5 Random Thoughts I Had After Watching "Still Alice"

1. Have you ever gotten so drunk at a party that you couldn't remember your address to give to the taxi driver on your way home? If Julianne Moore hasn't, she must know exactly how it feels. While watching her performance as a college professor struggling with a rare form of Alzheimer's that unexpectedly strikes otherwise vibrant and healthy 50-year-olds, I kept having flashbacks to my own bout of alcohol-induced amnesia. Yeah, that's right: "bout." It's only happened once!

I never stopped appreciating Julianne Moore as an actress, but it's been forever since I've loved her (circa 1999's Magnolia, to be completely honest). Still Alice reminds me of why I first fell for her (circa 1992's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, her second film) and why I first adored her in the first place (circa 1995's Safe). In some ways, Alice is Julianne coming full circle from Safe, playing another woman in the grips of a mystery illness. Once again, she nails that what-the-f**k-is-happening-to-me mix of fear and disbelief that accompanies gradually and inexplicably finding your health slipping away.

2. As someone whose personal and public identity is also closely tied to words and being able to use them well (Julianne's Alice character, Alice Howland, is a celebrated cognitive psychologist), I related to her situation in a way that made watching the movie more uncomfortable than it otherwise might have been. Initially pegging those strange symptoms as a brain tumor is exactly the conclusion I would have jumped to.

Perhaps that's why I found Alice so likable, though neither Julianne nor the script bend over backwards to make her so. It's interesting that for her, the greatest tragedy of the disease isn't losing touch with her loved ones but losing her mind. It's the less sentimental approach, but that Julianne managed to keep me perhaps even more invested in what was happening to Alice while periodically checking to make sure my own memory was still intact says as much about her acting skill as it does about where my own priorities lie.

3. It's easy to draw comparisons to Away from Her, the 2006 film in which Julie Christie played a woman losing her grip to Alzheimer's. Julie scored her fourth Best Actress Oscar nomination for that movie, and it's almost a foregone conclusion that Still Alice will earn Julianne her third in that category. (It'll bring her nomination total to five overall.)

But there's a big difference between the two movies. Despite Julie's Best Actress status, Away focused mostly on the husband's point of view, to the film's detriment. Yes, it must be painful to not only slowly lose your wife to Alzheimer's but to also lose her to a fellow patient in a care facility. Still, you don't cast an actress like Julie Christie as the tortured lead in a film and then ask the audience to spend most of the movie focusing on someone else's agony. I believe that cost her the Oscar.

Sorry, Marion Cotillard, but Julie should have won. You may have been great in La vie en rose, but I have a problem with people winning Oscars for musical biopics in which they lip sync. (Sorry, Jamie Foxx. If What's Love Got to Do With It's Angela Bassett had lose to The Piano's Holly Hunter, you should have been congratulating Hotel Rwanda's Don Cheadle on Oscar night 2005.) On the plus side, Marion, I think you should be in the running this year for The Immigrant (but probably won't be as Oscar seems to be over you since that one-night stand), right alongside Julianne and Wild's Reese Witherspoon. She won her biopic Oscar the way God intended, by also singing the part of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line.

4. I wish the movie had looked more closely at Alice's marriage to John (Alec Baldwin), who kind of seems like an afterthought. It glosses over the fact that John, though supportive and loving, treats his wife's declining faculties mostly as an inconvenience. Maybe Alice meant to have a word with him about that but forget to. He was no what's-his-name from Amour!

Elsewhere, the strained family dynamics -- did sisters Anna (Kate Bosworth) and Lydia (Kristen Stewart) hate each other or what? -- made me glad that I never see most of my immediate kin. It's strange how so many of us force ourselves to be around people we really don't like just because we share a bloodline, a bloodline which, as Still Alice makes abundantly clear, could potentially kill you. I'd rather spend Christmas solo, thank you.

5. Kristen Stewart is blossoming into such an effective actress. She's come a long way since On the Road a couple of years ago, now holding her own with the great Julianne Moore. It would have been so easy for her to overplay the petulant in Alice's youngest daughter, but Kristen actually makes her the most likable of the three children.

Maybe that's the benefit of her having more screen time than Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish, but even at her brattiest, railing against Alice for reading her journal, Kristen lets us see flickers of Lydia's compassion, like she's just holding back the rage. That's a tough balancing act to pull off when the scenery must have been so tempting (chomp chomp).

