Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 2011

The Contenders:

Glenn Close: Albert Nobbs
Rooney Mara: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Viola Davis: The Help
Meryl Streep: The Iron Lady (winner)
Michele Williams: My Week with Marilyn

Take It Like a Man

Film: Albert Nobbs
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

As always, I’m a slave to my Oscar lists, and I’m also a slave in one respect or another to what is available on NetFlix. Albert Nobbs is scheduled to vanish from streaming in a couple of days, so I figured watching it would more or less keep another movie off the huge list of discs I need. It seems that a lot of what I watch on streaming I end up watching because it’s about to disappear. What can I say? When possible, I try to avoid low-hanging fruit.

I didn’t realize that Albert Nobbs was based on both a novella and a play, and that speaks well to the way in which the film was directed. It’s not obviously based on a play. What I knew going in was that Glenn Close plays a woman who masquerades as a man. Additionally, the film has one of the most misleading NetFlix blurbs I have ever encountered. Read the blurb if you wish, but realize that it’s only tangentially related to the real story here.