Best Lead Actress - Meryl Streep (2011) Meryl Streep has given a lot of wonderful performances in her career. She's reached the point where just about anything she touches turns to gold, even a movie with a storyline as bland as The Devil Wears Prada. Unfortunately, she can't always carry the weight of her films directly on her shoulders, as she proved with this biopic about Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady focuses almost entirely on the later stages of Thatcher's life, all but glossing over all of the key moments in her political career that made her perhaps the most influential prime minister of all time. It also shies away from any of the more controversial decisions she made in her tenure, instead focusing on her slide into dementia following the death of her husband. To be fair, Streep's performance embodies Thatcher in a way that would be difficult to imagine any other actress pulling off (even Helen Mirren). The scenes of her hallucinating about her dead spouse or acting completely confused and afraid are haunting, even if there's more than a little Oscar-baiting flashing across the screen. This movie did not deserve an Academy Award. And it's especially unfortunate that Meryl Streep broke her thirty year award drought by winning for this particular role, when she's done such better work in recent years. (Doubt, Adaptation, The Hours.)