Clearly Kristen learned a thing or two from the woman playing her mom. If she keeps it up, we might soon be seeing her name in the Oscar conversation. Why should Jennifer Lawrence keep getting all the twentysomething love?

Thoughts on Qantas In-Flight Entertainment from Johannesburg to Sydney and Back Again

What would any long-haul Qantas flight be without white wine, hot chocolate and in-flight entertainment?

Maleficent
I loved the general themes of the Angelina Jolie-headlined retelling/retooling of Sleeping Beauty: Romantic love is not the only true love. Maternal love reigns supreme. Sisters are doing it for themselves. Loving well, not getting even, is the best revenge. And love, not hate, will conquer all. Plus, Jolie is almost always watchable, even when her movies aren't. But the whole thing is so cartoonish (I almost think it would have worked better as an Enchanted-style mix of live action and traditional animation), and I couldn't figure out whether the camp was intentional.

Also, it was clearly created as a 3D spectacle, so my aisle seat in coach on Qantas flight 64 probably wasn't the ideal viewing space. I could see distracting evidence of the 3D effects on the miniature screen. It was like watching a sleeping beauty who fell into her deep slumber before she had a chance to wash off her make-up.

Shameless
Having recently completed a marathon viewing of several seasons of Weeds (1 to 3 and 8), some of them nearly a decade belatedly, I'm not sure if I am up for another dysfunctional-family comedy-drama from Showtime. I wasn't bored watching the two season 4 episodes of Shameless, and I love Emmy Rossum's gritty side, but will someone please explain to me why a couple who is having trouble conceiving would even consider having the husband screw the wife's mother so that they could possibly be the proud parents of the wife's sibling?

The Immigrant
Love her and leave her has never applied more than it does to Marion Cotillard and Oscar after she won Best Actress in 2008 for La Vie en Rose. If Cotillard were Jennifer Lawrence and she gave the performance she gives in The Immigrant, she would be a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination. Speaking Polish no doubt boosted Meryl Streep's Oscar appeal in Sophie's Choice, and as far as I could tell, Cotillard pulled it off masterfully as The Immigrant's titular character caught between two cousins (Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner) and, like Sophie, having to make a difficult choice. She does tortured and conflicted so effortlessly, fooling you into thinking she's not even acting. But I'm fully prepared for the Academy to overlook her yet again.

The Normal Heart
Julia Roberts made me cry. Matt Bomer broke my heart. Alfred Molina made me look forward to seeing his work as John Lithgow's lover in Love Is Strange. Jim Parsons made me wonder if he's only capable of doing variations on The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper. Taylor Kitsch made me wish he'd send me a message on Grindr, which had everything to do with how the actor looks and nothing to do with how he acted here, which, frankly, was somewhat generically. (In his defense, he was playing the dime-a-dozen closeted "straight-acting" gay hunk.) Finn Wittrock, whom I've loved since he was Tad Martin's long-lost son on All My Children, confirmed my long-held suspicion that daytime soaps were just the beginning for him.

Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo, an engaging actor of whom I'm quite fond and the human crux for which The Normal Heart beats, impressed me because he's sexy even when he isn't trying to be. For the most part, though, his performance didn't move me. His fake weeping as he watched his lover succumb to AIDS didn't help. Tears -- actual tears -- may not be enough to save starving children, but they are needed to really sell a dying-too-young scene. See Oscar nominee Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion to see how the living side should nail it.

My biggest problem with Ruffalo's Emmy-nominated performance in The Normal Heart was how mannered and self-conscious it seemed. He lacked the natural quality of other straight actors who have played gay in leading film roles in recent years (Sean Penn in Milk, Colin Firth in A Single Man), perhaps because Ruffalo's character, Ned Weeks, was pretty much a stand-in for Larry Kramer and Ruffalo played it that way. Ruffalo appeared to be trying too hard to capture Kramer specifics instead of just embodying the fighting spirit of the real-life activist and the film's screenwriter, on whose play the movie is based, and letting Ned be his own man.

