Taking into consideration that "overrated" is overrated. ;) I tried not to rank them in order of how good they were, but rather in order of how overrated they were. Also, yes, I kept it to one Cate Blanchett and one Johnny Depp performance each. ;)
15. Salma Hayek - Frida
I just read in, I think, Glamour magazine, where they were talking about Frida, and they said, of course, "Salma becomes Frida." GOD, I AM SO TIRED OF THIS. Makeup makes a lot of these biopic performances what they are. Salma seems all "oh my God I am in a prestige picture and I need to ACT!!!" throughout the whole movie, and thus loses all the joy and vitality she could possibly have. Not totally overrated because she almost never wins in 2002 due to the combination of The Hours ladies and Julianne Moore. But even a nomination is very very undeserved.
14. Leonardo DiCaprio - The Aviator
Not at all a bad performance. In fact, it's pretty good. But when I hear people calling this the greatest male performance of the new millennium, or even of all time, I do cringe a little. The performance doesn't seem to have a lot of sublety, though Leo has absolutely explosive screen presence and is absolutely natural. Like I said, it's good, it's just drastically overrated. He didn't deserve his nomination... but then again, very few of his fellow nominees did (2004 was such a terrific year for movies, and such a terrible year for the Oscars...).
13. Sean Penn - I Am Sam
Awful. Just awful. Hammy and horrendous and without a note of sublety. He doesn't even look interested to be there. This would be higher, but there are definitely those that agree with me.
12. Adrien Brody - The Pianist
I'm a really big lover of sublety and naturalism, as has probably become clear from this entry where I say "sublety" about 204860486 times. But Adrien was just too subtle. He was boring, and is one of few actors I would say just can't hold a movie in lead. I'm a huge sap and cry over everything (Crash or a movie that can be better-compared to this one, Schindler's List, pretty much destroyed me the first time I saw it), but I hardly cared about this guy.
11. Joan Allen - The Upside of Anger
Should probably be higher on this list. Wow, she was terrible. Like, Razzie-worthy. I thought she was just a horrible shrieking harpy that could not possibly be mistaken for any actual living human being. I didn't find her funny. Her attempts at being sexy are just laughable and bring her performance down even more (and no, I'm not being one of those "OMG WOMEN OVER 40 SHOULD NOT BE PLAYING SEXY" people. She was just laughable at it. Honestly, Helen Mirren was sexier in The Queen. Okay, that's an exaggeration. But still.). I hated every minute of this movie and her performance and I don't understand why people liked it.
10. Emily Blunt - The Devil Wears Prada
I know, frequent readers of this blog (if there are any of you........) are probably shocked! shocked! that she is not #1. But there are performances that are way worse that are way more praised, so I'm not going to overstate my case. Emily was fine. However, she was in no way award-worthy or even close to award-worthy. She was pretty funny, which is nothing a million other actors and actresses haven't done in the past, and she stole scenes from Anne Hathaway, which is really not hard. Her character was badly written and I think she made more of it than was on the page, but I never felt sympathy for her, like I did with Meryl Streep's. Most importantly, I never felt like she was an actual human being, unlike, again, Meryl Streep. She was just a quip machine.
9. Rinko Kikuchi - Babel
I really hate to oversimplify performances like this, but: she showed her vagina a lot and made weird faces. She didn't ever express her pain to me. She has one brilliant second in the club where she sees the guy she likes kissing another girl and her face just falls, but it's literally a second. The rest of her performance is terrible and desperate for attention.
8. Felicity Huffman - Transamerica
Another "wow, terrible, how could anyone like this?" performance. SO HAMMY AND UNREAL AND ACTING!!!!!!. I can't stand Desperate Housewives, but from the little of it I saw, Felicity was just great there. I still find her likeable, but I don't know why she's so terrible in movies. I'm so thrilled Reese got that Oscar!
7. Julianne Moore - The Hours
All the ladies in The Hours are fairly overrated. None of them even deserved a nomination (except for, oddly enough, Toni Collette), and it's nowhere near the best work of any of their careers. But seeing as Julianne Moore was the worst of the three by far, I included her here. It's not a horrible performance; she definitely makes you feel something. But that's probably just her role and all the crying and menstruation (;) I like The Hours, I do) it involves. Moore is always stylized, sometimes a little too much for me. This is one of those times. Her performance just seems like a bunch of weepy scenes with little connective tissue.
6. Joaquin Phoenix - Gladiator
Bad. Hammy. Prancy. Yuck.
5. Naomi Watts - 21 Grams
This is partially her awful movie's fault. By fucking with the time so much, it eliminated any possibility of a real "thread" going through her performance. So...it comes off as a lot of screaming and howling and histrionics, which I despise. It's like she took that breakdown part in Mulholland Dr. and just acted that the whole movie, and it is way too much. Terrible, terrible, terrible. But at least some people agree with me.
