Role reversal: advantage, men

WOULD anyone consider it even mildly anticlimactic if tonight’s Oscar telecast opened with the best actress award? The suspense over whether the trophy will go to Reese Witherspoon or Felicity Huffman isn’t exactly killing us.

The same cannot be said for the best actor category, which is notable for the quality of competition headed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heath Ledger.

It used to be that those of us who cared more about the art of acting than the spectacle of celebrity were focused on the best actress race. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the current mixed bag of Huffman, Witherspoon, Keira Knightley, Charlize Theron and Judi Dench seems like the Oscar equivalent of Quick Pick -- with the odds heavily stacked in favor of prettiness and youth.

Yet it really wasn’t so long ago when movies boasted more memorable women’s roles than could be honored during awards season. The ‘80s -- that surprising bastion of better times -- consistently celebrated the finest contemporary actresses, young and old alike.

Two of that decade’s winners were the distinguished gray-haired veterans Geraldine Page (who finally collected, on her eighth nomination, for “The Trip to Bountiful”) and Jessica Tandy (who won at 80 for “Driving Miss Daisy”).

Best actresses such as Sissy Spacek and Meryl Streep were impressive, but so too were nominees Debra Winger, Glenn Close and Jessica Lange (who eventually won for 1994’s “Blue Sky” after having nabbed a supporting actress award for 1982’s “Tootsie”).

OK, so Cher won for 1987’s “Moonstruck,” (a historical footnote Mario Cantone riffs on to hilarious effect in his stand-up act), but at least there was a real contest that year. After all, Sonny’s infinitely better half beat out Streep, Close, Holly Hunter and Sally Kirkland. And in fairness, it wasn’t Cher’s first praiseworthy performance, even if, sad to say, it was her last.

Only an industry spokesperson could deny that today’s women are languishing in comparison to the previous generation. But then perhaps this decline has been somewhat harder to see given how well the men have been filling the dramatic vacuum.

Much has been made about Hoffman and Ledger, two straight actors, taking on gay characters -- once career suicide in Hollywood. Groundbreaking as this is, there’s a larger story about the kinds of male roles now deemed Oscar worthy.

Consider that three of the five nominees play tortured artists (Hoffman in “Capote,” Terrence Howard in “Hustle & Flow” and Joaquin Phoenix in “Walk the Line”). And that two are tortured in other ways: In “Good Night, and Good Luck,” David Strathairn portrays Edward R. Murrow at a moment when the broadcast journalist put himself on the line to challenge Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and in “Brokeback Mountain,” Ledger plays a closeted cowboy who can’t kill off the love he feels for another man.

In each nominated leading male performance this year, a moral crisis is tied to psychological vulnerability. Strength confronts weakness and vice versa -- with little room for the reassuring virility that’s been the stock in trade of actors even as daring as Brando. Marked by fear and frailty as much as courage, these roles offer the kind of nuanced internal battles we normally expect to find in the best actress category.

That is, until the store of complex characters for women all but dried up. What happened? A vicious cycle of lamebrained casting (such as the sultry Knightley as Jane Austen’s plain heroine Elizabeth Bennet), publicity-driven producing, and a failure to recognize literate adults as a profitable demographic.

Looks tell the story. Beauty, always a prerequisite for commercial schlock, has been on the ascendant for high-end pictures. The best actress winners since 2000 (Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Theron and Hilary Swank) would make a great Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover.

More seriously, there’s been a marked shift in the way this new generation speaks about its craft. In fact, the old subject of craft has been eclipsed by that more tactical concern of career. We hear more about fantastic opportunities that paid off than we do about the development of technique and artistic growth.

“I love comedy, I love drama,” Witherspoon said to CBS News after the nominations were announced. “I love everything, you know. I feel lucky that maybe it opens people’s minds to what I’m capable of doing, hopefully.”

