AND THE WINNER IS…

Though something like this “Ellen” appearance by best actress hopeful Gabby Sidibe (“Precious”) may seem like nothing more than spontaneous throwaway fun, I suspect that it was actually quite carefully considered — and not just by her and her roommate Adam. After all, the biggest challenge facing Sidibe this awards season is convincing voters that she is not playing herself in the film — that though Gabby, like Precious, is a significantly overweight young black girl, she is not illiterate and morose but instead highly intelligent and in possession of a healthy amount of joie de vivre.

Why does doing so matter? Because it will show voters that she really had to work to give the performance that we see in the film. I don’t believe 2007 best actress nominee Ellen Page was  — or ever since has been — able to overcome the belief that she really is the eponymous character in “Juno,” and I suspect that’s why she got her nomination but didn’t win it.

Appearances like this one are important for Gabby not only because they begin to familiarize the general public with her name (although Ellen introduced her as “Gabourey,” when lately people seemed to be moving towards calling her the less-tongue-twisting “Gabby”), but also — and just as importantly — with what kind of a person she is (and is not).

The response to my post from yesterday, in which I explained why I believe Carey Mulligan (“An Education”) has an edge over Meryl Streep (“Julie & Julia”) in the best actress race, been steady and strong. Many Mulligan backers have never had nicer things to say about me, while some Streep fans have reacted with full-fledged outrage.

The reactions that I most looked forward to, though, were those of four other Oscar bloggers who almost always have a good pulse on the race — Tom O’Neil, Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, and Jeff Wells — and it is with their permission that I will now share those with you…

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We’re still three months away from the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees, so I get that it’s premature to be talking about winners. That being said, anyone who knows anything about the awards race knows that there are two — and only two — locks in the best actress category, Carey Mulligan (“An Education”) and Meryl Streep (“Julie & Julia”), so I believe it’s fair-game to begin pondering which will be in a stronger position down the homestretch.

First, a little refresher course on the ladies in question…

Mulligan

• Virtually unheard of a year ago. Had appeared on British television, played small part in “Pride and Prejudice” (2005), and was making Broadway debut supporting Kristin Scott Thomas in “The Seagull.”
• Things began to change at Sundance in January. “An Education,” in which Danish director Lone Scherfig cast her as central character Jenny, premiered and instantly spurred bidding war between several indie studios.
• Sony Pictures Classics nabbed film for around $3 million, took it on festival circuit (Berlin, Toronto, etc.), and began hearing same reaction everywhere it went: in their little film, a big star is born.
• As “An Education” is slowly released in theaters across America, look for Mulligan to bewitch audiences just as she does Peter Sarsgaard in film. No role has done as much for an actress as I expect this will do for Mulligan since Julia Roberts clicked in “Pretty Woman” (1990).
• Most apt comparison is even further back: Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday” (1953). Audrey was — as Mulligan is — 24-years-young, British, and beautiful (in a gamine way that allowed her to appear both childlike and ladylike) when she gave breakthrough performance en route to best actress Oscar.
• Like Audrey in that film, Mulligan in this one comes to see world anew through eyes of man very different from herself, and in process comes of age before our eyes. By closing credits, she is less like innocent/carefree Audrey than battle-tested/worldly-wise Lauren Bacall (complete with low-voice), and audience cheers her as a survivor.
• Potential controversy: Mulligan’s character first seduced by Sarsgaard’s character when she’s underage and he’s not. With Roman Polanski‘s situation causing heightened awareness of things like this, it could turn-off some.
• Oliver Stone‘s highly-anticipated “Wall Street” sequel, in which Mulligan and boyfriend Shia LaBeouf are top-billed, will be released shortly after Oscars.

