Why Marion Cotillard Should Win Best Actress, and Won't

The most deserving of the five Best Actress Oscar nominees is Marion Cotillard, the brilliant actress whose performance puts the rose in the French film La Vie en Rose. She inhabits the life of legendary French singer, Edith Piaf, with such dexterity and verve that unwitting viewers might not notice that the 20-year-old Piaf and the frail 50-year-old version are played by the same actress.

This is doubly impressive when the film’s structure jumps backwards and forwards, haphazardly at times, to juxtapose scenes of Piaf as a young waif erupting into song on street corners for bread money with the internationally acclaimed star crushed by deprived love and relentless ambition being spoon fed by a staffperson at a nursing home. Cotillard sings, and doesn't lip synch, Piaf’s songs. She masters her throaty accent and conveys subtle changes of mood beneath layers of prosthetic glaze (with, of course, a good assist from skilled make-up artists). Her performance is powerful yet emotionally pliable.

One scene near film’s end evidences her vast range by sending her from near ecstasy to anger and then a soul-draining sadness in the course of a minute or two. Her lover, Marcel, awakens her from slumber with breakfast in bed and the surprise prompts her to spring with girlish strides out of the bedroom to find a present she’d meant to give him.

Her movements become erratic and jerky as she hurries from room to room and can’t locate the present. She accuses the hired help of losing, and even hiding, it until an awareness they’re actually hiding a dark fact about Marcel gradually slows her to a standstill. The scene’s dialogue is largely irrelevant. Cotillard’s energy and fluidity communicate what’s really happening at this pivotal moment of the film and Piaf’s life.

Unfortunately the dialogue does matter. It’s in French. And for this reason, above all others, Cotillard will not take home an Oscar on Sunday evening. Only one actress has won Best Actress while speaking dialogue not written in English, Sophia Loren for the 1960 Italian film, Two Women.

As brilliant as Cotillard is in La Vie en Rose, neither she nor Edith Piaf command the goddess-like persona of a Sophia Loren, goddess-ness being possibly the only way to persuade Academy voters to overcome their biases against foreign languages.

Cotillard has the additional disadvantage of vying against far more experienced or youthful contenders. Julie Christy, the Welsh beauty of Dr. Zhivago, is certainly the sentimental, if not odds on, favorite for her role in Away from Her. In her favor are decades of stardom experience, familiarity from Baby Boomers and younger generations alike, and her representation of a cause, in her portrayal of an Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife. Her performance was remarkable, and Oscar loves actors who take on the challenge of roles marked by disease or other ailments, such as depressed Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours or gender-challenged Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. Yet Christie doesn’t have much screen time and, as challenging as the role was, it didn’t have the breadth or the difficulty of Cotillard’s.

The other favorite is Ellen Page for Juno. Page just turned 21 today and plays a 16-year-old pregnant high school student. Juno is a lighter, albeit irreverent, film. Its comedy plays weighs more easily than the heaviness of La Vie en Rose or most of the other contenders in this and other Oscar categories. Page balances her character’s sassy tongue with enough warmth to endear her even to mainstream audiences. Juno earned a bigger box office at $117 million than the films in any other of the major categories with the exception of American Gangster ($130 million), which features Best Supporting Actress nominee, Ruby Dee. If the Oscar doesn’t go to Christie, it will almost certainly go to Page.


Not that Christie and Page aren’t very deserving nominees. They are. But Cotillard’s role was of a much higher difficulty and her performance surmounted every challenge. Had the dialogue of La Vie en Rose been in English, Cotillard would’ve been as much of a favorite as Helen Mirren was last year for portraying Queen Elizabeth in The Queen. Instead, Cotillard will depart the Kodak Theater on Sunday as just another also ran whose deserving performance will likely drift into obscurity over the next decade, much like that of Brazilian actress, Fernanda Montenegro, in Central Station 10 years ago or, more recently, Penelope Cruz in Volver just last year.