Golden Globes shine on ‘The Artist,’ Gosling and Clooney

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Gosling (in a scene from 'The Ides of March') will compete with 'Ides' director George Clooney, nominated for 'The Descendants'

The Golden Globes nominations were unveiled this morning, and The Artist—France’s silent black-and-white valentine to retro Hollywood—continues to charm its way down the long road to the Oscars by topping the Globes with six nominations. The Descendants and The Help are tied for second place with four nominations apiece. Both George Clooney and Canada’s Ryan Gosling are golden. Clooney snagged three nominations, as best dramatic actor for Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, plus best director and screenplay for The Ides of March.  Gosling was nominated in the comic acting category for Crazy, Stupid Love, and in the dramatic acting category for  Ides, which has him going head to head against with Clooney. Unlike the Oscars, the Globes break down the best picture and acting categories into dramas and comedies-or-musicals, which allows the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) to better spread the wealth. But the rationale is often wonky. The Descendants, a quirky mix of comedy and drama, is classified as drama, presumably because someone dies; My Life With Marilyn was considered a comedy-or-musical, but though it’s got a couple of tunes, it’s not a musical, and despite some laughs, it’s much less of a comedy than The Descendants. Go figure.

The Globes gave a boost both to The Ides of March and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which have been ignored by most of the critics’ awards. Tattoo‘s cyberpunk heroine, Rooney Mara, hacked her way into a heavyweight actress slate,  competing with Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Viola Davis (The Help), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs).

The most notable snub was ignoring Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme D’Or in Cannes and has been honoured by several critics’ groups, including the Toronto Film Critics Association. However, its star, Brad Pitt, was nominated for Moneyball in the dramatic acting category, along with Clooney, Gosling, Michael Fassbender (Shame) and Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar). Honouring DiCaprio instead of Take Shelter‘s Michael Shannon underscores the HFPA’s tacky pedigree as a gang of junket whores who never saw a superstar they didn’t like. (If you think that’s too harsh, Ricky Gervais has said much worse things about the HFPA, yet they’ve hired him back to host the Globes, which adds a curious S&M kink to the junket whore role.) Continue…

What Oscar likes in a woman

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

In Conviction, Hilary Swank plays another working-class warrior—a dropout who gets a law degree to exonerate her brother; George Pimentel/Getty Images

Meryl Streep used to routinely complain about the dearth of strong female roles. Those days are long gone. In fact, Hollywood seems to have adopted a new double standard, by which women have a monopoly on outsized heroic virtue. Over the past decade, the Best Actor winners have included two psychopaths (Training Day, There Will Be Blood), a mass murderer (The Last King of Scotland), a prima donna journalist (Capote), a philandering junkie (Ray), and a shambling alcoholic (Crazy Heart). Only one actor was awarded for playing a righteous crusader: Sean Penn in Milk. With the women, it’s another story. Of the past 10 Best Actress winners, just one played a psycho: Monster’s Charlize Theron. Among the other roles are a beloved queen, a string of noble martyrs, and two stubborn crusaders—Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.

Real-life heroines tend to dominate Oscar-pedigree roles. And though it’s early to start handicapping the awards, the trend seems stronger than ever—with the notable exception of Natalie Portman’s sensational tour de force as a ballerina in the melodrama Black Swan. Lately I’ve seen a glut of powerhouse performances by actresses cast in true stories of underdog crusaders triumphing over long odds—Diane Lane in Secretariat (opening Oct. 8), Hilary Swank in Conviction (Oct. 15), Naomi Watts in Fair Game (Nov. 5), and Rachel Weisz in The Whistleblower (release date pending). Each of these roles fits a particular mould: a working mother who tests her family’s patience by taking the world by storm.

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Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 23, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

If they had a million dollars
Montreal rockers Arcade Fire will match donations up to $1 million to Kanpe, a charity rebuilding family life after the Haitian earthquake. “We’re all family in times like this,” said Régine Chassagne, whose parents were born in Haiti. “Please,” her husband Win Butler urged fans, “take our money.”

For better and worse, check
In 1984, Steve Fonyo ran across Canada, raising $13 million for cancer research, an epic achievement for a 19-year-old with a prosthetic leg. His life since, always in the shadow of the late Terry Fox who attempted a similar feat in 1981, has been a train wreck. He was stripped of the Order of Canada last year after a long battle with addictions and multiple criminal convictions. He’d hoped a planned Aug. 28 wedding would signal a turnaround, but that, too, went off the rails when it was revealed last week that his fiancée, Lisa Greenwood, is serving a jail sentence for theft and assault. Victoria-area business people, who had planned to underwrite the ceremony at the city’s Fonyo Beach, where he’d ended his run, rescinded their offer. John Vickers, executive director of the Victoria Truth Centre, who helped arrange the event, said the couple’s “lives are too complicated at this time for a supported wedding to occur.”