Streep

• Most respected actress alive, hands-down.
• Having consistently given great performances in major films for over 30 years (including five that received Oscar nods for best picture, three of which won), everyone already knows her name, and virtually everyone already likes her.
• Nora Ephron‘s “Julie & Julia” is a big-budget/big-studio summer movie that every voter has heard about and nearly every voter will have seen — thus far, it’s made more than $100 million worldwide.
• In the film, Streep cooks up performance with all the ingredients that Oscar voters love: convincingly portraying a person who really lived and with whom we’re all familiar (Julia Child, “the woman who taught America to cook”); exhibiting major physical transformation (hair, posture, height); and mastering yet another accent.
• Best actress winners are very often women whose characters refuse to be victimized — like Streep’s Julia, who employs boundless energy and infectious optimism to disprove naysayers and achieve dreams.
• Thanks to her recent work in mainstream films — “The Manchurian Candidate” (2004), “The Devil Wears Prada” (2005), “Mamma Mia!” (2008), and now this — she has never been more popular at the box-office, especially with younger audiences.
• Though Streep has already won two Oscars, the record holder (Katharine Hepburn) won four, so it’s not like it would be unheard of to give her another.
• Nobody has received as many Oscar nominations — 15. Nobody has lost as many, either — 13.
• It’s been 27 years and 11 nominations — 12, if/when she gets one for “Julie & Julia” — since she last won. Many feel it’s time to correct that.

So who will win the 2009 best actress Oscar, Mulligan or Streep? As I’ve been indicating for several weeks now in my weekly projections — much to the consternation of a small but vocal group of Streep supporters — I give the edge to Mulligan. Here’s why…

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About a year ago I was seated next to the Indian director Mira Nair at a luncheon in New York City and spent most of the afternoon picking her brain about her next project: a big-budget biopic of the legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart. I told Nair that as someone who is fascinated with American culture/history, the origins of public relations and celebrity, and the Oscar race, I couldn’t be more excited about it. Nair told me that a rough-cut of the film was being test-screened for the very first time later that day so she couldn’t be more nervous about it.

On Tuesday night, I was at New York’s Paris Theatre as Nair introduced the finished product to members of the public for the first time — along with stars Hilary Swank (Earhart), Richard Gere (her publicist/husband  George Putnam), and Ewan McGregor (her lover, allegedly, Gene Vidal) – at the world premiere of “Amelia” (Fox Searchlight, 10/23, trailer). Since then, reactions have been pouring in from every direction. Some have been friendly — Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter calls it an “instant bio classic” that “ranks with recent real-life portrayals of Ray Charles by Jamie Foxx and Truman Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman” and suggests it “could be similarly awards-bound.” Most, however, have been less generous — to cite a fairly representative example, Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times labels the film a “turkey” and “stinker” and says it clearly “missed the mark.” (For the record, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times — the unofficial dean of film criticism — registers somewhere inbetween.)

My own feelings are mixed. I’m generally a sucker for biopics like those that were so prevalent in theaters and at the Academy Awards during the heart of the studio-era — stuff like “Disraeli” (1929), “The Story of Louis Pasteur” (1936), “The Great Ziegfeld” (1936), “The Great Waltz” (1938), “Juarez” (1939), “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), “The Pride of the Yankees” (1942), “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942), “Madame Curie” (1943), “Wilson” (1944), and “Lust for Life” (1956). They come around less often these days — probably because modern audiences are more cynical and less willing to accept the heroization of real-life figures — but a few always pop up during the awards season, including “Schindler’s List” (1993), “Pollock” (2000), “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), “Ali” (2001), “The Aviator” (2004), “Hotel Rwanda” (2005), “Good Night and Good Luck” (2005), “La Vie En Rose” (2007), and “Milk” (2008). This is because they’re generally regarded as “important,” and rare is the film rewarded by the Academy that isn’t.

The thing that sets apart those that resonate from those that don’t is fairly simple: they show us something about the person – real or invented – that we didn’t already know. The chief problem with “Amelia” is that it doesn’t. Earhart lived long enough ago that virtually nobody alive today can tell you first-hand what she was actually like, but not so long ago that people have stopped caring. The result is that most of us already know the core facts that the movie restates, and few others are introduced: she was the spunky woman who felt she could hold her own with the men, at least in the sky, and did; whereas Charles Lindbergh was “Lindy,” she was “Lady Lindy,” a feminist before feminism and a celebrity of the highest echelon; and, of course, that she never fulfilled her greatest ambition of flying entirely around the world, instead crashing along with her navigator somewhere in the Pacific while at the helm of her Electra aircraft.

