In the awards race, Kristen Stewart is suddenly the underdog for best actress, a role that may help her the “Spencer” star.
In awards season, the word “snub” gets overused in a major way. A snub, in life, is a deliberate dis. The essence of it is that it’s personal. When an actor fails to make the cut of nominees for a movie award, to call that a snub is to make it sound like a conspiracy — an omission with a hint of design, rather than what it is, which is an accident or, really, a preference. It’s an insult to those who did get nominated, as if they were mere placeholders for the hallowed star who got “snubbed.” But Kristen Stewart’s omission from the list of nominees for outstanding performance by a female actor in a leading role in the Screen Actors Guild awards, announced on Jan.12, did feel like a snub. I’m not just saying that because Stewart (to put my bias out there) happens to be my own choice for best actress in a movie this year. She’d been anointed as a contender for the Academy Awards from the moment that “Spencer” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, and in the time since she has often been referred to as the front-runner. Even as “Spencer” provoked divided feelings on the part of many critics and viewers (though some of us adore it), there were few who questioned the veracity, or radiance, of Stewart’s performance. That doesn’t mean SAG owed her a nomination. But her absence from the SAG roster was greeted, I would say accurately, as the most startling omission from that group’s slate in a long time, maybe even decades. That “Spencer” itself isn’t more widely beloved probably had something to do with it. Yet for anyone with an eye on Stewart’s career, it certainly did seem as if this was “her time” — the moment for the awards-industrial complex to acknowledge her emergence as an actor of singular personality and power. On a gut level, the SAG nominations created the feeling that she was being knocked off her pedestal. Of course, one reason for that feeling is that people have been trying to knock Kristen Stewart off her pedestal for nearly 15 years. She’s the kind of star people become obsessed with, yet the obsession is double-edged. From the moment she was lofted into the “Twilight” stratosphere, the fan chatter about her tended to include a lot of serious carping. We all know the gripes: She’s the same in every role! (She’s not, but I once wrote a column asking, What if she is? So were Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne.) In public appearances, especially in the early days, she spoke haltingly and chewed her lip with an I’m-not-sure-I-want-to-be-here ambivalence that many took to be a sign of snobbish superiority.