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Dear John, I’ve really changed

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Everett Collection

Atom Egoyan has a knack for casting actresses on the cusp of adulthood in roles laden with sexual intrigue. In Exotica (1994), a 17-year-old Mia Kirshner skirted taboos as a stripper in a schoolgirl kilt. In The Sweet Hereafter, an 18-year-old Sarah Polley played a girl damaged by a bus accident, and an incestuous relationship with her father. In Felicia’s Journey (1999), Elaine Cassidy starred as a pregnant Irish teen befriended by a sexual predator. And in Where the Truth Lies (2005), as a young journalist unravelling a murder, Alison Lohman joined a steamy ménage à trois with Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon. For all four actresses, these were pivotal roles, and dramatic rites of passage.

But Egoyan has never conjured a performance as electrifying as the one unleashed by Amanda Seyfried in his sleek new erotic thriller, Chloe. Nor has he cast someone whose career has taken off with such velocity before the movie’s release. When Seyfried auditioned for Chloe, in 2007, she had attracted some notice as an airhead in Mean Girls (2004), and for her regular role as a disaffected Mormon daughter in the HBO series Big Love. But she was not widely known. Although she had co-starred with Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!, that movie wasn’t out yet when Egoyan cast her, and no one knew how huge it would be. Since then, after heating up the screen as the foil to a carnivorous Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body, and scoring a box-office hit as the heroine of Dear John, Seyfried, 24, has become Hollywood’s new It Girl.

“She told me Chloe was the last role she got on her qualities as an actress rather than being a star,” says Egoyan, who now hopes her celebrity will give his film a boost. “Dear John has a very different pedigree. I don’t know if even half of its audience would go see a movie like Chloe—America’s very weird about sex. But my fingers are crossed.”

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Howard Stern is a jerk—with a point to ponder

By Anne Kingston - Friday, March 12, 2010 at 4:19 PM - 42 Comments

Howard Stern can be a nasty bastard—but he’s also often the only one willing to voice unpleasant truths others won’t. So it was this week when the Sirius shock jock unleashed a tirade against the future prospects for Gabourey Sidibe, the Best Actress nominee for her role in Precious. “There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen,” Stern proclaimed the day after the Academy Awards. He went on to slam Oprah Winfrey’s tribute to Sidibe during the telecast in which she called the actress “a true American Cinderella on the threshold of a brilliant new career.” Stern was having none of it: “Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie. She should have gotten the Best Actress award because she’s never going to have another shot. What movie is she gonna be in?”

Stern was pilloried for being racist. He was also attacked for getting his facts wrong: Sidibe has been cast in the new Showtime comedy The C Word and the upcoming movie Yelling To The Sky, though neither are leading roles. The C Word stars Laura Linney; in Yelling to the Sky Sidibe plays a bully, which is safe to say not a role Halle Barry turned down.

On Wednesday, Stern defended his comments, taking on the role of compassionate health crusader. He compared Sidibe to his co-star Artie Lange, who recently attempted to commit suicide: “Like, I kind of don’t see a difference between what our Artie did—Artie tried to kill himself. And I feel this girl, in a slower way…she’s gonna kill herself.”

Stern being Stern, he couldn’t leave it there. He went on to deride the newcomer’s acting ability, calling her a “prop” in Precious, which suggests he didn’t see the movie or slept through it. His sidekick Robin Quivers chimed in with another inaccuracy: “You don’t have to be unhealthy to do that part,” she said. But any actress playing Precious, a 16-year-old girl monstrously abused by her parents, did have to be seriously overweight. The character’s only comfort comes from scarfing down tubs of fried chicken. Her excess flesh is not only a salient class indicator but also protective armour.

Off the screen, the 26-year-old is also creating buzz for showing no indication of signing up for a celebrity weight-loss reality show. On Oprah, she revealed she has battled her weight all of her life; it wasn’t until she was in her early 20s that she finally became comfortable in her own skin, she said. That was evident on the Oscar red carpet where she was joy to watch—exuberant, confident, loving every second, very much in the character of Precious who sustained herself with fantasies of being a celebrity. The actress ordered a camera to pan back to get her entire cobalt blue Marchesa gown in the frame and told Ryan Seacrest: “If fashion was porn, this dress would be the money shot.”