The fact that everyone knows the ending of the film before the beginning might initially seem to be the hardest obstacle to overcome, but it isn’t — after all, the same could be said of “Titanic” and “United 93″ and they were damn good. No, the bigger problem is that Earhart’s life on the ground wasn’t nearly as exciting as her flights in the sky, which were themselves more exciting in concept than in practice. (Heck, Earhart herself could barely stay awake for those!) What really made Earhart a legend in her own time, and has sustained her as one after it, is less what she did than what she represented. Earhart was the living embodiment of the sense of limitless potential that Americans felt during the twenties — at least until a crash of a different sort sent them reeling back to reality. She was an outlier; a country girl who conquered the city; a pioneer on a new frontier; a go-getter with a can-do attitude for whom not even the sky was the limit; a person who would never say die, until she did. All of that is obviously impressive; it’s just not particularly conducive to a two-hour cinematic spectacle.

I think the filmmakers realized that but felt they could overcome it the same way Hollywood has always clogged the holes in its plots: with what the old studio chiefs used to call “boy-girl stuff.” (Preston Sturges mocked this in his 1941 classic “Sullivan’s Travels.”) They couldn’t. This, I believe, is because everything we knew about Earhart, both prior to seeing the film and during it up until her publicist plops a kiss on her — prompting both her and the audience to ask why he did that – suggests that nothing was ever more important to her than flying and that nothing else ever even came close. Frankly, everything we knew about her suggested she was entirely asexual. Now, all of a sudden, we’re to believe that she’s madly in love and sexually hungry? (I doubt that even “Pretty Woman”-era Richard Gere could have had that much of an effect on a woman, let alone Richard Gere twenty years later.) It just doesn’t ring true.

Neither does an attempt to introduce a love-triangle to the plot, which is another common act of desperation in Hollywood. Yes, it’s true that Earhart knew transportation tycoon Gene Vidal — that much is beyond dispute — but I don’t believe for one second that he was a romantic figure in her life, certainly not to the extent that the film implies he was. I submit that he is portrayed as one in the film for two reasons: (1) because the filmmakers needed a little more spice to make this thing fly, if you’ll pardon the pun, and (2) because Gore Vidal was apparently consulted by the filmmakers despite the fact that he has — as I found when I interviewed him exactly a year ago — aged into a bitter, egomaniacal S.O.B. who loves nothing more than name-dropping and placing himself and/or his family at the center of virtually every major event in our nation’s history. (He got himself into this film quite a bit, too.) He is a brilliant thinker and writer about American history, but he is not a credible source when it comes to his own history and someone should have recognized that. (According to Roger Friedman of The Hollywood Reporter, Putnam’s granddaughter is already making the media rounds insisting that the Vidal affair never happened.)

The biggest problem, though, is that the film never adequately answers the question: what about flying made Earhart feel it was worth the risk — dare I say likelihood — of death? In fact, it only even considers it flippantly when she first meets Putnam and he asks her why she flies, to which she responds, “Why does a man ride a horse?” That’s cute, but it’s just not good enough. (Subsequently, she mentions wanting to be “free,” like the animals in the wilderness and unlike the people in the civilization over which she flies, but that was already a cliche in her own time.) Not providing the audience with a decent answer to that question is like not providing the audience with the meaning of “Rosebud” after making them wonder about it for an entire film.

Having now exhausted my list of things to bitch about — yeah, I’ll let the iffy accents slide, I guess — it’s only fair to offer some praise. Swank is as good as anyone could possibly be as Earhart, and not only because she bears a striking resemblance to the character. As was the case with the two performances for which she won Oscars for best actress, ”Boys Don’t Cry” (1999) and “Million Dollar Baby” (2004), she imbues her character with both strength and vulnerability, a combo that few actresses can pull off convincingly. It seems unfair for her performance to be denied awards attention because of the shortcomings of the rest of her film, especially since other recent performances haven’t been, including Annette Bening in “Being Julia” (2004), Felicity Huffman in “Transamerica” (2005), and Cate Blanchett in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007).

