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.”   

Image = The Theory of Everything is EVERYTHING…

I’m not going to say a lot about The Theory of Everything and how amazing Eddie Redmayne & Felicity Jones are in it because we are going to hear A LOT about that in the coming months.  Suffice to say, it’s a gorgeous movie (maybe even perfect) and they both deliver exceptional performances.  I would be very surprised if Mr. Redmayne doesn’t nab the Oscar for this role.  Simply attempting the physicality of Stephen Hawking was daunting enough, and Theory was shot out of sequence so Redmayne had to capture any given period in Hawking’s physical deterioration on any given shooting day.  He reportedly kept a chart and the result is nothing short of astounding.  If, by some cosmic blunder Redmayne doesn't win this year, he's 32 and looks about 16, which is a huge asset for an actor, so he'll be fine.

This film is not a typical biopic.  It’s less about Hawking’s scientific achievements on their own and more about how the love of a devoted woman fueled those achievements.   I love films about a triumph of the human spirit over devastating circumstances, but usually in those stories the person finds an inner strength on their own.  In this story, Stephen is given a brilliant mind and then a body that doesn’t cooperate, so he needs a champion in order to go on.

I expected Theory to be wonderful because it was distributed by Focus Features, who has produced and distributed many of the greatest independent films of all time.  Here’s a short list: Dallas Buyers Club, Brokeback Mountain, Away We Go, Beginners, Lost in Translation, Talk to Me, Atonement, Milk.  In the past 2 years, Focus has changed its focus and here’s a great article about that.  I am all for expanding their reach to films like Fifty Shades of Grey if that adds money to their the coffers to continue distributing extraordinary indies like The Theory of Everything.