So, Why DID Glenn Never Win?
Just ask any Snooty Twitter neckbeard: she was never Good Enough! No. Oh, but the bile they reserve for Our Number One Lady really is atrocious. To hear them talk, Glenn was never the frontrunner – yes, even the Stoleman year – and has always languished in fifth place. (A bit like me!)
Of Ms. Close’s eight nominations, she’s deserved it half the time. For The World According to Garp, her magnificent double-whammy of Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons, and The Wife. I’m also partial to Albert Nobbs. Oh, shut up! It’s the phallic title – they should’ve just called it Albert – and the woefully miscast Aaron Johnson and Mia Wasikowska at fault. Glennie is superlative! It doesn’t deserve its reputation as an Oscars joke. (Frankly, considering this year’s nominees, it’s in a class with Citizen Ka– Jeanne Dielman.) I remember going to the premiere during the Trinity hoo-ha and hearing Glenn talk about her grandmother who should’ve been an actress inspired me to go on! “Just do it!” she drawled.
Ms. Close had a fair suck of the sauce bottle on those occasions. But why did she come up short? In 1982, it went to Depressica Lange, not for Frances as she would have you believe, in Tootsie. Up until that point whenever a performer had been nominated twice in one year, they emerged victorious in the supporting category. Poor Siggy Weave – more of her later! – bucked the trend in 1988, and it’s happened to Julianne Less and Scarlett Johannson since.
When folk say Meryl Streep is the world’s greatest actress, I always think: “That’s a funny way to pronounce ‘Jessica Lange’”. But she does, let’s face it, play everything as Blanche DuBois. Still, her nods for Frances and Tootsie (bringing co-stars Kim Stanley and Teri Garr along with her) was an about-face for someone who’d been King Kong’s second banana and dumped Mikhail Baryshnikov for Sam Shepard. Survivor bias, yes, but it thrills me that Depressica and Glenn broke through as 30-something ingénues. As I’m fond of saying, I’m “it’s fine, Glenn was 35 before she made a film” years old or, less prosaically, closer to Norma Desmond’s age than she is!
In her memoir Speedbumps, Teri Garr writes: “I figured Glenn Close would win, and not just because Jessica and I would split the Tootsie vote. I thought she was perfect in Garp as Garp’s nurse mother”.
And she was! But these things are about timing. Depressica was never winning for Frances in the year of Sophie’s Choice. Therefore, category skulduggery prevented Meryl and Glenn becoming Oscar winners on the same night. Talk about a villain origin story! Mind you, Glennie wouldn’t have been nominated for her next two roles if she was a mere flash-in-the-pan. She credits her The Natural nod for the way Zooey Deschanel’s cinematographer father captured the light streaming through her hat (and “I cried in a shower in Big Chill”).
Lately, I’ve decided her best shot was Dangerous Liasions – if only because the vilification of the Yentlly ill Alex Forrest (and the infamous ending change) in Fatal Attraction offends modern sensibilities. The timing was wrong. Cher’s narrative for Moonstruck was more compelling (although the ‘he/they’ brigade insist Broadcast News’s Holly Hunter was runner-up).
The following year, the desire to christen a second Depressica in Sigourney Weaver backfired spectacularly. Her featured bit in Working Girl (did she and Joan Cusack cancel each other out?) was trumped by The Accidental Tourist’s Geena Davis. For Gorillas in the Mist, she lost not to Glenn (or even Meryl) but to Jodie Foster. Timing! The Accused is unwatchable – a rare example of a film taking Best Actress with no other nominations. (Julianne Less is another as the bottled-water tycoon, Still Alice.) The Academy were impressed that French-speaking Yale graduates, in the most awful wigs imaginable, could slum it as po’ trash. Plus, Ms. Foster deserved something after the Hinckley affair.
While that twenty-six-year-old enjoyed a meteoric rise, scoring another in 1991, Glenn entered a barren period. She wasn’t nominated again until 2011. Siggy Weave never was! Since Susan Sarandon’s triumph in 1995, Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek and Glenn are the only American women of Meryl’s age not named ‘Meryl’ to be nominated in this category. The first two were twenty years ago!
With the invasion of younger and international voters, they’ll never be again. This holds for the slightly more girlish Annette Bening and Michelle Pfeiffer. Even Ms. Streep hasn’t gotten one in six seasons. In her last absence in the early nineties, her prestige roles were gamely filled by Emma Thompson – as they are by Diet Emma Thompson, Olivia Colman, today.
I read a press clipping from 1989 that predicted Glenn was a shoo-in for her upcoming projects. Immediate Family (a dud), Reversal of Fortune or as Hannah Arendt, opposite Robert Duvall’s Eichmann, in a film that was never made. Indeed, her Reversal co-star Jeremy Irons won Best Actor making Glenn’s snub conspicuous. Hadn’t she reached a point where they’d nominate her for anything? While top-billed, her Sunny von Bülow is lean on screentime – but truly haunts and carries that picture in the manner of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. The same is true of Cruella. Look at Emma Stone floundering in the remake, the latest variation on Hitler-not-getting-into-art-school. Either could have been her Oscar!
The success of Angela Bassett in Wakanda Forever, helped by Ariana DeBose’s viral BAFTA rap, drives me to distraction. If Glenn delivered such a turn and died in the meantime, she still wouldn’t get noticed. I’m sure by “the thing”, Ms. DeBose means pulling off an overdue narrative where others couldn’t. Like Glenn, Ms. Bassett is horrendously deserving but pundits are keeping mum on what is a glorified career honour. Perhaps they can’t decide whether she’s winning for What’s Love Got to Do with It, thirty years later, or if it’s Chadwick Boseman’s posthumous award in another guise.
“It’s about the performance!” Twitter cried when Glenn made her valiant attempts on Albert Nobbs and The Wife. Moreover, they distorted every dumb thing she said, rooting out the slightest suspicion she was owed something. Both times, Ms. Close lost to nasty, vegetative portrayals. “Most Acting”, as opposed to best! Meryl’s pathetic Margaret Thatcher and Colman’s Queen Anne, an offering that exists on the intellectual level of Helena Bonham Carter in the Alice in Wonderland movies. (Even I cannot defend 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy, but I suppose I might try if its subject, now a United States senator, was a Democrat.)
In 1994, Our Number One Lady presented Deborah Kerr, the living legend with the most fruitless nominations, with her Honorary. It’s only a matter of time before Amy Adams follows in kind. Passing along the “curse”!
And when Glenn finally has that bald man in her hands? I pray she doesn’t peel off the gold paper and eat the chocolate in one go.