Also, “Amelia” deserves to be a part of any discussion about awards for best cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh, previously nominated for “The Piano,” has overseen some majestic shots from the air — although not as stunning as those in “Up in the Air”), best costume design (like last year’s “Changeling,” this film features exquisite fashion from the twenties), and best original score (thanks to a sweeping submission by the always-dependable Gabriel Yared, who incidentally won his Oscar for scoring another aviation-related epic, “The English Patient,” 13 years ago).

Photo: Hilary Swank in “Amelia.” Courtesy: Fox Searchlight.

Earlier this week, New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick suggested that the Gotham Awards’ total snub of “Precious” (Lions Gate, 11/6, trailer) was indicative of a backlash against the high-profile campaigning that exec-producers Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have been conducting on behalf of the film.

Tom O’Neil, my former colleague at the Los Angeles Times awards blog “The Envelope,” found the snub “shocking” and wrote a lengthy rebuttal in which he states, “I agree with Lou that a backlash is brewing against [the film], but among some film critics, not among Oscar voters or other industry folks and not as a result of Oprah’s or Tyler’s embrace… I think critics are starting to resent the fact that their darling flick’s gone mainstream… ‘Precious’ is obviously Oscar-bound.”

When Tom asked for my thoughts on this today (along with several other awards pundits), I responded as follows:

I think the folks behind “Precious” need to worry a lot less about an Oprah-backlash than about a violence-backlash. I guarantee you that a large segment of the Academy — much of which is still comprised of older and fairly conservative folks — will leave screenings, turn off screeners, or not even check out the film at all because of its shocking violence, vulgar language, and upsetting scenarios. The thing that attracted Oprah, Tyler Perry, and others to the film is the message that the film leaves you with: that no person is bound by their circumstances and every person has the power within themselves to rise above them. That’s a message that nearly voter would embrace… the problem, I suspect, is that they may never get far enough into the film to hear it.

Do I think “Precious” will be totally snubbed by the Academy (which is composed of thousands of industry insiders) as it was by the Gotham Awards’ nominating committee (which is apparently made up of only four critics)? No — support younger voters will probably secure it a spot among the ten best picture nominees, along with two or three other categories — but I also don’t think it’s likely to be the awards juggernaut that Tom (and a few others whose views I also respect) seem to think it will be.

I can tell you this much: if the film and/or director Lee Daniels and/or lead actress Gabby Sidibe and/or supporting actress Mo’Nique (whose character will pose the chief problem for many of the aforementioned voters) are snubbed by the Academy — which is honestly not inconceivable to me — there will be an uproar that could make past Oscar controversies — think “The Color Purple” (1985, lost all 11 nominations it received, including one for Oprah), “Do the Right Thing” (1989, no best picture nod), “Brokeback Mountain” (2005, lost to heavy underdog “Crash”), and “Dreamgirls” (2006, not nominated for best picture or best actress) — pale in comparison.

Photo: Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey, and Gabby Sidibe at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “Precious.” Credit: C.J. LaFrance (Getty Images North America)

For the past few weeks, Oscar trackers have been awaiting a decision from Sony Pictures Classics and Peter Sarsgaard — one of the stars of the studio’s critically-acclaimed awards contender “An Education” — about whether they would mount a best lead actor or best supporting actor campaign for his performance.

Many have argued for the former, citing the fact that he is the male with the largest part in the film and the love interest of the female star (Carey Mulligan) who will certainly be in the best lead actress race — both reasonable points. I, however, laid out an extensive argument for the latter because I felt/feel that (a) Sarsgaard wouldn’t stand a chance in the lead field, which is crowded with A-listers from bigger movies, unlike the supporting field, which remains wide open; (b) because it’s clearly Mulligan’s movie, and therefore everyone else is supporting her; and (c) that Oscar history has given us ample reason to believe that pushing him in supporting would not necessarily push out his co-star who gives an equally strong but much smaller performance (Alfred Molina).

Today, a rock-solid source who has been involved in the deliberations confirmed to me that a final decision has been made: Sarsgaard will be in the best supporting actor race along with Molina. (Both will be seeking the first nomination of their illustrious careers.) There will be no formal announcement of this until campaign materials — screeners, ads, etc. — are distributed later in the season.

Photo: Peter Sarsgaard in “An Education.” Credit: Sony Pictures Classics.