I bought Ned's anger and righteous indignation, which, like villainy, are not the hardest things to sell from an acting standpoint, but because of all the anger and righteous indignation, when Ruffalo's Ned should have been making me feel, I mostly didn't. After a while, the performance became exhausting for me to watch. Ned was one of the good guys, but his compassion was too angular. (So was Julia Roberts', but it worked better for her satellite character.) His moral compass needed a little less hard edge and little more soft vulnerability in scenes where he wasn't caring for his dying lover (Bomer). During the one in which Ned slammed the milk against the wall, Ruffalo was doing all of the capital-A acting, but I couldn't take my eyes off of Bomer's quiet, helpless response.

5 Things I Realized While Watching The Other Woman
1. As a daytime soap fanatic, I love a good catfight, but there is something so engaging about women working together to vanquish a common enemy (in this case a serially cheating spouse). The First Wives Club this trio of other women were not, but then who is.

2. Cameron Diaz is a Hollywood rarity, an actress who made it largely on the strength of her physical appearance (not that she didn't eventually prove her acting chops) but seems to be allowing herself to age normally. She doesn't look freakishly twentysomething, or like she's trying to be. She looks like a fortyish woman who is still smoking hot.

3. Leslie Mann is every bit Melissa McCartney's comedic equal, and I wish she were better known as that than as Judd Apatow's wife who occasionally appears in his films. Though the spoils weren't all that great, she stole The Other Woman from a top-billed Diaz and made it mostly her movie.

4. At sixtysomething, Don Johnson is still Miami hot.

5. Why aren't more people talking about Taylor Kinney? I've caught glimpses of him in the glimpses I've seen of Chicago Fire, which I'd glimpsed mostly to catch a glimpse of Jesse Spencer. I might be tuning in for more in the future.

Surviving Jack
Admiring Christopher Meloni's physical gifts could only preoccupy me for so long before I started to realize how not funny Surviving Jack was. (No offense to Meloni, who nicely sent up his hunkdom on Veep last season.) I'd never heard of the Fox sitcom until it showed up among the in-flight entertainment options, and after the very first scene, I knew it couldn't possibly still be around. (Indeed, Fox axed it on my birthday this year after only a few episodes had aired.) Memo to future comedy writers who want to create something about the spiteful side of parenthood: Do it with a little bit of love. (See Damon Wayans comically toeing the line between parental affection and contempt in My Wife and Kids.) Being nasty is not inherently being funny.

The Millers
I love the cast, but during the four back-to-back episodes I watched, I couldn't stop wishing they were on a better show. If I ever sit through it again, it'll definitely be for Margo Martindale, who basically does here what she did last year in August: Osage County only more broadly. I'd gladly watch her watching paint dry because she'd no doubt find a way to crack me up while doing it.

"Rust and Bone" Isn't All About Marion Cotillard!

If you're a film director aiming for critical acclaim, there are better ways to earn it than by prominently featuring Katy Perry in your movie. Yet there she is, screeching her No. 1 hit "Firework" on the soundtrack during several key scenes in French director Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os), including one that features Marion Cotillard doing some killer whale trainer moves that look cooler than anything Perry did in the "Firework" video. And still Rust and Bone is collecting Oscar buzz, which is all the more impressive since it's in French, with subtitles.

While I continue to ponder Perry's inclusion in a French film with subtitles, I'm wondering why the Oscar buzz is all for Marion Cotillard, who has scored Best Actress Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Broadcast Film Critics Association nominations, and is likely on her way to her first Oscar citation since winning in 2008 for La Vie en Rose. I'm not saying that Cotillard doesn't deserve the praise because, as usual, she does. She works for it, and she works it. She gives Stephanie more shadings than she probably had on paper: Blink and you might miss the character's subtle thawing after a freak on-the-job accident leaves her without legs, and Cotillard confidently maneuvers the physical demands of playing a woman with stumps where her legs should be.

Stephanie ends up being the opposite of what one might have expected -- bitter wheelchair-bound beauty spends the rest of the movie in her dingy flat, shutting herself off from the world -- and Cotillard plays her perfectly. I wanted more of her, more of her story, but ultimately, Stephanie is a glorified supportive girlfriend, and Cotillard probably belongs in the Best Supporting Actress running alongside Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables), Sally Field (Lincoln), Helen Hunt (The Sessions) and likely fourth-time (in that category) nominee Amy Adams (The Master), who received her third Oscar nomination for playing the supportive girlfriend of the title character in the 2010 film The Fighter.

