What year had the best overall quality of Best Actress nominees?
Most decades have at least one year where everything seems to come together brilliantly in this category, but a few do stand out: 1950 (including the underseen Eleanor Parker in Caged), 1962 (though I haven’t seen Days of Wine and Roses yet), 1987 (where the marvelous Cher, who won the prize, was somehow the weakest nominee). Still, pressed to make a single choice, I’d have to go with 1974. Not only are the performances impeccable (Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Diahann Carroll in Claudine, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, Valerie Perrine in Lenny, and Gena Rowlands in A Woman under the Influence), but each virtually espouses a different definition of screen acting, from Burstyn’s Method realism to Carroll’s politicized candor to Dunaway’s self-conscious mystique to the very different scales of improvisation that Perrine and Rowlands contribute. This race isn’t just a master class in acting but a time capsule of the artform in its fascinating varieties…and if you make al
