How much for your consideration? Best Actress

The best actress in a leading role requiring prosthetics, weight gain, playing a real person, ugliness or pretending to be a man goes to...

I suspect that the best actress award generally goes to movies that have below average budgets. Why? Women simply do not get good roles in big budget movies. Fact. Or is it? As I've done for the last few posts, let's have a look at the last ten years of Oscars and see what budgetary trends we can tease out.

2005 - Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line ($28M)
2004 - Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby ($30M)
2003 - Charlize Theron, Monster ($8M)
2002 - Nicole Kidman, The Hours ($25M)
2001 - Halle Berry, Monster's Ball ($4M)
2000 - Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich ($51M)
1999 - Hilary Swank, Boys don't Cry ($2M)
1998 - Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare in Love ($25M)
1997 - Helen Hunt, As Good as it Gets ($50M)
1996 - Frances McDormand, Fargo ($7M)

First of all, four of these movies were made for under the magic $10M mark, and exactly zero were made for more than $100M. Not only that, but exactly zero were made for more than the average cost of a studio movie (about $65M). The average budget was a measly $23M, which Julia Roberts can make herself for a single film. The reason (not why Julia Roberts can make $23M for a single movie, that defies explanation, but why best actress movies are generally so cheap)? Well, for one, four of the movies (Monster, Monster's Ball, Boys don't Cry and Erin Brockovich) had no production input by one of the major studios, and films made by non-major studios by default have lower budgets. For two, see the first paragraph of this post: take this year for example; are they really going to give Audrey Tatou (The Da Vinci Code) an Oscar for being stupid, or Keira Knightly (Pirates of the Caribbean) one for being annoying, or Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns) one for not being as good as Margo Kidder.

And the nominees for 2006 are...

Penélope Cruz, Volver (unknown, say $5M)
Judie Dench, Notes on a Scandal (unknown, say $10M)
Helen Mirren, The Queen ($15M)
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada ($35M)
Kate Winslet, Little Children ($14M)

Fits the trend nicely, maybe even a little cheaper this year - which makes sense, considering there are no movies with Julia Roberts or Jack Nicholson in to bump up the average. Based on budgetary considerations alone, anyone could win. The first three weren't produced by one of the big six, but that is no help, as explained above, so I'm going to have to throw in the towel. Having said that, surely Judie Dench and Meryl Streep were only nominated because the nominating committee (or however the hell they go about nominations) are just plain lazy, Helen Mirren because she is going to win, Kate Winslet so they can shaft her again and Penélope Cruz as the token 'foreigner', or to piss off Tom Cruise (see also, the first line of this post, i.e. Helen Mirren plays a real person).