Anghus Houvouras is getting sick of Meryl Streep…
I care less about awards with each passing year, maturing past the idea that art requires peer validation. I’m not aggressively anti-award. I won’t sit here perched atop my high horse and declare you all fools for caring. For many years I was more than happy to indulge in award prognostication and talk about the deserving and undeserving as if I had any real insight. I enjoyed the conversation and the discussion surrounding the awards season and what the various other movie awards meant for the potential contenders. What was once enjoyable turned kind of sour. A couple of years ago, the whole thing began to feel empty and pointless. Right around the time Avatar was nominated for Best Picture. That’s when I had my Network moment and declared that I was “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!” After that, I tried to find the enthusiasm and the passion I once had for movie awards, but it was gone. The ridiculousness of it all had been exposed, and I no longer saw any value in them. Now I sit back and enjoy the award season not really caring what makes it in and what doesn’t.
This year’s Academy Award nominations area fine group of potential contenders. Quality films all around. There’s no sore thumb like Avatar taking up valuable real estate. As a guy who used to pour over every category with an obsessive level of speculation, I can honestly say there wasn’t anything or anyone on the ballot that seemed out of place. Until I saw her name…
Meryl Streep.
There she was, nominated for August: Osage County. One of those Weinstein production that no one outside of New York or Los Angeles knows exist. That cloying Oscar bait that Weinstein seems hell bent on forcing into consideration every year.
Meryl Streep.
Our generation’s greatest actress. Nominated 18 times for an Academy Award (with 3 wins). 28 Golden Globe nominations (does anyone really care how many Globes someone won?). It seems like her name pops up every year. Frankly, I’m getting a little sick of seeing her there. That name, that obligatory name that shows up again and again every year…
Meryl Streep.
That’s not an indoctrination of her ability as an actress, though I’d be lying if I said her recent output doesn’t seem to border on the broad and cartoonish. Meryl Streep is a fine, well respected actress. But the frequency with which she has been nominated lately is becoming kind of comical.
She’s been nominated five times in the last eight years. And the quality of the movies varies greatly. While there may have been some real character work going into films like Doubt and The Iron Lady, is anyone going to sincerely argue that her work in The Devil Wears Prada and Julie & Julia was among the five best performances of that or any other year? Streep is an icon. An actress that has achieved unparalleled success and respect from her peers. But let’s be honest: these nominations are starting to feel less like a marvel and more like a mandate.
Aren’t there some other actresses that could use a nomination? New names and faces that could benefit from a little peer validation? Should we just automatically assume that on any given year there will only be four nominees for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress and the obligatory Streep nomination.
It feels like they call her name out every year. This annual tradition of unbridled adulation. I think they’d probably nominate Meryl Streep for Best Actress in a year where she didn’t even appear in a film, just because. They’ll just say:
“And the nominees are Meryl Streep for just being Meryl Streep.”
And after she dies they’ll honor her with an award posthumously. Perhaps they’ll just rename the category after her.
The Meryl Streep Best Actress award.
Then we’re guaranteed to here that name every year from now until the end of time. They can fashion the award itself to look like her and change the name from ‘Oscar’ to ‘Meryl’ guaranteeing that every year we recognize her brilliance…
Meryl Streep.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published January 16, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
