Best Actress 1975
Winner: Louise Fletcher, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
Nominees: Isabelle Adjani, The Story of Adèle H.
Ann-Margret, Tommy
Glenda Jackson, Hedda
Carol Kane, Hester Street

The Field: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★


Ranking Oscar's Ballot
 
 My Pick:
Isabelle Adjani, The Story of Adèle H. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

From There:
Louise Fletcher, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Glenda Jackson, Hedda ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Ann-Margret, Tommy ★ ★ (★) ★ ★
Though I'm sure we've seen thinner years, Oscar plainly felt he needed to stretch to fill his quota for this category in 1975, hence the made-for-television Hedda, the micro-budgeted and self-distributed Hester Street, Louise Fletcher's winning but borderline supporting role in Cuckoo's Nest, and The Who's psychedelic rock opera, which rewrote the unexpected phrase "Oscar-nominated actress Ann-Margret" as the even less expected "two-time Oscar-nominated actress Ann-Margret." Over time, what was decried at the time as an epochally compromised roster has started to look hipper to me for its far-flung inclusiveness—though I'm clearly not one to downplay the outrage of Hollywood's chronically meager offerings to women performers, and I hope you'll allow me to register my bemusement that in an industry where you can't get proper studio financing for a cornerstone of Western theater starring a double Oscar winner, you can bathe in Columbia's landfill of cash for a two-hour electro-rock jam about a sense-deprived idiot savant who's so very adept at pinball that an entire regime of fascistic idolatry rises and crumbles in his image. Whatever: suffice it to say, Tommy is by far the most unexpected vehicle ever to usher an actress to a nomination in this category, but that doesn't make the nomination a joke. Not everything gets off on the right foot, or ends up there. In truth, it's tough coming into early scenes of Ann-Margret having a dumb-show mountaintop picnic and a glistening shag under a waterfall, then packing pinballs into the cylinders of Allied missiles, then literally kenneling herself in her mad loneliness while her husband dogfights with the Luftwaffe—tough, that is, if you're thinking, "Here's an Oscar-winning performance." Especially during the first seven minutes when no one speaks or sings, but through large swaths of the ensuing movie, Ann-Margret's task is to strike voluptuous poses of longing, despondency, hedonism, anger, titillation, mystification, envy, and an odd, final amalgam of brainwashed subservience and mercenary opportunism, selling her son to the world while being his protector-disciple, accessorizing for this role as anyone would with shotgun and tailored fatigues. The sketchy, almost proudly immature conception of the role speaks for itself, but within the starkers envelope of Tommy, it's no more bonkers than Jack Nicholson's child psychologist or Tina Turner going all INLAND EMPIRE as the Acid Queen (and, obviously, it's significantly less bonkers than Tommy himself). For her part, Ann-Margret's vociferous displays of emotion can be rather gustily amateur: when you want grief, she'll give you Grief; when you want parental consternation, she'll conjure a storm of brow-furrowing and grimace like Nancy Kelly in The Bad Seed; when you want arousal, she'll ecstatically fondle her own curves, smearing them with soapsuds cast in the role of "champagne" and chocolate cast in the role of "shit," and agitate herself with abandon against a long tubular pillow. Yet, in an industry that tends to partition instant likeability from forthright eroticism, Ann-Margret has a kind of secret genius for getting the audience to root for her, maybe because she evinces not the least shred of cynicism ("Tommy says 'See me, hear me, touch me, feel me,' and that's so important," she told a reporter), and maybe because she seizes the chances extended to her not with the ruthlessness of the climber but with the glee of the anointed fan. When she comes on too strong or too superficially hysterical, you blame Ken Russell for exposing her lack of clear technique more than you blame her. And as Tommy plays out, especially if you avoid applying the retroactive pressure of looking for "Academy" acting, Ann-Margret nudges that gift for ingratiating herself into a much trickier achievement of making us feel something for the character. The Who wrote the damn thing, but there's no question who on screen has forged the most empathetic and personal connection to the outlandish material. The contrast crystallizes most between the rumbustious, flippant camping of Oliver Reed as her main partner in crime and Ann-Margret's own strategy of cutting to the purest emotions she can find. The war-widow bit fails but the mother walled off from her own child's unfathomability does, strangely, and the reliance on drink and self-stimulation manages to be both tender and witty, particularly when she purrs out The Who's gangly lyrics ("Do you think it's all riiiight... to leave the boy with cousin Keeeeeevin....?") while she's got a martini glass in her mouth. Tommy's own puerile dream of sprinting exuberantly through the surf becomes touching once Ann-Margret shows up, living out her own dream of really loving her son, and through juxtaposition, the scene exposes how subtly she has been threading self-recrimination and an unnerving, conscious collapse of self-identity into her work across the second hour. Storywise, Tommy is nowhere sillier than in its final 20 minutes, but the movie's brazen, almost daringly thin Clockworkadelica somehow pull it over the finish line. The ship doesn't quite go down, as a sensory experience and a welcome dose of dementia in commercial cinema, but even less does Ann-Margret go down with it. You realize how inordinately responsible she is for getting you through the whole ordeal, and supplying something like an emotional through-line, sometimes even a complicated one, in a picture that's barely asking for one.

Carol Kane, Hester Street ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Who gets your vote in this field, and on my dream ballot below? VOTE HERE!


My Favorites from 1975:
(As determined by years of Oscar eligibility)

My Pick: Ronee Blakley, Nashville
Nominees: Isabelle Adjani, The Story of Adèle H.
Nominees: Louise Fletcher, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
Nominees: Mariangela Melato, Swept Away
Nominees: Katharine Ross, The Stepford Wives

Jury Prize (Staggering But Ineligible): Delphine Seyrig, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Honorable Mentions: Marisa Berenson, Barry Lyndon; Julie Christie, Shampoo; Goldie Hawn, Shampoo; Glenda Jackson, Hedda; Ann-Margret, Tommy; Rachel Roberts, Picnic at Hanging Rock

Also-Rans (alpha): Katharine Hepburn, Rooster Cogburn; Carol Kane, Hester Street; Diane Keaton, Love and Death; Deborah Raffin, Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough; Charlotte Rampling, Farewell, My Lovely; Susan Sarandon, The Rocky Horror Picture Show


Gourmet Prospects: Karen Black, The Day of the Locust; Stockard Channing, The Fortune; Faye Dunaway, Three Days of the Condor; Marthe Keller, Toute une vie; Magali Noël, Amarcord; Maria Schneider, The Passenger; Delphine Seyrig, India Song; Jennifer Warren, Night Moves

Further Research: Anne Bancroft, The Prisoner of Second Avenue; Laura Duke Condominas, Lancelot du Lac; Catherine Deneuve, Donkey Skin; Tamara Dobson, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold; Barbara Feldon, Smile; Susan George, Mandingo; Pam Grier, Friday Foster; Marilyn Hassett, The Other Side of the Mountain; Liza Minnelli, Lucky Lady; Diana Ross, Mahogany; Cybill Shepherd, At Long Last Love; Barbra Streisand, Funny Lady; Raquel Welch, The Four Musketeers

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