Image = Academy Award Winner Julianne Moore

For months I have been saying that Julianne Moore will win the Oscar for Best Actress for the movie Still Alice, opening today.  I finally saw the film this week at an advanced screening and I am indeed correct.  I have never been so certain of a win by an actor for a relatively unknown film.

Still Alice is a beautiful, heartbreaking and incredibly compassionate portrait of a 50 year old woman who gets a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s.  It’s not just a film about Alzheimer’s – it’s a very well made film about Alzheimer’s. 

It is a tiny little indie made in a month and it is amazing that it got made at all.  The universe aligned for it to happen in a short time.  It was financed by a small group of mostly women investors, including Maria Shriver & Trudie Styler; and the studio gave Julianne a month off from Mockingjay, which is usually unheard of in big budget land.  The other remarkable fact is that one of the directors has ALS and now has very limited mobility from the waist up and no access to speech.  So, the director couple (Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland) were experiencing a similar degeneration while making a film about a woman losing her memory.  It is no wonder that the film feels so empathetic.

In addition to Still Alice being a wonderful film – here are all the other reasons why Julianne Moore is going to win the Academy Award this year:

 

1 – She is due.  She has done consistently great work for 20 years and has been nominated four times already for both Best Actress & Best Supporting Actress.

2 – There is not a lot of female competition this year.  As I said previously, it’s all about the boys.  Moore's closest contender is Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything but I don’t think Jones is popular enough yet to be a real threat.

3 – The film is about early onset Alzheimer’s, a devastating subject and as usual, Moore does a great job in the title role.

4 – She’s an actor’s actor. Everyone in the business loves her and that’s who votes for Oscars.

For many years, I took Julianne Moore for granted.  I loved everything about Boogie Nights and then simply assumed she’d be excellent whenever I saw her show up in a movie.  She was so dependable that I didn’t really take notice of her.  But in the last few years she has grown on me and absolutely knocked me out in A Single Man.  I finally woke up to her talent and the world will next month as well when they say, “And the Oscar goes to… Julianne Moore.”