Screen Actors: Maybe my comments were too harsh
. . . about the Writers Guild screenplay nominations yesterday. At least they seem so in light of today'd Screen Actors Guild noms, which prove once again what we already know: actors are the densest group of people in the whole film industry.
As with all of these things, SAG made both decent and boneheaded individual choices in its movie categories this year. But the worst thing the union members did was swallow the myth that good leading were so hard for actresses to come by that, by default, another of Judi Dench's phoned-in English twit caricatures and Charlize Theron's looking scruffy = great acting jobs just had to make the cut.
I can name at least four other actresses who created persuasive, fascinating women on screen last year, and deserve to vie with Reese Witherspoon in any five-way competition. So I will: Junebug's Embeth Davidtz, Pride & Prejudice's Keira Knightley, Red Eye's Rachel McAdams and My Summer of Love's Natalie Press.
I can understand the SAG nods to Felicity Huffman and Ziyi Zhang; loads of extra effort obviously went into their respective portrayals of a transexual and a supergeisha. But admiring the work and buying the character are different things, and the latter is the key to great screen acting.