Watching, one couldn’t help wish for Sidibe to luxuriate in every second because deep-down we know Stern is right: Precious was a unique role; the odds of her transitioning into an American Cinderella—at least the Cinderella created by Disney who is slender and white—are nil in today’s Hollywood where women are valued for their youth, beauty and willingness to aspire to invisibility size-wise. “Plus-sized” or “full-figured” actresses (read: anyone over size six) have a tough enough time of it. Consider Nikki Blonsky who received high praise for her performance in Hairspray but hasn’t been heard from since. The verdict remains out on Jennifer Hudson, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Dreamgirls; she just dropped 60 pounds to play Winnie Mandela in a bio-pic.

The double-standard is so ingrained, it’s tedious: when Renée Zellweger gained 20 pounds to play Bridget Jones it was a major news story (and one suspects part of the reason she won an Oscar). Yet when Jeff Bridges packed on 25 pounds for his Oscar-winning role as washed-up country singer Bad Blake, no one asked for his weight-loss secrets. Male actors can get soft and paunchy and age and still get work—and the girl. Jack Black is allowed to play romantic lead against Kate Winslet. And nobody’s complaining that Philip Seymour Hoffman isn’t buff.

But Sidibe isn’t just “full-figured,” she’s obese—which, as Stern points out, is a hot-button topic in the U.S. and also a serious health risk. In Hollywood, morbid obesity is cheap-laugh fodder—slap a fat suit on Gwyneth Paltrow (Shallow Hal) or Eddie Murphy (The Nutty Professor/Norbit) and let the pathetic yucks begin. The 500-pound Darlene Cates who starred in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in 1993 is an exception: she went on a few other roles, all of which hinged on her weight.

People went overboard rooting for Sidibe, Stern argues, “because she’s a big fat lady.” Maybe he’s right again. Consider it the Susan Boyle effect—the righteous pleasure of being so broad-minded to see that talent can come in different-sized packages. But the craving for change, evidenced in the first U.S. Black president, is deeper than that. Hollywood is taking tiny steps: Kathryn Bigelow broke through the male Best Director Oscar barrier. Meryl Streep is hotter at age 60 than she’s ever been. Helen Mirren is an inspiration. And non-stick figure Queen Latifah is playing a romantic lead in the upcoming movie Just Wright.

Fat, however, is more impenetrable, reflected in Stern mocking Sidibe’s for saying “I’m going to hit a Chick-fil-A,” a L.A. fast-food chain, after the awards. “That’s so sad,” he said. Of course, when the slender Best Actress winner Sandra Bullock expressed similar sentiment, it was heralded as a sign of how down to earth she is: “I just want to eat!” Bullock told the press room. “I just want to sit down and take my shoes off, and take my dress off, and eat a burger—and not worry that my dress is going to bust open.” Nobody, even Howard Stern, sees anything wrong with that picture.

Live-blogging the Oscars!

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 7:09 PM - 23 Comments

7:08 p.m. Let the Games begin. As in Vancouver, we’re rooting for the Canadians. Which means King of the World (aka James Cameron), Jason Reitman and Ivan Reitman (director and producer of Up in the Air). And the two men behind District 9, writer-director Neill Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell.

Watching Ben Mulroney on the red carpet. Mo’Nique has just called him “brother.” Ben, you can take that to the bank. Jason Reitman has his soundbite down to a weary koan. On Up In the Air: “It’s a movie about family and it was made by a family.”

James Cameron talking to Ben about his rival, and ex-wife: “Kathryn has done a number of small films. She doesn’t play the Hollywood game.” And on the results tonight: “The tea leaves tell me that it’s going her way.”

7:13 pm: Barbara Walters’ Special. Her last special. OMG. Mo’Nique has just finished talking about the frictional specifics of being abused by her brother, and now she’s leaving Barbara Walters slack jawed by talking about how sex outside of her marriage is not a deal breaker. Next the camera moves in for a close-up of her hairy legs, as she delivers defence thereof.

7: 32 pm: We’re flicking between Barbara Wawa and Ben collaring Hollywood royalty. Ben asks George Clooney whether he gets more mileage out of an Oscar or being People’s Sexiest Man Alive. George says being sexy goes further. Ben, morphing into crazed fan, lunges at Meryl Streep as she sashays by, and she pats his microphone maternally. Media version of an air kiss. Or a polite way of saying, “Get lost.”