4. Cate Blanchett - The Aviator
From the first time I saw this film, I've never seen what anyone else saw in her. I didn't think she was magical or that she lit up the screen at all. What I saw was a well-accented but emotionally dead and somehow creepy performance. Worst of all, I can always, always see the wheels turning when I watch Cate here, something you never saw with Katharine Hepburn. I think that is the biggest insult to Kate of all.
3. Johnny Depp - Pirates of the Caribbean
I'm pretty surprised this isn't #1 myself. But yeah, what can I say, I am running out of steam. I didn't think he was funny, and I didn't think he created any sort of real character. We don't know who Captain Jack is, despite all the hoopla about him. And that's a real crime, and it's purely Johnny's fault. Awful. With stuff like Ed Wood, it's pretty gross that this is what finally got him attention.
2. Marion Cotillard - La vie en rose
My hatred for this film and performance is still so fresh in my mind. She's in the Naomi Watts camp - any way her performance could have been good was destroyed by the filmmakers, making it look like all she does is scream and howl and overemote. She's way worse than Naomi, though. Marion creates a thing of nightmares and does an incredible disservice to Edith Piaf by not playing her, but by creating an empty shell of hysterics and makeup. Just terrible.
1. Jennifer Connelly - A Beautiful Mind
Jennifer Connelly's performance in Requiem for a Dream is the second best performance of the 2000s. Until 2007, it was THE best. Unfortunately, her performance in A Beautiful Mind is one of the worst. Period. She's got my Razzie for it. She literally does nothing. She doesn't play it quiet and bring emotion and sublety and make you feel for her, but I don't really think sublety is Connelly's thing. That's fine. She's not terrifically subtle in Requiem for a Dream and that performance is fucking amazing. And yet, here, she doesn't go over-the-top, yet explode with fire and passion and light up the screen. She just looks bored the entire running time, like she knew she was going to get an Oscar for playing the supportive girlfriend/wife in a prestige movie made to appeal directly to AMPAS. Actors that are natural get a ton of credit for me, and actors that look like they'd rather be doing anything else get major shit points from me. This, my friend, is where shit points might as well originate. Yuck. 7 years later, I'm still complaining about her Oscar win over 4 great performances.
Also overrated (not in any particular order other than the one I remember them in): Bjork - Dancer in the Dark (duh. I just thought of this. I don't feel like writing up a new writeup, but suffice it to say she would be really high.), Cate Blanchett - Notes on a Scandal (would be on the list if not for the "one Cate Blanchett performance" rule), Johnny Depp - Sweeney Todd, Helena Bonham Carter - Sweeney Todd, Audrey Tautou - Amelie, Amy Adams - Junebug (sorry, Jesus), Kate Hudson - Almost Famous, Cate Blanchett - Elizabeth: The Golden Age (a lot of critics loved her), Patricia Clarkson - Dogville, Patricia Clarkson - Far from Heaven, Patricia Clarkson - Pieces of April (Clarkson is soooo notttt the "supporting actress godsend" that most portray her as. She's usually good, but not award-worthy.), Ryan Gosling - Lars and the Real Girl, James McAvoy - Last King of Scotland, Annette Bening - Being Julia (this would be on the list, except nobody online seems to like her here thank God), Judi Dench - Iris (people saying she was better than Julie at the whole Alzheimer's thing makes me crack the shit up), Diane Keaton - Something's Gotta Give, Jim Broadbent - Iris, Matt Dillon - Crash, Thomas Haden Church - Sideways, Jackie Earle Haley - Little Children, Natalie Portman - Closer, Shohreh Aghdashloo - House of Sand and Fog, Thora Birch - Ghost World, Gael Garcia Bernal - kind of everything, Ed Harris - The Hours, Adam Sandler - Punch-Drunk Love, Naomi Watts - King Kong, Ziyi Zhang - Memoirs of a Geisha (this one's not so loved on the internet, though, thank God), Eva Green - The Dreamers, Ellen Page - Hard Candy