At last month’s Toronto International Film Festival, I had the privilege of sitting down with Julianne Moore, who I regard as one of the five or six finest actresses working today, for a wide-ranging conversation about her life, career, and the two movies that she was at the festival to promote.

In Atom Egoyan‘s “Chloe” (Sony, 2010), which is sort of a “Single White Female” for the 21st century, Moore plays a long-married doctor who begins to suspect her husband (Liam Neeson) of philandering. Out of a growing sense of desperation to simply know the truth, she hires a young hooker (23-year-old Amanda Seyfried) to test him. Little does she realize that the hooker is more interested in her than her husband — that is, until one status-update evolves into a torrential lesbian love scene that lasts for a good five minutes and leaves nothing to the imagination! Meanwhile, in Tom Ford‘s “A Single Man” (The Weinstein Company, 12/11), she portrays a bored upper-class housewife whose neighbor, a gay professor (Colin Firth) for whom she has always pined, has just lost his life partner.

Here are a few audio excerpts from our chat, followed by a complete transcript…

• Moore on her big break

• Moore names several actresses she admires

• Moore reveals what scares her — and why she refused to audition for “A League of Their Own”
  

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Interview with Julianne Moore
Conducted/Transcribed by Scott Feinberg
September 14, 2009
Intercontinental Hotel, Toronto

I didn’t go to one of the press screenings [of Chloe]; I saw it last night with everybody else—
Oh, that’s nice! That’s good.

They really seemed to love it…
I didn’t stay.

Oh, you didn’t stay?
No, I didn’t.

Do you have reservations about watching yourself on the big screen?
I don’t like to, certainly not when it’s, you know, a packed house, and a big screen, and stuff like that—it’s no fun. [laughs] But, you know, for me, the best part of the movie is actually making it, is what we do when we’re working, and so once it’s finished my experience has already happened.

Incidentally, before a movie is seen by an audience, do you have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to be received?
No.

I guess it’s still got to be pieced together and a lot can happen…
Yeah. I have no idea, especially these days. I really don’t. You don’t know how something is gonna be—you know, you can have your own opinions about something, and then something can be received one way or another way, you know? But that’s something that you have no control over and it doesn’t always really have to do with the movie itself, you know? You could have a film that’s received really poorly, and a year later people think it’s terrific, and you’re like, “What?!” Or, historically, there have been movies that come out, and do really well, and then people say years later, “That was crap. That was just of its era.” You know? So I don’t know. I think it doesn’t have a whole lot to do except with the time the movie comes out.

Did you go to the movies growing up? And, if so, were there any particular favorites or influences?
I think the thing that was most formative for me— We lived in Alaska for a year, and there wasn’t much to do in the wintertime—it got really cold—and my sister and I were maybe nine and ten or ten and eleven, something like that, and we could take the bus to the movie theater, and we saw whatever was there; it didn’t matter. So we’d see, like, “Escape to Witch Mountain”; or, like, a Cassavetes film called “Minnie and Moskowitz,” I don’t know if you remember that; “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” we saw. We saw whatever was there; it didn’t matter. Later on, when my dad was stationed in Germany, it was the same sort of thing; the movies get changing, so you would just see whatever; it didn’t matter, you just saw it. And I think that was probably—that, and revival houses, you know—those were the most formative film things.

Would you say that was also what made you want to be an actor yourself, or was there another moment or something that happened?
I wanted to be an actor because of books. You know, the films were, kind of, completely outside of me, but I just liked books; I liked reading. And then when I started doing it in school—like, after-school stuff—it felt just like reading aloud; it seemed like I was in the story. So when I started to do it—I went to acting school—it was really all about the theater; I really didn’t know anything about movies. And then, when I was at school in Boston, I saw “Three Women,” the Altman movie, at a revival house, and I didn’t know who that was—I had somehow missed “Nashville” and everything like that [laughs]—and I was like, “Who is this guy?!” I said, “I want to do that!” So that’s—

That’s so interesting because you’ve kind of become one of those ensemble people with the Paul Thomas Anderson movies—”Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia”—
Mm-hmm.

Was that something that you always sought out—roles in big ensemble projects, as well as classic leading lady types?
That’s not what I saw in Bob’s work. What’s interesting about Bob’s work is the kind of incredible— You’ve seen “Three Women,” right?

