. This is Portman’s first nomination for Best Actress, but she was nominated in 2005 for Best Supporting Actress for Crash. In these clips, Portman discusses her role in Black Swan and gives a quick interview to StarCam at the No Strings Attached premiere.
Finally, Michelle Williams is nominated for Blue Valentine. The film centers on a married couple and charts their evolution over a span of years. Williams plays Cindy to Ryan Gosling’s Dean. The two have a daughter named Frankie, and though the tagline for the film is simply, “A love story,” the story is not necessarily all rainbows and happiness for the couple. Instead, “a love story,” refers to the very-realistic growing apart of many couples, and the changes that occur in that sort of relationship. This is Williams’ first nomination for Best Actress; she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain. Here's the trailer for Blue Valentine.
So, that brings us to my prediction for who will win the golden statue. In my book, Jennifer Lawrence is out, simply because this is her first time being nominated for an Oscar. Annette Bening would have a good shot, but since IMDB classifies her film as a comedy, I don’t know about that. Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams have the same track record as far as nominations, but I think Black Swan got much more attention than Blue Valentine (especially if you don’t count the will-it-or-won’t-it-be-NC17 fiasco surrounding Valentine). So, it’s between Portman and Kidman. I haven’t seen either film, but if I had to guess, I’d pick Natalie Portman to win Best Actress.
Your thoughts?
Source: http://blog.starcam.com/post/best-actress-nominees.aspx