2016 Best Actress nominees

The folks over at Indiewire are leaping past the summer movie season and focusing on this fall’s prestige pics, specifically forecasting ahead to next year’s Oscars. They based their, let’s call them possibilities not predictions, on what looks good on paper, pedigree and reactions at film festivals past (Sundance, Berlin, Tribeca) and currently happening (Cannes).

And here’s a fascinating potential scenario they’ve come up with: the past four best actress Oscar winners – Julianne Moore (Still Alice); Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine); Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook); and Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) – could all very well be in the running again in 2016

Moore stars in the October release Freeheld, a true-life tale of a New Jersey police lieutenant who fought to have her pension benefits transferred to her domestic partner. Can we just pencil her name on the ballot now?

Meanwhile, director Todd Haynes, who gave Moore two of her best-ever roles in Safe and Far from Heaven – reteams with his I’m Not There star Blanchett for Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith‘s novel The Price of Salt about an older married woman who falls for a shopgirl in 1950′s New York.

After one Oscar and another nomination, Lawrence would probably follow her Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle writer-director David O. Russell anywhere, especially when her co-stars from both films, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, are also along for the ride. So why not star in Joy, a based-on-fact comedy-drama about the Long Island single mom who invented the Miracle Mop and launched a mega-successful company.

Streep – you might know her as the three-time Academy Award-winning actress who just received her 19th nomination this year – is back this summer in a Jonathan Demme film, Ricki and the Flash. (His track record for steering actresses toward the gold: Mary Steenburgen, winner for Melvin and Howard; Christine Lahti, nominated for Swing Shift; Jodie Foster, winner for The Silence of the Lambs; Anne Hathaway, nominated for Rachel Getting Married) where she plays a rock star who returns to the family she abandoned years before when her daughter’s husband dumps her. Oh, and she sings, plays guitar and makes out with Rick Springfield. Does the Academy give out some sort of plaque when you reach 20 nominations?

Go beyond those four, and the last winner before them was Natalie Portman for Black Swan. She has a film out this year, too, called A Tale of Love and Darkness. Not much has been written about her performance, though; maybe that’s because all the ink has been spent talking about how the movie is her debut as a writer and director!

Who won the year before Portman? Last year’s nominee for Gravity Sandra Bullock, and here’s where the chain unlinks. She’s AWOL for 2015, save a voice role in Minions. She could be back in the hunt again in 2017, however, with her 2016 film, Our Brand Is Crisis.

We could keep going. Kate Winslet, 2009 winner for The Reader, has two chances this year with The Dressmaker and Steve Jobs. Nominee this year and 2008 winner Marion Cotillard is already being talked up for Macbeth. Woman in Gold may have come and gone without much impact, but Helen Mirren, 2007 winner for The Queen, could still make a year-end splash as Hedda Hopper in Trumbo. Chances are, though, that Mirren’s role and Winslet’s in Steve Jobs would land them in the supporting category.

Of course, all of this is beyond mere speculation at this point. Most of these films haven’t even been seen yet. And out-of-nowhere performances could light up America’s movie screens and new stars could be born.

Still, the very real possibility exists that the entire best actress roster at next February’s Oscar ceremony could be made up of very recent veterans. That’s great if they truly are deserving, but it makes it hard for a newbie to breath through. I suppose there’s always the pseudo-apprenticeship route of starting first with a supporting actress award and later grabbing the big one. The list is long of actresses who have parlayed their supporting win into lead nominations, and of those traveling the reverse direction, but only three women have won supporting and lead in that order: Streep, Blanchett and Jessica Lange.

Culled from Times Union