Best Actress the hardest to handicap

Each weekday until the Oscars on Sunday, Inquirer film critics Carrie Rickey and Steven Rea will discuss their picks for the winners in one of the six major categories - best supporting actress, best supporting actor, best director, best actor, best actress and best picture.

Best Actress:

The nominees for actress in a leading role are: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married; Angelina Jolie, Changeling; Melissa Leo, Frozen River; Meryl Streep, Doubt; and Kate Winslet, The Reader.

Carrie: Absolutely the hardest category to handicap. This is supposed to be the Year of Kate Winslet, previously nominated five times for acting awards and nominated this year for the sullen eroticism of her performance in The Reader. So far this year she's won the Golden Globe and BAFTA (British Academy Awards), but Meryl Streep won the Screen Actors Guild statuette for her performance as the steely Sister Superior in Doubt – which suggests that voters in this category are divided. Much as I think Winslet is one of the finest actresses working, I don't think The Reader is anywhere near Winslet's best work. (That would be Little Children or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) I actually think Streep (who got her record 15th nomination this year) had a greater degree of difficulty playing an unsympathetic Bronx-accented nun than Winslet did as the German-accented Woman With A Secret. I am totally knocked out by Melissa Leo as the desperate single mom in Frozen River gritting teeth as she feeds her sons popcorn for breakfast, and by Anne Hathaway, kicking to the curb her Cinderella persona as the bipolar, mouthy sister in Rachel Getting Married. Angelina Jolie in Changeling? Persuasive, intermittently moving, but lacks the bottomless well of emotion that the other performances have.

Steven: It is the Year of Winslet, I think. She's much-liked by the Hollywood community, she's been lobbying hard - but self-deprecatingly - for this award, and she has shown a taste for dark and serious roles (right from her first, in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) - and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tends to favor dark and serious over light and frothy.

PLUS, The Reader is a Holocaust film (or post-Holocaust, with flashbacks), a subject that draws the Academy members' votes, even when the film itself fails to impress.

That said, a case can be made for other contenders: It's Meryl's 15th nomination, but she hasn't won since way back in 1983, for Sophie's Choice. (A Holocaust movie.) And her Sister Aloysius in Doubt is a woman of unwavering certitude, a head mistress who presides over her flock with a stern countenance, who goes to war with the young priest played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and yet still, somehow, Streep manages to bring humor to this performance as well. (And the way she says "idea" (an uber-Bronxian idear), dropping it into her speech with no seeming effort whatsoever - well, she remains the Queen of Accents.

For anyone who just knew Anne Hathaway from her breezy, bridal-themed comedies and as the naif New Yorker in the cutthroat world of couture in The Devil Wears Prada (opposite fellow nominee, La Streep), the actress' turn as a seriously messed-up case in Rachel Getting Married was a revelation. Hathaway's wedding rehearsal dinner toast to her soon-to-be-wed sister is chillingly uncomfortable stuff. It's like a car wreck (and there's one of those in the film, too): you can't look away, even if you want to. In a close vote, with the Streep and Winslet camps canceling each other out, Hathaway could be bopping up to the Kodak Theatre stage.

Melissa Leo, alas, doesn't have much of a chance. Frozen River is the teeniest of independents, and even though it's brilliant work all around (a nod to Misty Upham, as the young Mohawk woman who falls into a wary friendship with Leo's character), in this case it truly is an honor to be nominated, as they say. If Leo wins the statuette, it will be a real shock.

And Angelina Jolie in Changeling - lots of drama, a couple of big screaming scenes, and she gets thrown into a scary psychiatric facility, which is where she could be found when she won her supporting actress Oscar in 2000 for Girl, Interrupted. I wasn't crazy about the way Eastwood shot her in Changeling, but when Jolie draws herself in and just projects thought and emotion without underlining it and throwing in a string of exclamation marks - well, there are some powerfully quiet scenes here, and they're the ones that work, that really resonate. And the nightmare story of a mother whose son is taken from her -- that's primal stuff.

Carrie: Without getting into an extended debate about why The Reader isn't a holocaust movie (for me, it's not about the immorality of Nazis but about the immorality of not speaking out when you should), I predict that the best actress race plays out in one of three ways: 1.) Winslet wins – but more as a reward for prior great work than as the best actress of the year; 2.) Streep squeaks by Winslet in an upset; or 3) Winslet and Streep collide on the way to finish line and Hathaway pulls it out.

Steven: For me, The Reader is both about the immorality of the Nazis and the immorality of not speaking out, but also about the ignominy of dim people carrying out unconscionable acts... Let's face it, Hanna Schmitz is not a smart woman, intellectually or intuitively, and that's what makes Winslet's portrayal of her so striking: This keen, curious actress playing a tamped-down and somewhat dull-witted woman, and doing so with the deepest empathy, and not a trace of caricature or condescension. I hope she wins it.

Carrie: Totally torn. Lord knows Winslet merits the Academy's acknowledgement of her extraordinary skills. And her performance in The Reader would not be as embarrassing an "oops, you deserve an Academy Reward for your talent" prize as that bestowed on Al Pacino for the perfectly awful Scent of a Woman. Still, I'm pulling for Streep or Hathaway – or a two-way tie.