More than anything or anyone else, Rust and Bone is about another fighter, Ali, played by the Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, who is an appealing mix of primal he-man and brawny softie. Watching Schoenaerts in action I felt like I was watching Tom Hardy's mixed martial artist from last year's Warrior in a slightly inferior film. If Schoenaerts were George Clooney, he'd probably be giving Lincoln's Daniel Day-Lewis a run for his third Best Actor Oscar.

My biggest problem with Rust and Bone (besides Katy Perry) is that its central relationships -- Ali and Stephanie, Ali and his son Sam, Ali and his sister, Ali and himself -- are so sketchily drawn that the upbeat ending doesn't resonate as it should. It doesn't feel particularly hard-won. We know Ali resents his son, that his sister resents him, and that he and Stephanie are bound to fall for each other, but those threads are all so underdeveloped that we're never really sure why. When Ali makes his heartfelt declaration during the movie's emotional climax -- a phone conversation that, curiously, is shown entirely from Ali's point of view, with Cotillard heard but not seen -- it seems to come out of nowhere because all the beats of the relationship haven't played out onscreen.

Still, the film is uplifted by the performances of Schoenaerts and Cotillard, and, despite the presence of Perry, the soundtrack, a combo of alternative rock, electronic dance-pop and Alexandre Desplat's score. The musical highlight -- which, like Perry's hit, doesn't appear on the soundtrack being sold by digital retailers -- is the Trentemøller Mix of Bruce Springsteen's "State Trooper," a song from his 1982 Nebraska album that was once beautifully covered by Cowboy Junkies (on the band's 1986 debut, Whites off the Earth Now!) and plays here during a sequence that begins with Stephanie buying a new car.

Though these scenes are supposed to belong to Cotillard, she loses complete ownership of them as soon as the music kicks in. But her partial loss are those two minutes' gain. And if someone is going to steal scenes right out from under you, it might as well be The Boss.

Cowboy Junkies "State Trooper"

Feel It!: More Thoughts on Passion and "The Deep Blue Sea"

Those fine folks at Merriam-Webster must have been consulting with Mother Collyer from The Deep Blue Sea. Their online dictionary seems to have a similarly tainted view of passion.

Its first definition:

a : the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death

b : an oratorio based on a gospel narrative of the Passion

Its fourth: 

a (1) : EMOTION this ruling passion is greed; (2) plural : the emotions as distinguished from reason 
b : intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction  
c : an outbreak of anger 

It's not until the fifth definition that we finally get a positive spin: 

a : ardent affection : LOVE

b : a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept

c : sexual desire

d : an object of desire or deep interest 

The Collins English Dictionary offers a more balanced point of view from the start:

1.	ardent love or affection
2.	intense sexual love
3.	a strong affection or enthusiasm for an object, concept, etc: a passion for poetry
4.	any strongly felt emotion, such as love, hate, envy, etc
5.	a state or outburst of extreme anger: he flew into a passion
6.	the object of an intense desire, ardent affection, or enthusiasm
7.	an outburst expressing intense emotion: he burst into a passion of sobs
8.	philosophy
	a. any state of the mind in which it is affected by something external, such as perception, desire, etc, as contrasted with action
	b. feelings, desires or emotions, as contrasted with reason

It's not until the ninth definition that Collins gets around to where Merriam-Webster begins:  "9. the sufferings and death of a Christian martyr." 

I'm particularly intrigued by Collins' definition 8a, which separates the feeling of passion from how one acts on it. Nevertheless, passion is as much the reaction to the intense feeling as it is the intense feeling itself. When someone responds to something emotionally, emphatically, it's passion that makes him or her do it, but the response itself is equally passion. "What passion!" one might say while observing a wailing bereft mother. The question then, is this: How much control, if any, should we exert over either manifestation of passion?

I, for one, have always been particularly prone to the stirrings of passion. But there's a reason why I've survived to such a ripe old age, mental and physical faculties mostly intact. Although I don't try to stifle the feeling itself, and I raise my voice more often than I should, I generally don't allow myself to respond to passion in unhealthy ways. My self-preservation instincts and my sense of restraint and decorum prevent me from going as far as Hester did, popping 12 pills because I can't choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. As Hester's wise landlady tells her later on, no man is worth it.

