In Praise of Longevity

When the Oscar nominations were announced last week, most of the attention went to Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s lack of nominations for Best Director and Best Actress, respectively, for Barbie. As was Internet habit, people got very worked up very fast, and then within 48 hours the conversation had burnt itself out, and it was on to the next thing. The Internet, and particularly social media, is built for outrage, and it was easy to be outraged that a movie about the difficulty of being a woman couldn’t get nominations for its female director and star (although Gerwig was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Robbie was nominated for Best Picture since she was also one of the film’s producers).

So I wanted to instead highlight a positive, which is that Annette Bening will earn her fifth Oscar nomination for Nyad, 33 years after earning her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1991’s The Grifters. I watched Nyad and rewatched The Grifters last week, and it’s difficult not to feel a sense of gratitude that we’ve been gifted over thirty years of performances from Bening. That’s not to say that every movie she starred in was gold, but rather that she has endured and persevered through a notoriously fickle business that tends to prize youth, especially for women. The fact that her nomination comes for playing a real-life woman who also refused to be written off simply because she was now in her sixties is a nice bit of symmetry.

For current audiences, it’s particularly easy to take an actor like Bening for granted. She, like her Nyad co-star Jodie Foster (who also received an Oscar nomination, hers for Best Supporting Actress), have been in movies for decades. You can’t think of a time when she wasn’t around, and there was never a period where she fully went away. You can’t call any of her performances a “comeback” because she’s been too persistent, and her talent has never dropped off. Again, this is something we take for granted, as there are certainly older stars who keep appearing in movies even though they rarely seem interested in the roles they’re playing (it’s very nice that Robert De Niro got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Killers of the Flower Moon, but these days I associate him more with stuff like About My Father and The War with Grandpa, even though he can deliver a great performance in an interesting movie when he wants to).

If we want to talk about sexism in the film industry, this is one area where women have to keep delivering whereas guys can appear in a bunch of dreck as long as they deliver a worthwhile performance every now and then. Again, that’s not to say that Bening only does terrific movies (I have sat through Life Itself and Death on the Nile), but rather that she’s unrelenting in bringing her gravitas to movies in a way that audiences don’t always appreciate. To put it another way, Bening has delivered great performances in films like 20^th Century Women (2016), The Report (2019), and Nyad, whereas other actors in their 60s like Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, and John Malkovichcan just collect paychecks, and no one thinks differently about them. And look, different actors have different priorities. I don’t begrudge Gary Oldman a payday if we wants to do a few days work on Hunter Killer or Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard.

But look at Bening in Nyad, and you have an actor who is finding new ways to push herself. The physicality of this role clearly demanded a lot of her, and it’s funny how we can ooh and ahh at a schlubby guy packing on muscle for an upcoming Marvel movie, but there’s far less discussion of a woman in her 60s spending hours in a pool and in the ocean so she can convince the audience she’s playing a legendary marathon swimmer. Bening is still out there doing it because that’s what the role demands, and she’s a professional.

I’m grateful that professionalism is still welcomed in Hollywood. That may seem like an odd thing to say, but the industry has always tolerated young-and-volatile over older-and-competent. The stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age were not what we would deem the most professional bunch (guys like Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable were textbook alcoholics, and sometimes you’d have to suspend filming because whoops the star of your movie was on a bender), and when they were older, they ran into a massive sea change in the industry. So many icons were swept aside in the 1960s and 70s because audiences wanted younger talent, the industry moved from being in the hands of studio bosses to corporations, and television had cemented itself as a viable entertainment alternative. I don’t think Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis forgot how to act, but by the mid-1960s, no one wanted to see them leading movies.

We have our own sea change today with the rise of streaming, but credit where it’s due, Netflix backed Nyad, and it’s not like you’re watching a made-for-TV movie. It’s a real film that’s competently directed, anchored by two legendary actors who bounce off each other wonderfully. Not every actor from 1991 makes it to where Bening is now. Her other nominees for Best Supporting Actress that year were Lorraine Bracco for GoodFellas, Diane Ladd for Wild at Heart, Mary McDonnell for Dances with Wolves, and the winner, Whoopi Goldberg for Ghost. And it’s not to say those other nominees disappeared, but none of them have come close to getting back to an Oscar nomination, whereas Bening has been nominated four times since. She has also been nominated at least once in every decade since the 90s.

While I do worry that our younger actors now find themselves tethered to franchise filmmaking rather than having the freedom to be movie stars on their own terms, I also have to show a little relief that the industry isn’t as fast to cycle out the talent that’s been with us for over a generation. We still get movies starring Annette Bening and Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand and Tom Hanks and Julianne Moore. Everyone in Hollywood may want an Oscar, but Oscar winners and nominees can fade just as quickly as those who are never recognized by the Academy. What they really want is a career that’s as long and acclaimed as Annette Bening’s.

Over on Decoding Everything

Dave gave his thoughts on the Academy Award nominees: