The following four actresses on this list are guaranteed to be nominated in this year's Best Actress race. In fact, their nominations are so predictable that its sureness puts Old Faithful to shame. However, theoretically speaking, if you had to say which of the actresses could possibly, in some bizarre-o parallel universe, miss out on the nomination, it would probably be Reese Witherspoon. This isn't meant as a commit on Ms. Witherspoon's acting abilities or her performance in Wild, which is actually quite impressive, but rather an observation on the Academy's reception of the film. Last year, Jean-Marc Vallee's Dallas Buyers Club proved to be extremely popular among Academy members, earning the film's stars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto their first Oscars, but Wild, Vallee's newest film, has not caught on fire the way Dallas Buyers Club. Particularly troubling for the film is the way Laura Dern's Best Supporting Actress campaign has almost totally dissipated in a relatively weak year for the category. However, Reese Witherspoon is her own woman, and even those who have been critical of Wild itself have cited Witherspoon's performance as the highlight of the film. Witherspoon portrays Cheryl Strayed, a woman who had hit rock bottom, using hard drugs and having sex with random strangers after the passing of her mother. In order to gain some semblance of who she use to be, Strayed decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, an arduous 1,100 mile trek through the deserts and mountains of the varied Pacific Cost terrain. Witherspoon's performance is a powerful and emotional one. Much like McConaughey's performance in Dallas Buyer's Club, it is a relatively low-key performance that is most effective in the film's quieter moments. Witherspoon's Cheryl is a woman left totally devastated by the loss of the warmest influence in her life, her mother, but this devastation is never overwrought in Witherspoon's hands, but rather appropriately melancholy. It is the type of performance that is both good and within the somewhat limited taste of Academy members. This means, barring some undercurrent of apathy or hate towards the film, expect Witherspoon to receive her second Oscar nomination.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