Yeah, they're great to spectacular, but calm down people: Nicole Kidman - The Hours, Meryl Streep - The Hours, Julianne Moore - Far from Heaven, Imelda Staunton - Vera Drake, Helen Mirren - The Queen, Isabelle Huppert - The Piano Teacher, Joaquin Phoenix - Walk the Line, Philip Seymour Hoffman - Capote, Penelope Cruz - Volver, Gael Garcia Bernal - Bad Education, Kate Winslet - Little Children (not so much now, but when it came out people were FLIPPING OUT!!!!), Ziyi Zhang - 2046, Mark Wahlberg - The Departed, Jack Nicholson - The Departed, Saoirse Ronan - Atonement, Tilda Swinton - Michael Clayton (the way the blogosphere talks about it, you'd think God got an Oscar), Casey Affleck - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Maggie Gyllenhaal - Sherrybaby, Cate Blanchett - Heaven, Parker Posey - Best in Show, Jake Gyllenhaal - Donnie Darko, Daniel Day-Lewis - Gangs of New York, Bruno Ganz - Downfall
And just to get the warm fuzzies out there, here are tons of sadly underrated performances (I don't nominate nearly all of them, and if they all got a ton of attention a bunch of them would probably be pretty overrated, but most of these get almost no attention, which is sad as they are great): Clive Owen - Croupier, Forest Whitaker - Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, Cate Blanchett - The Gift, Jeffrey Wright - Shaft, Philip Seymour Hoffman - Almost Famous, Jack Black - High Fidelity, Gary Lewis - Billy Elliot, Samantha Morton - Jesus' Son, Kirsten Dunst - The Virgin Suicides, Goya Toledo - Amores perros, Anthony LaPaglia - Lantana, William H. Macy - Panic, Ray Winstone - Sexy Beast, Brian Cox - L.I.E., Will Ferrell - Zoolander, Kerry Armstrong - Lantana, Uma Thurman - Tape, Tom Cruise - Minority Report, Sam Rockwell - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Greg Kinnear - Auto Focus, Samantha Morton - Morvern Callar, Jodie Foster - Panic Room, Catherine Keener - Lovely and Amazing, Maura Tierney - Scotland, PA, Philip Seymour Hoffman - Punch-Drunk Love, Ray Liotta - Narc, Brian Cox - 25th Hour, Edie Falco - Sunshine State, Emily Mortimer - Lovely and Amazing, Bebe Neuwirth - Tadpole, Kathleen McDermott - Morvern Callar, Hayden Christensen - Shattered Glass (never have I seen a great performance so dismissed by the "he can't act!" belief), Kevin Spacey - The Life of David Gale, Chiwetel Ejiofor - Dirty Pretty Things, Robert Downey Jr. - The Singing Detective, Paul Giamatti - American Splendor, Jack Black - School of Rock, Peter Dinklage - The Station Agent, Patty Considine - In America, Zooey Deschanel - All the Real Girls, Sarah Polley - My Life Without Me, Renee Zellweger - Down with Love, Hugh Grant - Love Actually, Laura Linney - The Life of David Gale, Laura Linney - Love Actually, Sean Penn - The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Tobey Maguire - Spider-Man 2, Will Ferrell - Anchorman, Tom Hanks - The Terminal, Laura Linney - P.S..., Abbie Cornish - Somersault, Jennifer Garner - 13 Going on 30, Lindsay Lohan - Mean Girls, Kim Basinger - The Door in the Floor, Reese Witherspoon - Vanity Fair, Laura Dern - We Don't Live Here Anymore, Steve Carell - Anchorman, Liev Schreiber - The Manchurian Candidate, Topher Grace - In Good Company, Kyra Sedgwick - The Woodsman, Lacey Chabert - Mean Girls, Amanda Seyfried - Mean Girls, Marion Cotillard - A Very Long Engagement, Sandra Oh - Sideways, Tony Leung - 2046, Yeong-ae Lee - Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Embeth Davidtz - Junebug, Lisa Kudrow - Happy Endings, Joan Allen - Yes, Nathalie Press - My Summer of Love, Vince Vaughn - Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Jeffrey Wright - Broken Flowers, Paul Rudd - The 40-Year-Old Virgin, George Clooney - Good Night, and Good Luck., Edward Norton - Kingdom of Heaven, Liam Neeson - Breakfast on Pluto, Maggie Gyllenhaal - Happy Endings, Isla Fisher - Wedding Crashers, Emily Mortimer - Match Point, Patricia Clarkson - The Dying Gaul, Heath Ledger - Candy, Edward Norton - The Painted Veil, William H. Macy - Edmond, Joe Cross - Running with Scissors, Cate Blanchett - The Good German, Melinda Page Hamilton - Sleeping Dogs Lie, Scarlett Johansson - Scoop, Doug Jones - Pan's Labyrinth, Paul Giamatti - The Illusionist, Ian McKellen - The Da Vinci Code, Kevin Spacey - Superman Returns, Woody Allen - Scoop, Jodie Foster - Inside Man, Jessica Biel - The Illusionist, Edie Falco - Freedomland, Jill Clayburgh - Running with Scissors, Blythe Danner - The Last Kiss, Don Cheadle - Talk to Me, Steve Buscemi - Interview, Gabriel Bryne - Jindabyne, Russell Crowe - American Gangster, Michael Shannon - Bug, Sienna Miller - Interview, Belen Rueda - The Orphanage, Dakota Blue Richards - The Golden Compass, Dylan Freasier - There Will Be Blood, Morgan Freeman - Gone Baby Gone, Kerry Washington - I Think I Love My Wife, Martha MacIssac - Superbad. WHEWWWWWWW.
Of course, I am sure there are many I am forgetting. Ah, bitching. You are wonderful.
