A Brief Love Letter to Keira Knightley and All Other Actresses Who Get Nominated for Playing "The Girl"

When I wrote my Oscar predictions blog a few months ago, I expressed some disdain for the fact that Keira Knightley, one of my top favorite actresses, was in the running for an Oscar nomination for a film where she is "The Girl" to an "Important Man." She did get the nomination (her second after 2005's Pride and Prejudice as Lead Actress). And I finally saw her nominated performance in The Imitation Game.

Don't get me wrong; her performance was fine. She is a brilliant actress and her performance as Joan Clark was typically nuanced. But let's take a look at Keira's career. After Pride & Prejudice, she starred in Atonement, Never Let Me Go, The Duchess, Last Night, Anna Karenina, Begin Again, Laggies and A Dangerous Method. All of these are infinitely more interesting than The Imitation Game. The Imitation Game is such a standard biopic. It's entertaining and solid but that's it. Considering how varied and risky her movie choices have been, it's frustrating to see her being rewarded for playing a character whose sole purpose is to make the prickly insufferable genius guy more human. 

I will practice believing Gone Girl didn't deserve a Best Picture nomination

Knightley is nominated for Supporting Actress alongside Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), Emma Stone (Birdman), Meryl Streep (Into the Woods) and Laura Dern (Wild). The Best Actress nominees are Marion Cotillard (2 Days, 1 Night), Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Julianne Moore (Still Alice), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) and Reese Witherspoon (Wild). Of these 10 nominations, only 4 hail from Best Picture nominees (Knightley, Arquette, Stone and Jones).  Only two of these nominees come from the same film, Wild (not a best picture nominee). And Felicity Jones is the only Best Actress nominee from a Best Picture nominee. And she's playing "The Girl" in a biopic. To be fair, because the film is based on her character's book there is some depth and nuance (but not much). 

Here's my issue. So we're okay with highlighting interesting performances. Witherspoon, Pike, Moore and Cotillard are the leads in their films; the stories are woman-oriented. Meryl Streep was the center of the plot in Into the Woods; Laura Dern was a struggling but surviving woman. These six actresses played women with agency and conviction. Even if they were playing wives and mothers and daughters, they had something to say (or at least their films passed Bechdel Test). 

But that's where it ends. We don't want too many "girly" movies taking up space, shoving out such "groundbreaking" films like The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game (basically the same movie). They're  safe, risk-adverse British biopics with inoffensive running times and story beats like a connect-the-dots game. By comparison, Wild, Gone Girl and 2 Days, 1 Night are films that are pushing the medium forward by telling original stories in inventive and expressive ways. 

"I'm a lead actress. Right? Right?!" -Felicity Jones

I don't want to take away from the performances by Emma Stone, Patricia Arquette, Felicity Jones and Keira Knightley. They're very talented and they often steal the films away from the leads. But, come on, the films are called BirdMAN or BOYhood. The Imitation Game refers to the Alan Turing test for computers; The Theory of Everything refers to Hawking's physics research and achievements. Male stories get the nominations and the actress in them gets some of the backsplash.

It's not just this year. Helena Bonham Carter, who has an even more eclectic filmography than Keira Knightley, was nominated in 2010 for playing "The Girl" in The King's Speech; she's a queen but she's still standing by her man. Same for Amy Adams in The Master, The Fighter and American Hustle. Berenice Bejo in The Artist. Sally Field in Lincoln. Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle. And, hey, Jennifer Lawrence won for playing "The Girl" in Silver Linings Playbook. The list goes on. 

Black Swan, a woman-oriented film with multiple noms 

It's not that woman-oriented films never get Best Picture nominations. The Help, Zero Dark Thirty, Black Swan, Philomena, The Blind Side, Gravity, Juno, Precious, An Education--these are other films with only female acting nominees and Best Picture nominations. But these are only 9 films among like 50 Best Picture nominees.

Before I saw The Imitation Game, I was hoping beyond hope that Keira Knightley's role would be more than "The Girl." I wanted it to be a performance that could rank among her best and that she was nominated because the Academy thought this performance was better than all the rest in her career. But now I can't reconcile the nomination for this performance against her more courageous work in the past. Why did it take Knightley being in one of the most conventional roles in her career to get recognized by the Academy? What is really being rewarded here? 

Keira, if you're reading, please continue to take on challenging roles. Don't let the Academy's boringness stop you from being the gutsy actress you've always been. 

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