One film that took the Academy by storm last year was Jean-Marc Vallee's Dallas Buyer's Club. While the film had been pegged as potential Oscar plays for actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto long before the film's release, nominations for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing proved the film had a deeper impact on Academy members than most Oscar pundits had expected. This year the Québécois director is back with yet another film based on a true story about an individual's personal struggles and eventual spiritual triumph. However, unlike Dallas Buyers Club, Wild appears to only be an Oscar contender in the acting categories. In particular, the film serves as an excellent showcase for its two main female thespians: Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. While Witherspoon obviously gets the majority of screen time, Dern plays an essential role in the film's flashback sequences as Witherspoon's mother. Dern's screen time may be smaller than that of some of her competitors, but when she is on screen, Dern makes her impact felt. Dern's undeniable warmth and love for her children and her determination to make the best of bad situations serves as the necessary inspiration for Witherspoon's character to embark upon the treacherous 1,100-mile trek that is the Pacific Crest Trail. Even when she is not on the screen, Dern's presence is felt. Despite Dern's reputation as a solid actress who has appeared in many films considered classics today (particularly her collaborations with director David Lynch), Dern has only once received an Oscar nomination for her work in 1991's Rambling Rose. This could either be considered a positive or a negative when it comes to her chances at securing an Oscar nomination in 2015. She is not Oscar royalty a la Meryl Streep, but the fact she hasn't been recognized very much by the Academy in the past could give her an "overdue" angle that could work in her favor. The single biggest deciding factor in whether Dern makes the cut though will be the Academy's reception of Wild itself, and this won't be known until the nominations are announced.
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.
