Blanchett’s Oscar hopes blowin’ in the wind?

Tilda Swinton
If you’re a fan of film festival fare, you’ve probably adored the work of Tilda Swinton for years. From her numerous collaborations with British queer underground filmmaker Derek Jarman to her championing of offbeat and challenging fare like “Female Perversions,” “Orlando” and “Love is the Devil,” Swinton has been something of a pin-up girl for audiences who liked their movies to be complicated and visionary.

Warner Bros.

Her nomination for “Michael Clayton” confirms that Hollywood has finally caught up to this fair-skinned and fiercely intelligent screen goddess. The last few years have seen Swinton applying her combination of old-school glamour and an off-putting thousand-yard stare to good use in mainstream movies like “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” “Vanilla Sky,” “Adaptation” and “Constantine” while still taking on edgy projects like “Young Adam” (which featured Swinton in a fairly explicit sex scene with Ewan McGregor) and Sundance fave “Stephanie Daley.”

In “Michael Clayton,” Swinton veers from her usual onscreen persona by playing a corporate drone who’s involved in a massive cover-up, but her gifts for digging through a character’s multiple layers is very much on display. One wordless scene in which she tries on an outfit before attending a conference reveals everything about this woman and  how uncomfortable she is in her own skin.

Hollywood comes calling for Tilda Swinton with greater frequency these days, but she remains as riveting and unpredictable onscreen as ever. And while she’s not likely to win an Oscar this year, the Academy is likely to eventually catch up with the connoisseurs who are her longtime admirers.

Should have been nominated: Margo Martindale
This journeyman character actress is probably more recognizable by face than by name — you saw her play moms in “Walk Hard” and “Million Dollar Baby,” and she has a recurring role on FX’s “The Riches” — but she’s always terrific. And her work in Alexander Payne’s segment of the anthology film “Paris je t’aime” absolutely deserved to be cited as one of the best of the year.

Inspired by David Lean’s “Summertime,” Payne’s short film “14ème Arrondissement” features Martindale as Carol, a letter carrier from the U.S who spends a week in Paris. Carol narrates the film (in brilliantly broken French) as a report to her night-school French class, and we see this solitary American alone and adrift in one of the world’s great cities. Ultimately, she has an epiphany about Paris — and her life — that is both uplifting and heartbreaking.

Martindale keeps the fireworks to a minimum, but in just a few short minutes she nails the character in a much deeper way than many performers could manage with hours of footage. Never condescending, Martindale offers a window into Carol’s crushing solitude and her moment of reckoning in a way that is absolutely devastating. I’ve shown the Payne film to friends on DVD on many occasions, and Martindale’s moving performance never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

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