Following her appearance as a nominee at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, Pamela Anderson received a big boost to her Oscar campaign when the Screen Actors Guild announced their nominations earlier this week. She’s in as a Best Actress nominee for her performance in The Last Showgirl which is a very, VERY good precursor to the Oscars.
Pam is now in New York, continuing to promote the film, and still picking up momentum since no one is running away with it. Demi Moore mighhhhht have a slight lead but clearly SAG membership is taken with Pam’s story, more taken than they are with previous Oscar winners Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet, and Tilda Swinton, all of whom were left off the ballot. This, really, is wide open. Pam’s campaigning up to this point has clearly worked. No sense in stopping now.
Also in New York is Pam’s co-star in the film, Jamie Lee Curtis. She’s been quieter this award season than she was a couple of years ago when she was contending for Best Supporting Actress – and eventually won – in Everything Everywhere All At Once, but when she does show up, the energy is similar. On EEAAO, Jamie campaigned by campaigning for others: the Daniels, who directed the film, and of course her friend Michelle Yeoh. It’s actually still amazing to me – that that year, three out of the four acting Oscars went to the cast of EEAAO. She’s giving the same this time, from the moment The Last Showgirl premiered at TIFF, Jamie has been all about Pam. She is her biggest cheerleader, and when Jamie Lee Curtis decides to cape for someone, it’s a powerful thing.
Last night, though, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, LA was top of mind. She was emotional off the top, because this is literally her community, where she lives and raised her kids and many of her friends have lost their homes. She’s an American Red Cross ambassador so she gave advice to people on what to do and encouraged them to donate. She also announced today that she’s donating too.
And then, because she’s a f-cking pro, she switched gears seamlessly, and she brought it, the way the best talk show guests do. She’s throwing down internet slang and f-bombs and pumping up Quest Love, she adores him. Then launches into a roast of cocktail parties and how annoying people are at those events, at one point she describes her character in The Last Showgirl as “ridden hard and put away wet”… she is chaos, controlled chaos, experienced chaos, but chaos!
Her SAG nomination for Supporting Actress was a surprise but maybe it shouldn’t have been. JLC is an institution in the business. So she might actually be invited back to the Oscars because, clearly, there’s a lot of industry support for this film and for her. The voting members across all those guilds and boards and academies know her, that’s a name they’d be happy to put on the ballot.
Especially now that she’s joined the campaign and is serving up this kind of amazingness. While, somehow, sticking up for unions. Because while she’s telling Jimmy about the movie and her character, she works in a note about union protections for workers and what happens when companies undercut labour organisations. If you have 13 minutes, watch the entire interview (embedded below) – she is fantastic.
And then… there’s this:
She and Jimmy relive her dance scene from the movie Perfect. And I’m telling you, at first I thought they just put her current face on her old body. But it’s her current face AND her current body. The surprise here isn’t what she looks like, it’s that she agreed to it. Agreed to get into that leotard and clip in the hair extensions and gyrate her hips, LOLOLOLOL. It’s silly, it’s borderline stupid, but she’s up for it – and that’s the takeaway here, because she can be serious, but she can also be profoundly unserious. And we win with both versions.
Here's Pam last night in New York and Jamie Lee at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on the weekend.
