Whenever a Gwyneth Paltrow-branded candle explodes or another news article speculates on the potential demise of Goop, her oft-mocked lifestyle enterprise, a Brazilian film fan is probably somewhere cackling. Paltrow has largely retired from acting and hasn’t drawn major awards attention since George W Bush was in office, but she is an unexpected presence in this year’s Oscar conversation. For if one particular nominee should take home the Best Actress prize, many will consider it a long-in-the-works redemption for Paltrow’s own 1999 Oscar win for Shakespeare in Love.
To the enduring frustration of more or less an entire country, that year’s prize didn’t go to actor Fernanda Montenegro for her feisty, riveting performance as a jaded letter writer in Walter Salles’s drama Central Station. “There was this feeling in the country that she was deeply wronged,” Brazilian film critic Isabela Boscov told The New York Times recently. The anger was valid: Montenegro, a national treasure with a local renown comparable to Pele’s, was the first Brazilian actor in history to be nominated for an Oscar. It’s taken 26 years for there to be another: Fernanda Torres, this year, for Salles’s new political thriller I’m Still Here. Torres, excitingly, is also Montenegro’s daughter.