As much as I embrace passion, I wouldn't want to live or love in a hyper-emotional world where everyone is running around bubbling over like Mount Vesuvius about to erupt. I had enough of that during the four and a half years I lived in Buenos Aires, where people spend too much of their daily lives acting like they're auditioning for a telenovela. Feel it, but for God's sake, don't completely lose it. 

Despite her early suicide attempt and periodic emotional outbursts over the course of the film, I like to think that Hester will be alright. My favorite scene in the movie comes near the end. Hester has lost everything, and she begins to sob uncontrollably. After several minutes of release, she picks herself up, dusts off, and lets the sunshine in -- literally. When she opens the curtain, and she's starts to smile, there's the unmistakable hint of optimism on her face. Maybe she's just looking forward to popping 12 more pills, but I like to think that she realizes that passion doesn't have to be break you down completely. 

It's a beautiful ending to a beautiful film. I wrote yesterday's post just before I read the Golden Globe nominations, and I was thrilled that Rachel Weisz received one for her nicely nuanced performance as Hester Collyer. Were she Michelle Williams, who collects Oscar buzz just for showing up at work, an Academy Award nomination would be a foregone conclusion. As it is, Weisz probably will have to battle Hitchcock's Helen Mirren and Rust and Bone's Marion Cottilard for her spot in the Best Actress line-up.

But getting back to Hester, the movie ends on a note I'd like to interpret as being hopeful. I can't imagine that she'll compromise her passion offscreen and start living in fear, embracing her soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law's philosophy because it's too dangerous not to. Indeed, "guarded enthusiasm" sounds so stiff and uncomfortable, especially when Mother Collyer says it. If you cut off access to your emotions, that most basic of instincts, you might avoid the pitfalls of some dark impulses and save up a lot of tears, but what about the unbridled joy you'd miss out on? 

Imagine a world without passion. Classical music, particularly the works of Bach, wouldn't be the same. Neither would soap opera history, without the campy Passions. There'd be no The Passion of Christ. Maybe Maggie Smith would have starred in The Lonely Unguarded Enthusiasm of Judith Hearne instead of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne in 1987. Perhaps Helen Mirren would have won her 1999 Emmy Award for The Unguarded Optimism of Ayn Rand, not The Passion of Ayn Rand, which has a much nicer ring. Passion, the upcoming thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace and directed by Brian De Palma, would need a new title. And what would we call passionfruit? 

Occasionally, I feel a twinge of jealousy when faced with guarded enthusiasts and masters of insensitivity. Passion can be so exhausting. But I'd rather live with an out of control raging fire burning on the inside than spend my time gardening because, as Mother Collyer tells Hester, gardens are so much safer than people. Why not just go ahead and start digging your own grave then? You might as well be pushing up daisies instead of planting them because you're already pretty much half-way to dead. 

4 Songs About Passion

"Passion" Rod Stewart

"P.A.S.S.I.O.N." Rhythm Syndicate

"Talk About The Passion" R.E.M."

"Pashernate Love" Morrissey

What's Her Age Again?: Why A-List Hollywood Actresses Are Getting Younger Every Decade

The other day while I was watching the American Film Institute's 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award tribute to Shirley MacLaine, I couldn't get a certain number out of my head.

78!

No, that's not the number of times the Universal Channel will probably air the show in Bangkok before finally giving it a rest. It's the number I came up with when a voice over revealed MacLaine's birthday (April 24, 1934) early in the show, and I did the math. How could she possibly be only 78?

It's not that she looks older, and the year of her film debut (1955, in Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry) would certainly put her in that chronological vicinity, but wasn't she already middle-aged, like, a lifetime ago? Did we all rejoin her in one of her next lives, already in progress?

The first time I ever saw MacLaine, playing an ex-ballerina stage mom in 1977's The Turning Point, which I watched on HBO in 1978, she was already middle-aged. At the time of the film's release, she was 43, the age Jennifer Aniston is now, but could anyone imagine Jenn (who, by the way, played MacLaine's granddaughter in 2005's Rumor Has It...) as the mother of an actress the same age, 20, that Leslie Browne (who played MacLaine's daughter in The Turning Point and earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination) was then?