Mm-hmm…
Is just how psychologically complex it is. And I think all the work that I’ve been drawn to, you know, are things that are about behavior, and about who we are, and the world that we live in. All that stuff has been much more interesting to me than “Lawrence of Arabia”? Do you know what I mean? I like psychological drama.

I guess psychological drama can come in the form of serious dramas like “Far from Heaven” and “The Hours” or in the form of some of the really funny comedies that you’ve done like “The Big Lebowski” that look at weird sides of psychology—
Right.

Are you more comfortable with one sort of genre than the other?
No, uh-uh, not necessarily. I mean, I’ve certainly done less comedy; I wish I’d more. Maybe I’m not that funny, I don’t know. [laughs]

No!
But, you know, I like it all. I like it. I’m just generally drawn to material.

You’re now one of our top, go-to actresses. Was there one film that was sort of “the break” and made that possible?
Well, it’s interesting, Atom and I were talking about this earlier—we both really came of age around the same time, at kind of the dawn of the independent film movement. In the eighties, I had worked primarily on television, and off-off Broadway, and did soap operas, and nighttime TV shows, and some regional theater, and off-Broadway, and all that kind of business, but I wasn’t—there wasn’t any film work I was getting and there wasn’t any film work I particularly even wanted. It was just not a time when—there wasn’t that much stuff. And then independent film happened, and it felt to me as if it happened overnight. I had three movies coming out at one time—there was “Safe,” and “Vanya on 42nd Street,” and “Short Cuts”—and that really changed my career. That was a whole different thing. I went from being, kind of, a— I mean, I literally had a different career; I didn’t even know what was quite happening at the time. And they were all projects that I had done within a year or two of each other, and they were all really exciting and meant a lot to me, but I didn’t know— You know, “Vanya” was a theater project I worked on for five years, you know? It didn’t ever occur to me that it was going to be a movie. And we shot it in ten days, you know? And “Safe” was a really quick, very, very, very, very low budget thing. And then Altman’s thing, of course, was a big deal; you know, that was sort of a dream come true. But that’s what changed my career.

I think a lot of people also very closely associate you with the Oscar-type of movie—
Mm-hmm.

Great stuff, “Far from Heaven” and others that I didn’t mention earlier. Do you have one that you think you’ve been best in? If you were talking to a friend and they asked, “What’s your best performance, in your opinion?”
I don’t know that I do. I don’t know that I do, you know? And I don’t know that I really think about my movies as movies as much as I remember then as how I experienced them while I was doing them. So sometimes how I experienced it on the set—that was most meaningful to me.

I’ve interviewed a number of people who have either acted with or directed you in movies—
Really? [laughs]

Yeah. And looking back at my notes from those, I noticed that there’s one word that seems to recur in all of them when your name came up: “fearless.”
[laughs]

That you’re not afraid to do anything, that you’re willing to do what the part requires even if that means to be emotionally or physically naked—
Right.

Is there anything that you come across in acting that actually is intimidating to you or that you’re not comfortable with?
No, there’s not. But I always say to people, you know, I’m not really afraid of feelings. I’m physically fearful. [laughs] I can’t jump off a diving board. I don’t like having balls thrown in my face. I don’t— You know, the stuff that requires a kind of physicality. Or jumping out of an airplane. Or bungee jumping. Those kinds of things are absolutely terrifying to me and I really wouldn’t do them; I really can’t do them. I mean, I couldn’t ever bungee jump; I’d rather die. So that, to me, seems really scary. But acting is just about feeling, and feelings can’t do anything to you, you know? Feelings can’t kill you, they can’t hurt you; they make you feel, but the other thing about them, too, is that they are transient. You know, even in real-life they always tell you about a feeling, “If you have it, stay with it, and then it’s gonna go through you and pass out the other side.” You know? So I’m actually kind of interested in it. I like extreme; I like emotion; I like, you know, sensation; I like all that. I just don’t like anything physical! [laughs] Just don’t make me play baseball. [laughs]

So we won’t look for you in “The Natural II”…
No, you won’t! [laughs] Well, you want to know something funny? Do you remember that movie—oh, gosh, the baseball movie with all the women!

