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Why Shailene Woodley In 'Fault In Our Stars' Deserves An Oscar Nod

This article is more than 9 years old.

Monday began 20th Century Fox's Oscar campaign for last summer's smash hit The Fault in Our Stars. The $12 million-budgeted cancer-stricken romantic drama was a "surprise" hit last year, opening to $48m over its debut weekend and grossing $304m worldwide. The film garnered mostly strong reviews, although too many of even the positive notices reduced the film to its mere worth as a tearjerker. What little hope the film has for would-be Oscar glory lies presumably in a long shot campaign for Ms. Woodley, and the slim possibility of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber receiving a Best Adapted Screenplay nod for adapting John Green's best-seller. Well, sometimes it's up to we individuals with a platform to create Oscar buzz or champion the ones that we hope end up included in the race, especially when said theoretical contenders are not preordained by virtue of anointed prestige or release date. So, with this platform that I have, let me say that I desperately hope that Shailene Woodley gets a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Fault in Our Stars.

15% of protagonists are female in cinema today. That's the sad statistic that opens Gregg Kilday's Hollywood Reporter piece regarding the dearth of viable and plausible Best Actress candidates for this year's Oscar race. And it is the same notion powering Alyssa Rosenberg's Washington Post follow-up piece and Sasha Stone's recent piece on the subject as well. The pieces runs down the overwhelming number of viable would-be Best Actor candidates, which is par for the course, while also offering the sad fact that there are shockingly few viable contenders for Best Actress this year. The reason for that is rooted in that statistic noted in the first sentence. The overwhelming number of would-be Oscar contenders, films that opened or will open between September and December and are thus preordained Oscar movies provided they don't sink with critics and/or fail at the box office, are explicitly male-centric stories.

As I've discussed in the past, it's never been a 50/50 split, but as the kind of cheaper dramas or mid-budget social issue melodramas that often gave women meaty leading and supporting roles became an endangered species, so too did the bias arise, implicit at best, explicit at worst, that male-centric dramas and melodramas were automatically presumed to be more artistically respectable than female ones. Now there are arguably enough would-be female lead performances to fill up a category, but that's only if you frankly include every conceivable mainstream female lead performance that we'll get this year. That's good news for the likes of Jenny Slate in Obvious Child or even Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Belle (both of whom I would be thrilled for if they snuck in), but grim news for the state of the industry overall.

And with news that Woodley may sign on to join Oliver Stone's Edward Snowden biopic, it stands to reason that Ms. Woodley may (depending on the quality and reception of the film of course) have  to settle for her first Oscar nomination for playing Joseph Gordon-Levitt's girlfriend. But Woodley shouldn't have to wait for her first "stand by your man" performance to earn Academy acclaim. As Susan Wloszcyna discussed, the easiest way for an actress to get an Oscar nomination is to play the long-suffering and/or supportive wife of a "great" man. Be it Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line or Jennifer Lawrence in The Silver Linings Playbook, some of our best actress have won Oscar gold not for their own star vehicles but for playing the girlfriend/wife who supports a man's narrative journey. The Best Supporting Actress category is even more stuffed with this phenomenon, as Jennifer Connelly, Marcia Gay Harden, and Rachel Weisz can attest.

That's partially why, to the extent that an Oscar nomination for a rich and famous movie star qualifies as "important," Shailene Woodley snagging a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Fault in Our Stars matters. Shailene Woodley offered a genuinely Oscar-worthy turn in a film that was an out-and-out female star vehicle. The film is a female-centric vehicle that debuted to critical acclaim and box office glory. Almost as importantly, it was not a preordained Oscar picture released in the last few months of the year, but rather a high quality summer release specifically intended to entertain the masses and make lots of money. It is a powerful and artistically triumphant film that deserves to be taken seriously even despite belonging in the oft-derided sub-genre of teen girl-centric entertainment. It is everything we say we want in the blockbuster-filled summer movie slate, and it is everything I would argue we need in the Oscar race as well.

An Oscar presence for The Fault in Our Stars will be a sign, a small one perhaps, that a mainstream female-centric melodrama released outside of the Oscar season can be taken as seriously and should be taken as seriously as male-centric festival darlings that drop in the last eight weeks of the year. Too much of the year-end awards race is made of up films that open right at the end of the year. Too many of those films are explicitly male-centric partially due (I would argue) to the implicit critical bias towards male-centric melodramas as being artistically superior or automatically worthy of critical consideration. It's not a complete shut-out of course, as the likes of Philomena, Winter's Bone, and The Kids are All Right prove. But there is still a critical bias towards explicitly female-centric melodramas, especially mainstream ones, as the inclusion of The Blind Side basically led to a complete overall of the nominating process even as the whole 10-nominees gimmick was initially designed to get a wider swath of films into contention.

The Fault in Our Stars is absolutely the kind of film that deserves our attention and our respect. Shailene Woodley's performance is indeed the kind of bravura star turn for which such year-end awards were made for. The film deserves our respect because it was a superb character drama and it deserves more than just being written off as a four-hanky weeper with all of the back-handed compliment connotations of that statement. And Woodley's leading performance deserves notice and acknowledgment both on its own merits and by virtue of its existence as a top-quality movie star performance in a high-quality commercial entertainment targeted at young women, starring a young woman, and concerning a young woman's narrative journey. If we want more female-centric movies in a variety of genres, we need them both to make money in a relatively consistent manner and for them to be taken seriously on a critical level and graded at least on the same relative scale as male-centric movies.

The Fault In Our Stars was a terrific movie that wasn't intended for Oscar glory, but was instead dropped in the heart of the summer season and racked up blockbuster grosses and critical accolades. Shailene Woodley's work is worthy of an Oscar regardless of the genre in which it exists and regardless of the out-of-season release date. Regardless of who ends up winning the Best Actress Oscar this year (Julianne Moore for Still Alice, if the buzz is to be believed), I hope Shailene Woodley ends up with a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Fault in Our Stars. Ms. Woodley is one of the more engaging actresses of her generation. She shouldn't have to play someone's girlfriend to get her first Oscar nod.

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