There were a lot of new trailers yesterday. Besides Ballerina, there were also trailers for The Last of Us season two (depressing!), Shrinking season two (depressing but funny, too!), and something called Hysteria starring Julie Bowen and Bruce Campbell (Satanic panic!). We also got the official teaser for Maria, starring Angelina Jolie as opera legend Maria Callas.
First, the big question: do we hear her sing? No, though she does emote a lot. But Angelina spent “almost seven months” training to sing opera, which is, much like ballet, an impossible amount of time in which to master the art. But then, Maria is set at the end of Maria Callas’s life, and by that time, her voice wasn’t what it was when she was younger, though I bet most of us can’t tell the difference (Callas in 1958 vs 1977). Opera nerds will insist Callas’s voice was “gone” by the 1970s, but I couldn’t sing like that, and she still sounds expressive, so…
And it’s not like Angelina has to be Met-worthy for this, anyway. They’re going the Elvis route, combining Angelina’s voice with Callas’s. I would actually love to know the percentages on that. In fact, any time an actor’s voice is combined with the real voice of their subject, we should be told the breakdown. Like in Elvis, the singing was 60% Elvis, 40% Austin Butler, or whatever. I would like to know how much of Angelina’s real voice, after “almost seven months” of training, makes it into the final sound mix. To be fair, though, training like that can be as much about learning the physicality needed to sell the motion on camera, not actually perfecting one’s opera voice, or arabesque, or whatever. You don’t have to be good, you just have to be good enough for the camera.
Maria got decent reviews out of Venice and Telluride, and Angelina is expected to contend for Best Actress, as did Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart before her, for their Pablo Larraín-directed biopics of famous women on the edge. Netflix has another Oscar contender this year, though, with Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, which is France’s official selection to compete for Best International Feature, plus The Piano Lesson, which continues Denzel Washington’s quest to produce August Wilson’s works for cinema. Netflix has a rather bad habit of prioritizing their Oscar hopefuls, resourcing one film at the expense of others. Maria looks like a film that could pull several craft nominations, and Angelina is a contender along with her Nineties contemporaries Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, and maybe Pamela Anderson, if The Last Showgirl gets released this year (still isn’t dated). But at this time, I consider Maria a longshot for a Best Picture nomination. It feels like it might be a weird year at the Oscars.
