Best Actress 2013: Annette Bening, Look of Love

This year 2013 carries with it great potential as it will feature Annette Bening in another lead role.  Isn't she just smashing?  I don't really care that she hasn't won an Oscar, and considering the lengths one has to go to nab one, I'm kind of glad she doesn't.  It's not really her style.  She's kind of above it all.  She seems to choose parts that appeal to her as an actress, whether on film or the stage, while keeping all the career-strategy noise at bay.  She has been nominated four times now.  After her gangbusters performance in The Grifters, she starred opposite several of Hollywood's leading men, before marrying Tinsel Town's penultimate single man and settling down into motherhood.  Once she hit forty, she came into her own with American Beauty, Being Julia, and The Kids Are All Right.  Her nominations are unusually spread out, so it may still be too early before she gets in the running again, if there's a model to go by.  But, who are we to complain if she rakes in another nod early, right?  Director Arie Posin cowrote Look of Love with Matthew Duffie (not to be confused with Steve Coogan's The Look of Love, which just screened at Sundance, and will probably force a title change on someone's part) about a widow played by Bening, who falls in love with a man who looks like her deceased husband played by Ed Harris.  The cast includes Robins Williams and Amy Brenneman.  The production designer is four-time-Oscar nominated Jeannine Claudia Oppewall (L.A. Confidential, Pleasantville, Seabiscuit, The Good Shepherd), and costumes are by three-time-nominated Judianna Makovsky (Pleasantville, Harry Potter I, Seabiscuit).  The involvement of two of director Gary Ross peop's begs the question: what is he up to?  After directing the enormously successful The Hunger Games last year, next up may be Civil War/Reconstruction drama The Free State of Jones.  Mentioning Ross begs the question: Does everything he touch turn to gold?  Love filmed early last year in L.A.

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