7:57 pm: This live blog, by the way, is coming to you from Helga Stephenson’s annual Oscar party. Helga is a former director of TIFF, chair of the recent Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and a global among cinephiles. Her annual Oscar soiree is always a blast. But I feel like a freak: typing at a party while watching television is perverse. Continue…

The Oscars' war of the worlds

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 11:50 AM - 28 Comments

The new and improved, fluffed-up Oscar nominations were announced this morning, and surprise! . . . there were virtually no surprises. The Academy Awards are now so heavily upstaged by the glut of awards leading up to them that the Oscar campaign is like an election that just ratifies the results of the advance polls. The race comes down to a David and Goliath duel between Avatar and Hurt Locker, which have nine nominations apiece—and between their once married directors, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow. Aside from the Battle of the Exes, a showdown tailor-made for Entertainment Tonight, we have a battle between two very different war movies, and two opposite worlds of high-risk movie-making—a duel between indie nerve and blockbuster brawn. Cameron has made a ideologically tinted, eco-minded anti-war epic that champions Mother Nature’s feminine spirit.  Bigelow has made a gritty, no-nonsense, ultra-masculine Iraq thriller that’s remarkably free of any anti-war sentiment.  The traditional polarity of male-female sensibilities is reversed. So that’s shaping up to be quite a battle.

Oscar’s big makeover this year, of course, is the expansion of the Best Picture category from 5 to 10 nominees. So let’s see how that played out. We can separate the 10 nominees into two halves. Had there been just 5 nominees,  they would likely be, in roughly descending priority: Avatar, Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, Precious and Inglourious Basterds. So the five “extra” nominees are An Education, District 9, A Serious Man, The Blind Side, and Up. The Academy expanded the category to make room for more boffo popcorn movies, in the hope of bumping up TV ratings for the show. That seems to have worked, up to a point. District 9, Up and The Blind Side all grossed over $200 million worldwide. But the other three films that squeaked in are all relatively small. And Star Wars Star Trek, the year’s best popcorn movie aside from Avatar, didn’t make the cut. It’s nice to see A Serious Man and An Education nominated. The Blind Side, one of the phoniest “true” stories ever filmed, has no business being there. And Up‘s nomination all but guarantees it will win in its native category, Best Animated Feature.

No matter how many movies are nominated for Best Picture, however, the number is beside the point. This is Hurt Locker vs. Avatar. Bigelow’s low-budget masterpiece has been winning the industry’s major awards. Yet Avatar is such a historic feat that Hollywood, a company town, may rally behind it. After winning the Directors Guild prize, however, count on Bigelow to take home the Oscar for Best Director, which would be a historic feat in its own right—she’d be the first woman to win that honour. Continue…

Spinning global guilt from the Golden Globes

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:58 AM - 21 Comments

This is a live-to-tape blog. Written in real time offline while watching the Golden Globe Awards and cleaned up (and tarted up) the morning-after so it’s less boring and at least semi-coherent. Gotta love the Globes. Acceptance speeches keep getting undercut by dark hints that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is one of the more corrupt awards outfits on the planet, a cabal of obscure junketeers who are (ahem) prone to influence, even if it’s just face time with a superstar. But Hollywood has appropriated the HFPA’s event as a party and a publicity orgy. And for the stars, this dress rehearsal for the Academy Awards is way more fun and less formal than Oscar night. They can get loaded on champagne then let the emotions fly on the podium. Plus it brings together film and TV, even though the TV folk get treated like minor league players.

Our host, a TV genius who has made the jump to the big screen with a movie unrecognized by the Globes (The Invention of Lying), is Ricky Gervais. He comes out swinging. Takes repeated shots at Steve Carell, then plugs a boxed DVD set of The Office, his breakout BBC series, which he says is better than Carell’s U.S. spin-off. Carrel mouths “I’m going to kill you,” making a joke of it, but frankly, he looks unamused.

“I will be making the most of this opportunity,” says Gervais. “I’m not used to these viewing figures. Another is NBC.” [This will be the first of many swipes at the train-wreck network. The other constant reference to NBC is in the frequent pleas to donate to the Haiti relief effort. Presenters ritually ask viewers to go to NBC.com. So this morning I did go to NBC.com, expecting some serious hype for charity. What do you know, amid all the glitz ads promoting Jay Leno and various NBC programming triumphs, I found a tiny, unadorned "Donate to Haiti Relief" box , which takes up maybe two percent of the NBC home page.]

