How the hell did that happen?! She's a great actress and small time on screen can be Oscar worthy, but she was mediocre.. bland.. forgettable. I don't understand at all? Lauren Bacall was much better and wasn't even nominated.
shareI agree completely. I was so keen to see her Oscar-winning performance. After her amazing performances in Gaslight, Casblanca, Autumn Sonata and Anastasia, I felt that she would nothing less than excellent in it. However, her role in this is SO brief and unremarkable, I would not even have even realized that Ingrid Bergman was in this movie had I seen this movie. Seriously, how crazy can voters be? Ellen Burstyn getting an Emmy nomination for 14 seconds of screen time, and then Ingrid winning an Oscar for a role that is not much longer.
shareMe too, she was very bland in this.
Sometimes they just give an Oscar to somebody because they think they are 'overdue' one, that's all. For example, Leonardo Dicaprio. I don't think the Revenant was his best performance, but they gave it to him because he was owed one.
Agreed. Another Oscar given for "overdue" reasons was definitely Katherine Hepburn for Guess Whos Coming to Dinner. She couldn't do much in that movie except for being teary-eyed. I wonder whether voters would have chosen her if they anticipated her performance in "The Lion in Winter" next year (which very deservedly won the Oscar).
The supporting oscars in those years were so ummmm.... weird! Helen Hayes in Airport would never have been nominated (let alone win) today.
Oh I agree with your examples. Although you mention Helen Hayes wouldn't be nominated today, ....but she probably would!.... I mean, considering how many actresses are nominated who do no not deserve to be imo. For example, Michelle Williams. She's been nominated lots of times, and imo, for very average performances most times. Her most recent nomination she was no more than 10 minutes on screen, and again the kind of performance she has repeated dozens of times, and is not worthy of even a nomination.
That's why I have a thread somewhere in the GD board titled 'Aren't the Oscars actually irrelevant?' lol
In that thread, I put as an example Nicole Kidman winning an Best Actress Oscar (2003) for The Hours, where her prosthetic nose got more attention than she did....erm, for the whole 15 minutes or so of her performance. Ridiculous! That same year, Catherine Zeta Jones won Best Supporting Actress for Chicago. All inexplicable.
Bacall was great in this movie, although I don't know if I would have give her the Oscar for it. She was leagues ahead of Ingrid for sure (Ingrid's blink-and-miss role was too brief and insubstantial to be called a "performance"), but she has done even better work in other movies.
IMO Albert Finney was very convincing.