Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1996

The Contenders:
Emily Watson: Breaking the Waves
Kristin Scott Thomas: The English Patient
Frances McDormand: Fargo (winner)
Diane Keaton: Marvin’s Room
Brenda Blethyn: Secrets & Lies

Marvin's Room

Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Sometimes I don’t get to make the decisions I want to. A case in point is my watching Marvin’s Room today. My reason for watching it, beyond the fact that it is on one of my Oscar lists, is that it vanishes from NetFlix streaming in a couple of days and NetFlix doesn’t have it on DVD. So it was pretty much now or never. I was heartened by the cast, which is top to bottom excellent. I was concerned about the plot based on the short synopsis. But, rather than let this slide into the “can’t find it” pile, I figured it made sense to knock it out.

So let’s talk about that cast for a moment. Diane Keaton was nominated for Best Actress here, making this one of a handful of times someone other than Meryl Streep was nominated. We also get Hume Cronyn, Leonardo DiCaprio the year before he did Titanic, Robert De Niro in a small role and Dan Hedaya in a smaller one. Seriously, this is a cast any first-time director would mortgage his soul to get.