Gervais’s nothing-to-lose monologue veers into blue territory as he praises the great work done this year . . . by cosmetic surgeons, then talks about his penis reduction surgery. “Just got the one now. And it is very tiny.  But so are my hands. So when I’m holding it, it looks pretty big. And let’s face it I usually am holding it. I wish I was doing that now, instead of this, to be honest.” Continue…

The Oscar for biggest ham goes to . . .

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 8, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 4 Comments

“It turns out I’m a bit of a slut.” When Meryl Streep makes that giggly confession in It’s Complicated—admitting, in a menopausal Sex and the City moment, that she’s having a raging affair with her ex-husband—you get the impression it’s a line she’s been dying to deliver all her life. For over three decades, Streep has reigned as Hollywood’s queen, earning a record number of Oscar nominations (15), and enjoying a career that’s the envy of every actress in search of a meaningful role. But lately, Streep has blithely thrown her gravitas to the wind. Taking flight in a string of confections, from The Devil Wears Prada to Mamma Mia!, she has starred in three comedies this past year—Julie & Julia, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and It’s Complicated. Our Most Serious Dramatic Actress has reinvented herself as a giddy comedienne. In the process, she has defied Hollywood’s laws of physics to prove that a 60-year-old woman can be both a romantic lead and a box office star. Well beyond the expiry date by which most leading ladies have retreated into character roles, Streep is basking in the greatest commercial success of her career.

But at what price? Well, though I’ve been enjoying Meryl’s triumphant populism as much as the next person, I’d argue that by turning herself into a more lavish performer, she has become a less credible actor.

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Loving 'The Road' and the plastic fantastic 21st century 'Fox'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 11:01 PM - 5 Comments

The sky is falling at the multiplex this weekend, with two new movies about indomitable dads trying to survive the end of the world as they know it.  Take your choice between grim and giddy, and between a bunker and a foxhole. The Road is a gruelling post-apocalyptic odyssey based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, with Viggo Mortensen starring as a widowed survivor dragging his son through the barbaric ruins of America. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop-motion animated feature directed by Wes Anderson (Rushmore), with George Clooney voicing the role of Mr. Fox, whose compulsive banditry turns his family into homeless outlaws.  I can heartily recommend both movies, although they offer utterly different experiences. Featuring superb performance from Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays his son, The Road is one of the year’s strongest dramas. But it’s no picnic, to say the least. The Fantastic Mr. Fox, on the other hand is a tonic, a painless treat, and although we have yet to see Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, it stands out as the year’s wittiest animated feature. And in an era of computer generated spectacle, both films have a rare physical realism.

The Road

Like No Country for Old Men, another Cormac McCarthy adaptation, The Road should make a significant dent at the Oscars, although it’s not as much fun: unlike the Coen brothers’ movie, John Hillcoat’s sombre epic is painted in shades of grey, not noir. It’s set in a world where there’s nothing left of civilization, including its sense of humour. And there’s no villain to speak of, just zombie-like hordes of cannibal vigilantes who roam a barren, burnt-out landscape under a permanently leaden sky. This is no 2012: it’s about an America where the havoc has already been wreaked, without explanation, and no one’s in Kansas anymore. Whether from a nuclear blast or a cosmic collision, this scorched Earth is a dirty, barren mess. There’s no power, no vegetation and virtually no food. Everyone’s a refugee and some of them want to eat you. Continue…

Maclean's Interview: Nora Ephron

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

Nora Ephron is a celebrated journalist, author and a writer-director whose movies include Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. Her latest film, which will be released on Aug. 7, is Julie & Julia, a romantic comedy inspired by Julie Powell’s 2005 book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen, based on the 36-year-old’s 2002 blog chronicling the year she spent cooking the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I. It also draws from Child’s own memoir, My Life in France, which describes the process of writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a culinary classic published in 1961.

Q: One of the wonderful surprises of Julie & Julia is its depiction of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), this beloved dowager and culinary icon, as a romantic, vibrantly erotic figure in her relationship with her husband Paul Child (Stanley Tucci). In fact, that relationship is far more electric than that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), living in New York. Were you intentionally being subversive in showing how hot a middle-aged marriage can be?

A: No, I was just telling the truth. That’s what Julia Child’s marriage was. She wrote letters about it and so did Paul—he wrote to his brother and she wrote to all her friends. And one of the first things I loved when I started writing this is that the two of them had such a lusty sexual relationship and that the modern couple simply didn’t have time. And I loved that. If you looked at these two couples you would not have guessed that this is how this would have shaked out, if you had to guess which one of them had a really sexual marriage. I really loved that. It was a heavenly thing.

