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tMF OSCARWATCH: Best Actress Losers - Ellen Burstyn ( Requiem for a Dream)

Written by Jed Medina

Tuesday, 11 August 2009 07:09

If there is one particular actress that filmmaker Darren Oronofsky likes to cast, then it has to be Ellen Burstyn. In The Fountain, the director himself wrote into the script a role for the acclaimed actress. In Requiem for a Dream, Burstyn was nominated for a Best Actress award, and it was very unfortunate she did not win- her performance is way up there with the greats.

In the movie, Burstyn portrays Sara Goldfarb, an elderly widow who became addicted with weight-loss amphetamine pills, was hospitalized against her will, undergoes painful electro-convulsive therapy, and later on was confined at a mental asylum. For her performance, she won the Indie Spirit Award for Best Lead Female and more than 8 major critics' association awards for Best Actress. She also received nominations for Best Actress from the Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globes and the Oscars.

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The actress is not new to awards and acclaim and even controversy. Burstyn has received Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress in 1971 for her role in The Last Picture Show and for Best Actress in 1973 for the horror movie The Exorcist. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1974 for her performance in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, directed by Martin Scorsese. That goes with the BAFTA and the Golden Globes as well. She was nominated again in 1978 for Same Time, Next Year, in 1980 for Resurrection, and for Requiem for a Dream in 2000.

Why discuss an issue already resolved? A winner has already taken home her Oscar trophy.... Yes, but even after more than 8 years, some people can still remember Burstyn's performance and the disappointment on her Oscar loss.

Here are the list of nominees and the eventual winner for the Oscar Best Actress race, where Burstyn was nominated for Requiem for a Dream:
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Joan Allen - The Contender as Sen. Laine Hanson

Juliette Binoche - Chocolat as Vianne Rocher

Ellen Burstyn - Requiem for a Dream as Sara Goldfarb

Laura Linney - You Can Count on Me as Sammy Prescott

Julia Roberts - Erin Brockovich as Erin Brockovich - winner

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I watched all of the movies above, except You Can Count on Me, and while I think Joan Allen did a magnificent performance in The Contender and Juliette Binoche was divine in Chocolat, it was the many scenes featuring Ellen Burstyn in Oronofsky's movie- her pain and agony, her lost dream and her addiction that I constantly remember even now. Peter Travers at Rolling Stones has this to say about Burstyn's performance:

His scenes with Ellen Burstyn has achieve a rare poignancy as son and mother drown in delusions. Fixated on appearing on a TV game show, Sara stuffs down diet pills so she can fit into a red dress she wore in her youth. The speed leaves her crazed by hallucinations -- the scene in which Sara's refrigerator seems to break free of the wall to crush her is scarier than anything in The Exorcist. Burstyn gives an award-caliber performance that is as raw and riveting as the movie that contains it. [ read more ]

Watch scenes featuring Ms. Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream:

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Ellen Burstyn, the Actress: Here's an article written by Rick Lyman for the New York Times (Her Ellen Burstyn Enjoys Second Act)and it narrates the career of Ms. Burstyn.

In effect, we get to know a lot about the person and the actress:

For a period in the 1970's, during the height of that golden age of American film, Ms. Burstyn was perhaps the most honored and respected actress in Hollywood, starring in emblematic films like Peter Bogdanovich's ''Last Picture Show'' (1971), for which she received her first Oscar nomination; William Friedkin's ''Exorcist'' (1973), for which she was also nominated; and Martin Scorsese's ''Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore'' (1974), for which she finally won an Oscar.

But in the 1980's, the size and prominence of the roles she was being offered declined, partly because the movies she made toward the end of the 1970's, while critically acclaimed, were not the box-office hits that her earlier films were, and partly because she was nearing 50 and Hollywood is notoriously unkind to actresses in middle age. Her white-hot career dwindled to a string of television movies (''The People vs. Jean Harris,'' ''Surviving,'' ''Pack of Lies'') and series, including, in 1986, the short-lived ''Ellen Burstyn Show.'' She felt a growing sense of past glories receding in the rear-view mirror.

Basically, she has been underused over the years.I mean, an actress like Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis had 30 or 40 great roles in her career, but how many great roles has Ellen Burstyn been given? It just shows how true it is that they don't write enough great roles for women anymore. The fact is, if Ellen Burstyn were working in England, she'd be Dame Ellen Burstyn. She'd be a national treasure.

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Requiem for a Dream: Some Notes - The Guardian on Requiem for a Dream:

The energy, consistency and utter mastery of technique that Darren Aronofsky shows in his adaptation of Requiem for a Dream reminded me of that legendary confidence. His agonising and unflinchingly grim portrait of drug abuse, taken from a novel by Hubert Selby Jr (with whom Aronofsky co-wrote the screenplay), is a formally pleasing piece of work - if pleasing can possibly be the right word; it shows an engaging young man's descent into heroin addiction at the same time as his elderly mother becomes hooked on diet pills in the grotesquely forlorn hope of regaining her youthful figure in order to appear on a TV game show.

It's a repulsive and yet somehow elegantly considered symmetry of ironies, pre-figured by Aronofsky's split-screen argument through a locked door between Harry (Jared Leto) and his mom Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), who is refusing to let Harry hock the TV to buy drugs. Gradually, inexorably, Harry and Sara's lives unravel, as do those of Harry's buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and his lover Marion (Jennifer Connelly). Their excursion into the progressive circles of hell is recorded by Aronofsky with such precision that the whole film is unsettlingly like a gruesome yet compelling vivisectional experiment.

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[ Official Movie site ] [ IMDb Movie Details ]

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