Woe is Cotillard

What does raven-haired French beauty need to do to be taken seriously?  Last year, around this exact time, critics were under the spell of her performance as the amputee in Jacques Audiard's Rust & Bone.  Many expected an award from the Cannes Film Festival to be nearly a done deal for the international actress.  And in beat-- it didn't happen.  No worries, the bar was raised when Sony Pictures Classics gave the darkly sensual film a prime awards bait release date.  At the very least the middlebrow mensches at the Academy would approach the skill, technique and tragedy that Cotillard was offering-- she had no legs, for crying out loud.  Nudges and murmurs and this is going to happen vibes started breaking when she earned Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her work, and in a thud, the Academy didn't catch the bait.  No worries, she would up the ante with two films at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival-- one as a sign of solidarity to her Frenchman (and beau)-- Guillaume Canet's Blood Ties, which premiered out of competition-- and the other to finally grasp the throngs of Cannes victory that eluded her one year ago.  For in James Grey's The Immigrant, the ever-busy and industrious actress plays a Polish immigrant turned prostitute in 1920s Manhattan alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner.  Period film, check.  Tragic backstory, check.  She even learned Polish for the part-- a French woman playing a Polish woman speaking English, she's trying to Meryl Streep her way into movie awards land.  Alas, wasn't meant to be.

It would be foolish to really feel to sorry for the talented and vibrant actress.  She already does have an Oscar to keep herself cozy, the one she won for her 2007 breakout film La Vie en Rose, becoming only the second woman in Academy history to win for a foreign language performance.  However, considering all that, that beauty and the certain ambition, the awards bodies haven't paid much attention to her since then.  Surprising for a post-American-ified career that's translated into Oscar-friendly territory and made her a favorite on Oscar watchdog lists ever since.  Since La Vie en Rose she played a gangster's moll in Michael Mann's Public Enemies (2009)-- too divisive for Oscars taste, okay...then came Nine (2009), for which see received best in show reviews for and a Golden Globe nomination-- the film was too terrible, got that, even though Penelope Cruz scored a bizarre afterglow nomination, okay...then Inception (2010), which earned multiple nominations, winning four awards-- the film was more a visual achievement, okay...then Midnight in Paris (2011), which earned a Best Picture nomination-- that one was a Woody Allen joint, not a performance piece, okay...Rust & Bone (2012), also-ran status.  In between she found time to join Steven Soderbergh's ensemble in Contagion (2011), cultivate a fanboy base with The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and star in a few movies from her native France.  What more does she have to do?  I fear she may become the female equivalent to Christian Bale if awards bodies don't honor her with something in the near future...