Filed at 8:04 a.m. ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Win or lose at Sunday's Oscar ceremony, British
actress Kate
Winslet will enter Academy Award history.
Winslet, 33, will either walk past her chief rival, Meryl
Streep, to collect her first Oscar for her performance as a woman with a
secret Nazi past in "The Reader," or share the dubious title of biggest loser
for having been nominated for the coveted honor, and lost, six times.
The betting in Hollywood ahead of the February 22 ceremony for the world's
top film awards is that Winslet should be getting her acceptance speech
ready.
"I think it is her time. When Academy members are voting, they are going to
be thinking not just of 'The Reader' but of 'Revolutionary Road,'" said
Hollywood.com movie critic Pete Hammond, when talking about the two movies
starring Winslet that were released within weeks of each other in 2008.
"That is pretty daunting when you have two great performances like that back
to back," Hammond said.
The three other best actress nominees are Anne
Hathaway as a resentful sister in "Rachel Getting Married," Melissa
Leo in border smuggling drama "Frozen River" and Angelina
Jolie playing a mother searching for her child in "Changeling."
Winslet, who parlayed art house success into international stardom in
"Titanic" in 1997, has already picked up two Golden Globes for her role as a
German woman with a teenage lover and a secret in "The Reader" and as a
frustrated 1950s American housewife in "Revolutionary Road."
She has also won BAFTA and Screen
Actors Guild Awards, and in emotional speeches, she has expressed shock at
her wins after smiling bravely from her seat so often in the past.
"Kate is way overdue. One more loss and she will be tied at six as Oscar's
biggest losing actress with Deborah
Kerr and Thelma Ritter. And at the age of 33, that would be terrible," said
Tom O'Neil of awards website TheEnvelope.com.
"Kate has a solid lead. She is in a Holocaust movie, speaking with a foreign
accent, she ages dramatically and she looks great naked -- all key elements for
a win," he said.
IT'S TOUGH TO LOSE
Streep, 59, a two-time Oscar winner has a record of her own as the
most-nominated actor or actress ever in Academy Award history with 15 previous
nods.
Although a popular winner at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in January for
her role as a suspicious nun in "Doubt," the last Oscar Streep took home was for
1982's "Sophie's Choice."
Streep admitted last month that losing was tough. "When you lose you think
'my work wasn't any good,'" Streep told the ABC news program "Nightline." "But
it's an honor to be nominated, and it is! It is. But you just feel worse when
you lose than you did before you got nominated."
Streep's turn in "Doubt" -- a tense drama of suspected sex abuse in the
Catholic Church in the 1960s -- was a reminder of her versatility in a year that
also saw her comic turn as the singing mom in musical blockbuster "Mamma
Mia!"
"I thought it was a wonderful performance," said film scholar Richard
Schickel of Streep's work in "Doubt." "But people say Meryl always gives a
good performance."
Jolie, Hathaway and Leo are considered long shots, yet O'Neil notes that
Academy voters often are full of surprises and anything could happen Oscar
night.
"These 6,000 or so Oscar voters are bullheaded contrarians," he said. "Every
time we think we've got them figured out, they remind us how eccentric they are.
And that's what makes the Oscar race fun."