Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 2016

The Contenders:

Isabelle Huppert: Elle
Meryl Streep: Florence Foster Jenkins
Natalie Portman: Jackie
Emma Stone: La La Land (winner)
Ruth Negga: Loving

Camelot Has Fallen

Film: Jackie
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on various players.

I can’t say that I was overly excited about the prospect of Jackie, a feeling that was intensified the moment Natalie Portman opened her mouth. It’s worth noting that I honestly have no idea what Jackie Kennedy actually sounded like. It’s such an unusual intonation, but it is evidently quite accurate. It’s just so strange, breathy and with words pronounced so oddly that it was difficult to get my mind around initially.

Jackie is, of course, less the story of Jackie Kennedy than it is the story of her experience after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The film does jump in time a bit, although in the main it follows her life in those days after Kennedy was killed in Dallas. The frame of the film’s narrative is an interview she gives to an unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup). Scenes take place that come across more or less as her memories of those days, either being explained to this interviewer or in her own memory as he asks questions. I don’t mean to say that it’s dreamlike, but that it plays something like a flashback.