OK, so last week I chose my want to, should and will win for Best Actor contenders at this year’s Academy Awards.
This go-round I’m going to decide who I want to win, who should win and who will win in the Best Actress category.
Here we go.
Actually, hold on.
I have to confess something. I’m biased.
Madly, crazily biased even. There’s only one woman I think should walk away with the Best Actress statuette this year, but that honestly doesn’t make for a very good discussion column. So I’m going to talk about her for a minute and then I’ll get on with the actual guessing.
So who saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Yeah, so without me getting on the whole “Jim Carrey was robbed” tangent again, my pick for everything in this category is the other star of that movie.
Kate Winslet absolutely deserves the Oscar because not only was she utterly spectacular as Clementine, but she played crazy well … against Jim Carrey.
That in itself deserves some kind of award.
Most of Winslet’s roles fall on the “serious” side of the acting spectrum. I mean, how funny was she in Titanic?
Naked, yeah. Funny, not really.
Not to mention this is her fourth Oscar nomination, and she’s only 29. That’s pretty damn impressive.
So in order for me to properly guess about this race, I had to get that bias off my chest.
Onward.
OK, so after Winslet I’m left with four other deserving women to pick and choose from.
Seriously, I think they all deserve something. That’s pretty rare for Oscar.
So these ladies are split two and two in my “should win” and “will win” categories. I’m not bothering to pick a “want to win” because that should be pretty damn obvious by this point.
For who I think should win, I’m torn between two women most of you readers will have never heard of, let alone seen the movies they’re nominated for – Imelda Staunton and Catalina Sandino Moreno for Vera Drake and Maria Full of Grace, respectively.
Let me ‘splain about the movies, and perhaps you’ll see why I’m torn.
Vera Drake is a movie about a little old (well, middle-age) lady who performs illegal abortions on young women with nowhere else to turn. Animal House this ain’t.
Maria Full of Grace is a story about a young woman taking a job as a heroin mule to escape her life and find a better one. Um … Animal House this ain’t either.
So you see my hesitation to pick a favorite. Both women performed wonderfully, and both stories deserve to be talked about a lot more, as movies often are after their stars win something.
But since this is a guessing game, I’m going to go with Staunton.
She’s been at this game a lot longer than Moreno, and honestly Moreno has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually winning in my opinion. But as a young actress with talent, I’m sure she’ll get another chance at bat.
Now who do I think will win? This is where the biting and scratching and reopening old wounds come in.
Dear Hilary Swank and the fabulous Annette Bening are at it again. The two duked it out for the 1999 award and Swank emerged victorious, but this year I’m not sure that’s how it will play.
At the former awards ceremony, Bening was considered the likely winner for her role as the high-strung wife of Kevin Spacey’s soon-to-be-dead, job-quitting narrator in American Beauty.
Swank was up for playing a girl playing a boy in love with a girl in Boys Don’t Cry. We know who won.
So why is this year different?
Well, for one, Bening, an aging actress in Hollywood, is playing an aging actress in Hollywood in Being Julia.
I am willing to bet there are a few aging actresses out there who feel that pain and want Bening to take that stage on Feb. 27, and spout the “older women are just as good as younger women” gospel.
Not to mention a lot of people are going to want to let her walk away with the gold that Swank got in the last go-round. I’m cool with that.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Swank and Million Dollar Baby are something the audience should see. She’s strong and the story is powerful, but I don’t think her performance is worth gold this year.
But this is Swank’s second nomination in half a decade and she shows no signs of wanting to quit movies – she’s primed to be nominated again.
I think this is a group of women to be watched and I strongly suspect some of them will show up in this category again.
Most of them already have.

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