“And the Oscar goes to…Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games!”?
Not surprisingly, Jennifer Lawrence’s name has popped up many times when it comes to predictions regarding the 85th Academy Awards. However, it is her role in the upcoming film Silver Linings Playbook, that has many people putting her as a shoe in for Best Actress.
Thelma Adams from Yahoo! Movies seems to think otherwise! She believes Jen should be receiving a nomination for The Hunger Games instead. While her portrayal as the fiery Katniss Everdeen has garnered much critical praise, Adams says that perhaps the odds aren’t in her favor.
Her character is not physically disadvantaged.
Katniss Everdeen is a whole teenage girl. She shoots arrows. She stands on thighs achieved not by climbing the Stairmaster but by running in the forest after game to feed her undernourished family. As Katniss, Lawrence delivers the most physically empowered performance by a woman without superpowers in 2012. (No disrespect to Scarlett Johansson’s femme fatale, the Black Widow from “The Avengers.” The catsuited sidekick of a male pack is not running the Oscar race.) And Lawrence can’t play the handicapped card, either, like Marion Cotillard, whose troubled Frenchwoman comes into her own once an orca chomps her lower legs and she learns to live and love without feet. Katniss has feet.
Romantic love isn’t her prime directive.
Sure, Katniss vacillates between two different and appealing young men, the hunter Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and the baker Peeta (Josh Hutcherson). And that love triangle has a powerful force. But she’s no Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina, forsaking her role as mother and wife and leaping in the path of a train because of her passion for Count Vronsky. In “The Hunger Games,” the heroine’s greatest love is her younger sister, Prim. Katniss steps forward and takes Prim’s place in the almost certainly fatal games, and it is that action, not romantic love, that sets the plot’s challenges in motion. Doing the right thing, not doing the romantic thing, defines Katniss and her character in the larger sense of the word.
She’s angry, and it’s not pretty.
Good girls aren’t supposed to raise their voices or fists. Not so Katniss Everdeen. Like Lawrence’s sullen but determined Ree in “Winter’s Bone,” Katniss didn’t walk off the set of Teen Nick. She has more in common with a Clint Eastwood character than with a Vanessa Hudgens one. One of Katniss’s greatest challenges is not letting her own anger sabotage her — even if the emotion is justified. Katniss is angry because she’s trapped in a totalitarian society that killed her miner father. She’s pissed at her fragile mother for crumpling and emotionally abandoning her and her younger sister. She’s irate because she’s afraid of her own feelings and how they might make her vulnerable to the maw of the Capitol: If she surrenders to love and has children, their fate will be the same as hers. As hard as it is for Katniss to enter the Games, she senses that it’s harder for the mother to relinquish her child to the death Olympics. This anger is both her power and her Achilles heel, and it diminishes her Oscar appeal.
In the end, “The Hunger Games” is too successful for Lawrence’s Oscar good.
Lawrence is part of a universally acclaimed franchise aimed solidly at girls and women — but men like it, too. It has grossed $408 million domestically and $687 million worldwide. It has achieved cult status, and there are three sequels in the pipeline. But, lately, Hollywood shuns the best products of its hive mind for smaller, singular performances like Meryl Streep in last year’s “The Iron Lady” or, on the male side, Jean Dujardin for “The Artist.” On Oscar night, Lawrence may win for her quirky Tiffany in David O. Russell’s contemporary, crowd-pleasing “Silver Linings Playbook,” but I’ll still be pulling for that extraordinary girl named Katniss.
While I think it would be amazing for her to be nominated for her portrayal of Katniss, and to represent The Hunger Games, I’ll be rooting for Jennifer Lawrence the actress. Whether she’s there for Silvering Linings Playbook or The Hunger Games, any nomination for Jen is a win in my books.
Source: Yahoo! Movies
