Universal is officially launching the Best Actress campaign for Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day as she will be given the Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film by the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
As of right now, no pundits on Gold Derby have Emily Blunt predicted except one. Anne Thompson and she only predicts movies she has seen, not movies she hasn’t seen. She has Blunt at #2, which is pretty good. The way the Oscars used to be would probably make Blunt, along with Disclosure Day overall, a strong player. The new Academy? Not so sure.
The actors branch is still the largest branch. But it isn’t like the old days, that’s for sure. They’re more international, less industry-centered. That hurts people like Steven Spielberg and Emily Blunt because they are most likely considered on the basis of prestige alone.
But we don’t live in that kind of world anymore, Thelma! We just don’t. We live in a world ruled by millennials, older and younger. It’s not exactly MY favorite world but it is the reality. Give me Gen-X any day. Heck, I’ll take the Boomers. Millennials are well-behaved, very controlling and VERY correct. But they are also less inclined to even know film history beyond, like, Paul Thomas Anderson.
Disclosure Day is not as bad as I’d heard, certainly not bad at all. Is it top tier Spielberg? No but I’m not even sure Spielberg is capable of making a bad movie, and I mean really bad. He always delivers on an emotional level. If Disclosure Day suffers from anything it’s having two leads who aren’t romatically involved. Then, we have to involve ourselves with Kurt Russell’s son and Bono’s daughter as we’re also trying to get into the two leads. I would have gone with one.
I do appreciate the nod to Close Encounters, of course, with two marriages falling apart. But in Close Encounters, one of them was a single mom and Richard Dreyfuss was with a mom who was angry all of the time. Oh, what a great GREAT movie. Why? Because it told the truth. But we don’t live in that kind of world anymore, Thelma! We live in an aspirational world – a utopian one where all movies must present us as our higher, unflawed selves.
So that’s a little boring and that’s the biggest problem with Disclosure Day. In these kinds of movies, with no real stakes because they don’t tell the truth, we’re always at a cool remove (as with The Odyssey). Obsession, for instance, grabs us from the outset, shoving a hand through the screen and grabbing us by our shirt collar, because it DOES tell the truth.
I would say the same is true about The Invite. We are given four deeply flawed characters and we spend the whole movie wanting to know who they really are versus who is being presented to us. Olivia Wilde knocked it out of the park.
But, there is still a scenario where Emily Blunt makes it through because she does give a great performance. The problem it’s a performance that doesn’t stay with us because ultimately, we don’t know who she is or why we should care about her. But still, in a year with a weak-ish Best Actress race, can she make it in? She has a powerful publicity machine behind her, and she is very well liked throughout the industry. She was the standout for the film.
She’s tasked with doing a variety of accents, including American – which is the hardest of them all since we Americans can always detect a British person trying to do American. They do a kind of flat affect that is not tethered to any real place we know. People talk differently if they’re from California or New York or Boston, etc. But she does fine and she also speaks a wide array of other languages.
Ultimately, I kind of liked the ideas behind Disclosure Day. But I don’t know if it’s well liked enough for Blunt to get through. Maybe.
Here is the rest of the press release:
“Emily Blunt takes risks most actors wouldn’t dare – moving between drama, comedy, and blockbuster spectacle with the same precision and commitment,” said Michael Douglas. “That range and authenticity are exactly what the Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film was created to celebrate. We’re proud to honor her,” he added.
This summer, Blunt earned some of the strongest reviews of her career for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic Disclosure Day, in which she stars alongside Josh O’Connor as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City TV meteorologist whose increasingly inexplicable experiences draw her into a sweeping effort to reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life to the world. In this role, Blunt showcases the full breadth of her remarkable range, moving between humor, fear, confusion, vulnerability and wonder.
The performance marks another high point in a career defined by Blunt’s extraordinary versatility. She earned her first Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Kitty Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award this past year for her role opposite Dwayne Johnson in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine. She has moved effortlessly between drama, comedy, action, musicals and thrillers in films such as A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, Sicario, Edge of Tomorrow, Into the Woods, Mary Poppins Returns, Looper and The Devil Wears Prada. Earlier this year, Blunt reprised her beloved role as Emily Charlton in The Devil Wears Prada 2, reuniting with Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Stanley Tucci two decades after the original film became a cultural phenomenon and helped launch her international film career.