Q: Did you ever meet Julia Child?

A: No, it’s so sad but I never did.

Q: The movie is constructed with two parallel stories—one set mostly in Paris in the 1950s, the other in modern-day New York City. It’s a clever conceit. Was that your idea?

A: No, unfortunately. The credit has to go to Amy Robinson, one of the producers of the movie.

Q: If there’s a criticism to be made of the movie, it’s that the scenes of Julia and Paul Child in Paris are so transcendent and glamorous compared to those depicting Julie Powell and her husband in Queens, N.Y.,—so much so that you don’t want them to end. Did you anticipate that would happen, that the Queens scenes would sharpen the glamour?

A: Oh yes, it was entirely intentional. The whole movie starts out with the contrast between the Eiffel Tower and that awful water tower in Queens. It couldn’t be more obvious.

Q: Meryl Streep is brilliant as Julia Child. She appears to literally shape-shift in order to play a character who was imposingly large and six foot two. How did you achieve that?

A: We did every single trick in the book to make that happen. But we did only things that happened 40 years ago. In other words, there is nothing digitally done, just the normal tricks done to make people look bigger. All the clothes are designed just slightly short in the waist so that she looks bigger. I didn’t cast anyone tall to work with her. And every so often we would have extra-tall extras work in the scene and Meryl would glare at them, like “Move them out the way.”

Q: Julia Child is such a larger than life character that it would be easy for Streep’s performance to become a caricature, which never happens. Yet you do include a scene set that shows Dan Aykroyd’s famous parody of Child from an old episode of Saturday Night Live. Why did you do that?

A: Actually, one of my proudest moments was getting that into the movie. I had many thoughts about it. I knew that there would be a lot of people who didn’t know who Julia was, and who wouldn’t know how iconic she was, that she is part of the popular culture. And I also wanted people who didn’t know who she was to know we weren’t making that up that she talked that way—that it wasn’t just an actor’s choice. And I also just loved that clip we used. I just thought it was hilariously funny.

Q: This film will introduce a lot of people to Paul Child, who was happy being in the background, either taking photographs of her recipes or later producing her television show. What was your take on him?

A: Well I was only thinking about what I knew, which is that she believed that the handsomest man on the earth had fallen in love with her. And she was, I was sure, positive that no one would marry her; and along came this man that she just thought was the most sophisticated, debonair human being. And if you look at pictures of Paul, he’s always beautifully dressed. Clearly he had a very healthy vanity about what he looked like. And he was also a wonderful photographer. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to be the most successful civil servant who ever lived, he found this other thing, which was this adventure Julia had embarked on and she made him completely a partner in it.

Q: This movie seems like a homage to supportive husbands who are nice guys. Rather ironic, don’t you think? Given that you’re so well known for your novel Heartburn, a roman-à-clef based on the breakup of your marriage to Carl Bernstein who walked out on you when you were seven months pregnant?

A: That was a long time ago. I’m now married to a really nice guy [the author Nick Pileggi].

Man-less women rule the Oscars

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Meryl Streep has been lamenting the lack of good roles for women for most of her career, most famously in 1990 when she said Hollywood was run by a men’s club of “stupid, greedy people” who seemed determined to erase women from the screen. Who could blame her? She had just turned 40, well past Hollywood’s expiry date for leading ladies. But this year Streep, now 59, starred in the highest grossing musical of all time (Mamma Mia!) and broke records with her 15th Oscar nomination, for Doubt. And finally she is not alone. All those actresses who once complained that Meryl took all the good female roles can relax: suddenly it seems there are more than enough to go around.

All five nominees vying to be named Best Actress at the Oscars this Sunday—Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, Kate Winslet, and Melissa Leo—play formidable, self-sufficient women who come armed with their own stories. None of these characters is dependent on a man. None is even involved with a man, unless you count Winslet coldly seducing an adolescent virgin in The Reader. These are women on the attack. Compare that to recent years, when the most reliable way for a woman to seduce Oscar was to play a martyr or victim. During the past decade, half the Best Actress winners portrayed damaged souls who died at the end of the movie. And curiously, seven out of 10 played real-life characters—from Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf to Marion Cotillard’s Edith Piaf—as if dreaming up strong fictional heroines was beyond Hollywood’s imagination.

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