“A League of Their Own”?
“A League of Their Own.” When I first got to Hollywood—like L.A.—I was auditioning, and everywhere I’d go the women would say, “Have you read for ‘A League of Their Own’?” And I’d say, “I don’t play baseball.” And that happened every single time. And, finally, they were like, “Just try! Just try!” And I’m like, “I can’t play baseball! I can’t do it! I will not be able to do it! It’s not gonna work!” Because there were all these big baseball tryouts, and I was like, “Uh-uh, that’s not gonna work!”

[laughs] That is so funny. Who knew Madonna—
She could play baseball! [laughs]

Apparently…
Yeah!

When you look at your résumé—you have four Oscar nominations, you’ve been a part of numerous movies that are instant-classics, and you have a very strong case as the greatest red-headed actress of all-time—
[laughs] Nice, thank you!

Greer Garson and Maureen O’Hara might complain, but hey…
[laughs]

So if you look at it in those terms, do you feel you have anything left that you need to prove or really want to prove still? Is there an accomplishment that you’re striving for, in particular, or a role that you’d really like to bring to the screen?
I’d like it just to keep going, you know? You think about it a lot because when you’ve been doing something for a certain amount of time you’re like, “Hm, what do I want to do?” And I’m always like, “I want to just keep doing stuff that really interests me.” And, so far, there have always been things that have come up where I’ve thought, like, “Hm, that’s fun, that’s great, that’s interesting, that’s different, that’s—” So it’s never anything in particular, but I do find that I know it when I see the material.

You mentioned going to school in Boston and training as an actor. Do you use an approach that falls under one of these nice little labels like “the Method” or something? I’m always interested to know if an actor can articulate the way he or she tackles a part…
I mean, the interesting thing is that you have all these different teachers, and they have all this different methodology, but at the end of the day you realize that what they’re trying to say to you is that it doesn’t matter what you use as long as it works for you. And I think that, you know, what you do is you take from every single teacher, you know, all the technique, all the method, all the whatever. For me, the most important thing is that I connect with the story somewhere; I have to be excited, and intrigued, and curious, and, like, fascinated, and, like, “Oh, my God! Can you believe they do this thing in the story?!” Then I’m really compelled by it. So it is really about— Stella Adler, actually, of all the teachers who came out of The Group and stuff like that—and I never studied Stella Adler, it was only later—the stuff that she espoused is really kind of a lot of the stuff that I believe in.

Is there anyone whose career trajectory you look at it and would like to emulate?
I don’t know. It’s not like that. I mean, there are actresses that I admire—I mean, you know, Meryl, for one. You know, she was on the cover of Time magazine in, like, 1977 or something like that, I think, because I was in high school and I remember I said to my dad, I said, “Do you see this woman?” I said, “She’s amazing, and she’s doing all this stuff!” So she was the one contemporary actress that I kind of noticed, so I was like, “Holy cow!” But, then, I see it everywhere. I see all sorts of performers that I admire, I have admired. And I think when an actor is able to, like, kind of bring an emotion, you know— Isabelle Huppert, always—I watch her and I’m like, “Holy cow!” She makes me feel something. Kathy Bates—I actually once stopped Kathy Bates because she’s done so many performances where she starts to do something and then, like, all this feeling comes up, you know? Dianne Wiest is another one. I mean, there are just so many. Young people? Kristen Stewart in “Into the Wild,” you know? Kate Winslet’s always beautiful. I mean, there are so many.

Is there one person out there who you would particularly like to work with?
You mean a director or an actor?

Director, or actor, or actress…
There’s a ton! I think there’s a ton. The fact is that even though I’ve worked for many, many years and stuff, I always feel that there are people that, you know, I’d love to work with. I’d love to work Ang Lee, you know? I’d love to work Scorsese. I’d like to work with Steven Spielberg again, you know? I mean, I don’t know, there’s just a gazillion.

Many, many years from now, when we’re all gone, what would you like people to say when they’re flipping through the film history books? Who was Julianne Moore? What was this career about?
I think if they even remembered me that would be enough! [laughs] That, in itself—that would be fine.

Photo: Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore in “Chloe.” Courtesy: Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group.