MacLaine was on the cusp of turning 35 when Sweet Charity was released in 1969, and just eight years later, she was already typecast as mom, a role for which she would finally win an Oscar six years later, at age 49, playing the mother of Debra Winger, then 28, in Terms of Endearment. Does anyone think that by 2019, Reese Witherspoon, now 36, will be playing the mother of a 20ish actress?

Years ago, when I first watched the Katharine Hepburn movie Summertime, which was released in 1955 when Hepburn was 48, I remember feeling a twinge of pity for Hepburn's character, because, well, who wants to be almost 50 and all alone in the city of love? It gave the film a certain pathos that I don't think director David Lean necessarily intended it to have. (What did I know? The closer I get to being 48 myself, the less I focus on her age and the more I think, Lucky girl! She's in Venice!)

If Julianne Moore were to be cast in a similar role today, anyone who doesn't know her age (51) could conceivably peg her as 35, the age she played eight years ago in Laws of Attraction. Men have always gone for leading ladies who are young enough to be their daughters, which might be why it was such a shocker to recently see Robert DeNiro, 68, in bed with Jacki Weaver, who's 65 and looks it, in the trailer for The Silver Linings Playbook. Now the leading ladies are going younger, too.

In 2009's The Proposal, Sandra Bullock, then 45, fell for Ryan Reynolds, then 33, and their age difference wasn't even written into the script. Interestingly, that same year she played the foster/adoptive mother of a high school football star and won an Oscar for her efforts. But would anyone cast her as the mother of Carey Mulligan, who, at 27, is certainly young enough to be her daughter? They'd probably give that role to Melissa Leo, 51 -- who already won her Oscar for being mom to Mark Wahlberg, 41, and Christian Bale, 38 -- or some other actress who doesn't have an eternally youthful image to uphold (see Hollywood's B-to-Z list).

Actresses have long complained about how few roles there are for women over 40, but I'd say that part of it might be because so few of them are passing for women over 40. You can pin some of the blame on changing fashion, too much plastic surgery, too much Botox, and too many yoga and Pilates sessions. But I'd put even more of it on the unwillingness of many A-list actresses of a certain caliber to go gently into that good dusk, the golden middle age -- especially when grown children are involved.

It might be fashionable today to play the cougar, the older woman bedding the younger guy -- a role assumed in recent years by the likes of Cate Blanchett (in Notes on a Scandal), Uma Thurman (in Prime), Kate Winslet (in The Reader), Catherine Zeta-Jones (in The Rebound) and Michelle Williams (in My Week with Marilyn) -- but the actress who is robbing the cradle, so to speak, is generally perceived as being hot enough to land a guy any age, and if she's playing a character with kids, they're usually well under driving age.

When French actress Simone Signoret fell for younger guy Laurence Harvey in 1959's Room at the Top (winning a well-deserved Oscar in the process), not only was she presented as being kind of over the hill and desperate, a thoroughly tragic figure, but at 38, she was only some seven years older than Laurence! Would any director today dream of casting Oscar winner Marion Cotillard, 36, and Ryan Gosling, 31, in a remake? Would Cotillard take the "older-woman" role opposite an actor so close to her age? If Steven Soderbergh were directing, probably, but would anyone buy it?

Later this year, Kristin Scott Thomas, 51, whose 2012 leading men have included Robert Pattinson, 26, and Ewan McGregor, 41, will add Gosling to her list in Only God Forgives, Gosling's reunion with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn. "At my ripe old age, I'm getting these fantastic leading men," Scott Thomas told me earlier this year when I interviewed her in Bangkok, where the film was shot. But, she added, "I am playing his mother." Hopefully, she'll be handsomely rewarded -- with an Oscar nomination? -- for acting her age.

Charlize Theron, 36, won plaudits (but no Oscar nod) for acting her age last year in Young Adult. Well, kind of. Although her character, Mavis Gary was 37 years old and competing with a grown woman (played by Elizabeth Reaser, 37) for the attention of her college boyfriend, Mavis was a childless former beauty queen who could have passed for 29 even if she hadn't been acting more like 19. This year, in Snow White and the Huntsmen (which could almost be seen as an allegory for aging in Holllywood), Theron's onscreen competition is Kristen Stewart, 22.

