While Oscar season may officially start in September, that doesn’t mean the marketplace has been devoid of features worthy of Oscar consideration. Inception is in the discussion, as is The Kids Are All Right. And with the Best Picture category now at ten nominees animation studio Pixar may always be the mix whenever it has a new release. Toy Story 3, the studio’s newest release, has received a mostly positive reception among critics. Those who weren’t as supportive were vilified as a result. And as far as actors deserving of consideration, well, there’s Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo for Kids, Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone, and Robert Duvall for Get Low.
Now Deadline has reported on another actress who is eligible for a nomination. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy may have been released overseas last year, including two that were made for television, but because Music Box Films released director Niels Arden Oplev’s Dragon Tattoo in a Los Angeles County theater for a qualifying run this past March, it means Noomi Rapace’s performance eligible.
This is new territory for Music Box Films. The small studio has distributed a few films like Tell No One (a French adaptation of Harlan Coben’s best-selling thriller) and the spy spoof OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, but they’ve never had a film that garnered “Oscar Talk.” Noomi Rapace has already won the Swedish equivalency of Best Actress so if she could build the same buzz that Marion Cotillard had when she played Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, then she could make the transition to tentpole projects like Marion did with Public Enemies and Inception.
Already, there is word that Warner Bros. wants Rapace for the Sherlock Holmes sequel and Paramount wants her for the fourth Mission: Impossible adventure. She’s also met with Brad Fischer for the Phoenix Pictures project The Last Voyage of the Demeter, James McTeigue on The Raven, and McG on This Means War.
The Buzz: Personally, Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth Salander has been one of the acting highlights of the year. It’s such a difficult role; to play a woman who has a gifted mind but has become antisocial because of her experiences as a young girl. She is promiscuous and highly intelligent, dresses like a biker chick, and can hack into any computer system. Her performance is reminiscent of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Not because of her actions, but because when she (like Ledger) is not on screen, we’re always thinking about her character, Lisbeth Salander.
Whether or not she gets a nomination, her performance is one of best of the year in my opinion.
