Time once again for Coffee Spew’s annual Nominated for the Wrong Performance award, which singles out an actor who in the previous year gave a better performance in a different film than the one for which they’ve been Oscar-nominated. (Previous winner was a tie between Kate Winslat, who was so much better in Revolutionary Road than The Reader, and Penelope Cruz, who gave a richer performance in Elegy than Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) This year’s winner is Vera Farmiga, wrongly nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Up in the Air instead of Best Actress for her harrowing work in Orphan. Farmiga’s sexy-cool femme fatale in Up in the Air is really more of a plot contrivance than a believable character. (I don’t know about you, but I felt cheated by the “surprise” revelation of her character’s duplicity and the manner in which the film invited us to scorn her.) Farmiga in Orphan, on the other hand, is simply astonishing playing a recovering alcoholic mother and wife whose grip on reality grows slimmer by the minute.
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