Sarah Jessica Parker did entire episodes of Sex and the City about competing with twentysomething women, but she's still acting like she's not that much older than one. Over the course of six seasons on Sex and the City, she proved herself capable of playing more than light romantic comedy, yet she can't seem to get out of the city and out of her thirties. She's 47 now. It's time for her to stretch. She'll never be Meryl Streep, but I'd hate to see her turn into Meg Ryan, evidence of the damage that trying to be forever young can do to a career -- and a face.

Even Ponce de Leon never found the Fountain of Youth. Instead he stumbled upon Florida, a state now best known for being the final resting place for retirees. Draw your own conclusions.

My Final List of 2011: 10 Reasons Why Juliette Binoche Will Always Be My Best Actress

1. She taught me that you can't fight the feelings. And you can't run from love either. In 1993's Three Colors: Blue, my favorite movie of all-time, after the death of her husband and young daughter in a horrific car accident, Binoche's character Julie retreats from life. Love, she decides, is a trap. The only way to survive is to not feeling anything. Try as she might -- and she does make a valiant effort -- she finds that something, or someone, keeps pulling her back to life. Ultimately, she realizes that life without love, and the risk it brings, isn't really life at all. It's a lovely sentiment, one that continues to rule my life.

2. The English Patient was bearable because of her. When, against all odds and pretty much every prognostication, she beat Lauren Bacall for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1997, the phone calls started pouring in. All of my friends wanted to congratulate me. To know me is to know that I love her.

3. She says it all when she says nothing at all. Her most powerful moments onscreen are when she's simply listening, to Jeremy Irons' amorous entreaties in Damage (a movie, which, in all fairness, Miranda Richardson stole in under five minutes -- a few of them topless!), to Ralph Fiennes' scarred soldier recounting his tragic love story in The English Patient, to Certified Copy's cold writer (and possibly her husband) recalling the mother and son he saw in Florence -- she was always walking a little too far ahead of him -- who inspired his latest book. Binoche's tears broke my heart and helped make the performance one of the year's best.

4. Death becomes her. I'll never forget her final scene in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, before the car crash. Binoche: "What are you thinking about?" Daniel Day-Lewis: "I'm thinking about how happy I am." Or something like that. I hope I get to say words to that effect sometime before I die, and hopefully, I won't die right after I say them.

5. She's no snob. She can work with some of the most highly esteemed directors on the planet, ones who are known mostly to die-hard cineastes but are usually under Oscar's radar, and still play Steve Carell's love interest in Dan in Real Life, or costar with Channing Tatum, Tracy Morgan and Katie Holmes in Son of No One.

6. She takes the high road. When fellow Gallic legend Gerard Depardieu laid into her during an interview a few years ago, labelling her "nobody" and "absolutely nothing," Binoche didn't stoop to his level. But she got the last dig: While speaking to the Guardian after the attack, and after making nice with him, she said, "Perhaps I should send him my reviews." Well played, Mademoiselle Juliette.

7. Crap can be watchable if Binoche is in it. I'm not talking about Son of No One, which I haven't seen and I have no intention of doing so. I'm referring to Chocolat, for which she received a 2000 Best Actress Oscar nod; Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, her first film with Ralph Fiennes; and Jet Lag, her sort of terrible 2002 romantic comedy with Jean Reno. Confession time again: I've seen it more than once and even bought the DVD.

8. She can wow in multiple languages. In Certified Copy, she does so in three: her native French, English and Italian. Can Marion Cotillard top that? Maybe I'm still bitter about Cotillard's sabotaging of Julie Christie's bid for a second Best Actress Oscar a few years ago, but while watching Midnight in Paris, I couldn't stop thinking how I would have liked it so much more with Binoche instead of Cotillard, who, to me, came across as the archetypal free-spirited French beauty.

9. The bright lights of Hollywood haven't blinded her. I read somewhere that she turned down Steven Spielberg's attempt to cast her in Jurassic Park in order to make Blue. Good choice, and Binoche makes a lot of them. Sure there are duds in her filmography (see No. 7), but after winning the Oscar, she could have chosen to work with any director and become an even bigger star, but she picked interesting projects, often in French, that weren't likely to make her the next Julia Roberts. God knows we have enough of those.

10. Duh! She's this blog's poster girl. For 13 years after seeing Blue at the Quad Cinema in New York City, I slept with a framed Blue movie poster over my bed. Unless I had company, Binoche was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night. In the last five and a half years, waking up and falling asleep just haven't been the same without someone, my beloved Binoche, to watch over me.