After being beaten down by an industry that once seemed to love her, ridiculed for her choices in projects and her looks, Renee Zellweger returned from a six year break from screen acting in 2016 to reprise her role of Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones’ Baby. She returned to fanfare (even if the movie didn’t,) and just a couple of years and a number of projects later, Zellweger’s back in the spotlight. Her portrayal of Judy Garland in Judy (I love clever titling) is widely critically acclaimed, and she’s nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role at February’s Academy Awards. She’s probably going to win, and she deserves it for a performance that almost makes you forget that the movie as a whole kind of blows.
It’s been almost as long of a nomination hiatus for Renee Zellweger as it has been for Tom Hanks, whose back-to-back Oscars go down as some of the best and most deserved wins in his category. Either way, Hanks’ nomination hiatus is a bit more famous, as he’s been much more present on our screens in the last two decades. Zellweger has a golden statuette as well, awarded to her on her third nomination for Anthony Minghella’s 154 minute epic war drama Cold Mountain.
I recently revisited this film so that you do not have to. I hate to be the enemy of those with good taste, but this movie falls into a distinction I’ve given many awards-show darlings: “Pretty Much Fine.”
The first thing that struck me as I sat down to watch it again was the length. This is one of my most passionate debate topics. Most movies are too long, and the moment your film hits 2 hours, you are cutting it way too close. If you’ve hit 2 and a half? Forget it. I’m already pissed that I have to look at these people’s faces for this long, whether the movie ends up being great or not. Some examples of movies that are just too long? Dances With Wolves (which is a torture device of a movie,) Titanic, The Sound of Music, anything made by Quentin Tarantino. Movies do not have to be 3 hours long to be good.
Another thing that has always resonated with me is that, while its performances are the thing keeping it compelling for me, Renee Zellweger’s Ruby almost feels like she is in a completely different movie. In her first scene opposite Nicole Kidman’s Ada, she quite literally rips the fucking head off of her rooster because Ada said that it was “the devil.”
This is a film about a Civil War deserter, and here comes plucky farmhand Ruby, who is making you laugh and also completely confusing you as to what she’s really doing in this particular scene. It’s a part that works because Renee Zellweger is just that good at acting, and it surely might have been mishandled in the hands of another actress and felt even more out of sorts than it already does.
Because supporting roles fit into a B story rather often, I find myself taken out of movies with a completely out-of-left-field supporting character where everything else might feel quiet and restrained. Here is an excellent tweet on the subject concerning Merritt Wever’s strange turn in last year’s Marriage Story.
All this is basically to say that Renee Zellweger won an Oscar for a movie that really is not her best work. I might be biased, as one of her prior nominations comes from a film which occupies the number 5 spot on my all time list of favorites, but her turns in both Bridget Jones’ Diary and Chicago are sort of dazzling. Cold Mountain is just kind of weird, and still they called Zellweger’s name and she gave that really boring speech in that stunning dress. Cool.
All of this reflection on a movie I sort of never liked led me to the phenomenon of the “consolation Oscar,” or the award that feels like it was given to make up for not giving that person an award at some other point when they might have been more “deserving.” As first time nominee turned first time winner in 2010 Sandra Bullock began her speech, “Did I really earn this, or did I just wear y’all down?”
The most famous examples of what might be considered “consolation Oscars” are Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, who finally won after a decades long career of looking on from the seats, clapping for the winner. John Wayne (ew) finally winning for True Grit (ew) is also widely considered to be a consolation because apparently he may have deserved it for something else. (He was racist so I do not care.) Awarding Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with, like, 11 awards just feels like they were making up for not giving the first two movies anything at all.
Renee Zellweger is so good. One could argue that she is probably not bad in anything (except for the Netflix series What/If,) but we should probably all forget that that was ever made. She’s good in Cold Mountain, but she’s nowhere near as good as she is in Bridget Jones and Chicago. Hollywood treated her like shit, so she went away for a couple of years, and she somehow came back even better than ever before. The point is, Academy, you didn’t have to give her Cold Mountain because she came back from the dead and gave us an undoubtedly career-defining in Judy. Maybe if the Academy voting body was made up of less old white men and more people who are familiar with the modernities of an ever-changing industry, there wouldn’t be consolation Oscars to begin with.
