Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1969

The Contenders:

Genevieve Bujold: Anne of the Thousand Days
Jean Simmons: The Happy Ending
Maggie Smith: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (winner)
Liza Minnelli: The Sterile Cuckoo
Jane Fonda: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Manic Pixie Damaged Girl

Films: The Sterile Cuckoo
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

With The Sterile Cuckoo, we’re in familiar territory in a lot of places. This is something like a romance, kind of. It wants to be a traditional romance and doesn’t want to be, which gives it a bit of a multiple personality, and that’s familiar. We’re also in a situation where Liza Minnelli (at this point very early in her adult career) gives a very strong performance of a very unlikable character, something she’d do even better in Cabaret a couple of years later. We’re also dipping our toes into the waters of Manic Pixie Dream Girl-dom, although it’s a bit undecided here, too, but in a good way.

Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton) is heading to college in upstate New York. Waiting for the bus, he meets “Pookie” Adams (Liza Minnelli), who sometimes seems like she could use an extra “d” in her last name. Pookie is almost painfully extroverted and aggressively odd, which comes as a shock to the studious, introverted, and somewhat nerdy Jerry. On the bus, she lies to a nun so that she can end up sitting next to Jerry, and she spends the entire bus ride talking, moving from topic to topic as whim takes her. This is who Pookie is, evidently, and it’s well-established. It’s important to note here that Jerry and Pookie are headed to different schools, but schools that are relatively close to each other. This means they won’t be spending all of their time together, but are close enough that weekends are fair game.