The girls with grit - THE OSCARS - Los Angeles Times

The 77th annual Academy Awards may be one of the few such events in the past couple of decades that will not be held up (or written off, as the case may be) as exemplifying the Year of the Woman.

Let's face it, the prevailing opinion among movie know-it-alls is that actors, rather than actresses, were dealt the best cards in 2004. Uma Thurman notwithstanding, it was the men who got to do the hero thing. Again. Men got all the biopics. Men got to found aviation empires, reinvent rhythm and blues and rescue Rwandans. And if Chris Rock has his way at the 2004 Oscar giveaway Sunday night, a man will slam-dunk the nastiest one-liners of the night.

And women?

"It was women's turn to have their stories told," says Imelda Staunton, the British character actress who was nominated for her plaintive tour-de-force in "Vera Drake."

Oh, but what stories. To scan the list of the best actress nominees' roles, these were stories of women who flouted the rules, women who swam against the tide of female career paths or defied expectations of acceptable behavior. Tellingly, four out of five of these films were titled for their individualistic heroines.

Staunton, for starters, played a doting British wife and mum who secretly performed abortions. Caterina Sandino Moreno's character ("Maria Full of Grace") was a Colombian drug mule. Hilary Swank's ("Million Dollar Baby") a boxer. Annette Bening ("Being Julia") impersonated a stage actress (in an earlier day, mind you, when it was still considered by some to be a bit outre for a woman to earn her living that way) who has an affair with a man half her age and then pulls the rug out from under him.

And, defying categorization, Kate Winslet ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") played a sexually forward eccentric with blue hair who leads her boyfriend (literally and otherwise) onto thin ice: Femme fatale meets Katharine Hepburn in "Bringing Up Baby."

Arguably, the Oscars haven't seen a year like this since 1990, when Kathy Bates' psychopathic murderer in "Misery" won out over Anjelica Huston's con artist in "The Grifters," Julia Roberts' hooker in "Pretty Woman" and Meryl Streep's recovering addict in "Postcards From the Edge."

Depending on whom you ask, this is good news, bad news or something in between.

Nominee Moreno chooses to feel encouraged. "We always see women as the girlfriend of somebody, the wife of somebody, the cousin," she insists. "The nominees are strong women, in charge of everything. They are in control of everything. And that's maybe what people want to see."

"They are strong, but they are dark," says Molly Haskell, film critic and author of the groundbreaking "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies." "Even 'Eternal Sunshine' is dark, dark, dark. And 'Vera Drake,' where she is all sunshine, for about half a minute."

Could that darkness be interpreted, perhaps, as an indication of some prevailing anxiety surrounding take-charge women in our society? This has been, after all, a year that has seen Martha Stewart languishing in jail, "radical" attorney Lynne Stewart sentenced to her own cell block tango and top Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina dumped unceremoniously.

"Unceremoniously, but not unlucratively," qualifies Haskell. "And Martha Stewart is going to come back. So in a way, there is a silver lining to all of these scenarios. And I think Stewart's comeback is as interesting as her downfall. Her celebrity quotient has gone up from prison. Probably it has nothing to do with forgiveness. It may be that we are too quick to embrace scoundrels and everything else in this era."

For Anne Thompson, deputy film editor of The Hollywood Reporter, the current Oscar slate of "scoundrel" women is the inevitable outcropping of a creative evolutionary process in which screenwriters are compelled to keep pushing the envelope.

"What is left for writers to create high drama?" asks Thompson. "Where is the conflict and tension and mystery and excitement, if not in the universe of danger, risk-taking and transgressive behavior? What are the barriers left for romance, or love, or redemption?"

The history of Oscar-nominated actresses, indeed, is a kind of time capsule of women breaking barriers: "Being Julia" (or being Vera Drake, or Maria, or Swank's million-dollar baby, or Winslet's Clementine) is merely the latest wrinkle in cinema's fascination with women transgressing social rules/leaping into the void.

Long before the abortionist with the heart of gold, of course, was the prostitute or fast woman with the heart of gold (besides Julia Roberts, there was Gloria Swanson in "Sadie Thompson," Greta Garbo in "Anna Christie," Shirley MacLaine in "Irma La Douce" and "Some Came Running").

By contrast, Oscar has also been drawn to super-career women (Faye Dunaway in "Network," Holly Hunter in "Broadcast News," Katharine Hepburn in "Woman of the Year") and supermoms (MacLaine in "Terms of Endearment, Greer Garson in "Mrs. Miniver," Irene Dunne in "I Remember Mama," Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce").

Addiction, when appropriately suffered, invariably has stirred a groundswell of sympathy (Grace Kelly in "The Country Girl," Lee Remick in "Days of Wine and Roses," Diana Ross in "Lady Sings the Blues" and Gena Rowlands in "A Woman Under the Influence"), as have physical handicaps that were boldly surmounted (Jane Wyman in "Johnny Belinda," Holly Hunter in "The Piano," Anne Bancroft in "The Miracle Worker" and Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark").

Then came the outlaws. In 1990, Bates' "Misery" prize set the stage for "Thelma & Louise," the film that would change the language of possibilities for women the following year.

"That really does seem to have started the ball rolling," says Haskell, "in terms of women taking their own back. So the last decade has been really good for powerful women. While I think the margin of acceptable behavior is still wider for men, I think the margin is widening for what women can do and still be accepted.

"There are limits on that. I thought Cate Blanchett was really good in 'Veronica Guerin,' , but then everyone was turned off by that character: any time in which a woman endangers her children. If the woman in 'Maria Full of Grace' had had children, Moreno wouldn't have been nominated for an Academy Award."

Among the Oscar-winning renegades "Thelma & Louise" would anticipate were Charlize Theron's lesbian serial killer in "Monster" and Hilary Swank's transgender character in "Boys Don't Cry," which in turn would open a door for her lady boxer in "Million Dollar Baby."

"That's an amazing kind of comeback," says Haskell of Swank's latest role. "Because her career was in a tank after 'Boys Don't Cry' [despite winning a best actress Oscar for her performance]. Hollywood doesn't know what to do with idiosyncratic people, especially women that don't fit into any sort of niche. So they picked all the wrong things for her. Completely unsuitable. It's almost like sabotage in a way."

Haskell is heartened by the new prominence, typified by "Million Dollar Baby," of fighting women in film. "When J. Lo played a cop , it was very believable," Haskell says. She's got this kind of street grit, anyway. So you are getting women, Latino women and black women, who are believable as action women in a way that is broadening the perspective for women."

"And I loved the way Uma Thurman was handled by [Quentin] Tarantino," Haskell continues. "There was something womanly about her. The two women in 'Kill Bill' are sort of protecting their home, and yet at the same time they have a sort of masculine integrity or honor, which is something people didn't always feel women had. Before, they were doing things for emotional reasons. Again, it's a broadening of the idea of a woman as an action figure."

The need for stronger sparring partners for the leading lady was the chief deficiency of "Being Julia," according to Haskell. In that film, Bening's middle-aged British stage star is manipulated by her young American paramour and his girlfriend. "The male and female ingenues were just so lightweight that it was hardly a contest.

"But, nevertheless, anything that gets Annette Bening back into movies! She's given Warren Beatty enough babies. It's time to resume her career."