Remember when there was fascination in such things as the Actors Studio backgrounds of Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda and Sally Field? Or Streep’s education at the Yale School of Drama and apprenticeship off-Broadway? Or actor-playwright relationships such as Holly Hunter and Beth Henley or Kathy Bates and Marsha Norman? Or the regular commuting between stage and screen of Vanessa Redgrave and Dench, who appears to have been nominated this year (in a mediocre film) to shore up whatever integrity the best actress category is supposed to have.

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Well-rounded counterparts

NOWADAYS, it’s the men who are likely to tout these kinds of credits. Before “Capote,” Hoffman was best known for a few deft supporting turns in smaller films as well as his vibrant theater work in New York, where he’s an artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, an off-Broadway hotbed. Strathairn, another actor with serious stage chops, is as likely to be working on a new play as a new movie. And supporting actor nominee Paul Giamatti, who was robbed of a best actor nomination last year for “Sideways,” could tell you the pluses and minuses of drama school training.

Star packaging -- orchestrated by managers, flacks, media vultures and complicit actresses -- finds nothing sexy in the unglamorous hard work of artistic commitment, which accounts for the relentless boilerplate about how brave it was for one of the “Desperate Housewives” to portray a transsexual with little mention of her equally brave stage career (which includes an Obie for her role in David Mamet’s “Cryptogram”).

But the truth is Huffman, peppered with questions about her doubly blessed fortune as a TV star with an Oscar nomination, is rarely allowed to stray in interviews from that narrow script.

Clearly, the press isn’t helping matters. Couldn’t we all have done with one less story about Kidman’s fake nose in “The Hours” or airhead remark about how gorgeously Swank can dress up despite her penchant for playing butch? And Theron, whose performance in “North Country” is far grittier than that of any of her fellow nominees, seems to be perpetually overshadowed by her glaring bombshell radiance, which belies her evident seriousness and ability.

Male actors are finally able to publicly embrace their art form without fear of being hurt at the box office. Yet this prerogative, which once belonged to the women, seems scarcely in evidence among today’s leading actresses, who are encouraged to be cute, perky and not too threateningly real.

The clincher is that Witherspoon, a delightful comic presence in films such as “Legally Blonde,” is likely to claim the Oscar for “Walk the Line,” when the movie so clearly belongs to Phoenix, whose personification of Johnny Cash is comparable to Spacek’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and Lange’s haunting embodiment of Patsy Cline in “Sweet Dreams.” Witherspoon’s June Carter, though pleasingly effervescent and laudably unsentimental, might have landed nothing more than a supporting nomination a decade ago.

Of course, there are actresses upholding the old tradition -- Patricia Clarkson, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Julianne Moore, to name a few. And it’s heartening to report that right now in New York, Cate Blanchett is starring in “Hedda Gabler” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music while Roberts is in rehearsal on Broadway for Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain.” This will have to serve as consolation as the camera pans the Botox-hardened crowd of former Oscar winners, who have sacrificed their most important asset -- the expressiveness of their faces -- for some forlorn hope of longevity.

Blame a system that doesn’t recognize that beauty in acting has less to do with good genes (or a great plastic surgeon) than with the representation of human truth. George Bernard Shaw made the point over a century ago when, in an essay comparing the two most acclaimed actresses of his era, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, he sided with Duse’s achingly unadorned realism over Bernhardt’s bedazzling artificiality.

“Madame Bernhardt ... shows that she has not studied modern art in vain,” Shaw noted. “Every dimple has its dab of pink ... Her lips are like a newly painted pillar box, her cheeks, right up to the languid lashes, have the bloom and surface of a peach; she is beautiful with the beauty of her school, and entirely inhuman and increditable.... When [Duse] comes on the stage, you are quite welcome to take your opera-glass and count whatever lines time and care have traced on her. They are the credentials of her humanity; and she knows better than to obliterate that significant handwriting beneath a layer of peach-blossom from the chemist’s.”

If tonight we have to look to the men for those “credentials of humanity,” let us hope it inspires the women not to succumb to a retrograde cultural moment that has lost sight of their own.

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Contact McNulty, The Times’ theater critic, at calendar.letters@latimes

.com.