Best Actress 2013: Carey Mulligan, The Great Gatsby

Besides Sandra Bullock's Gravity, The Great Gatsby's Carey Mulligan is another major Best Actress holdover from 2012.  Baz Lurhman's adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel is the movie nobody asked for with the expensive price tag.  The promo shots, trailers, and postponed release dates have instilled little reason to rethink this stance.  If Luhrman is trying to convince studios to not hire him for big extravaganzas and discourage studios from investing in anything other than action sequels, he's certainly doing a stupendous job!

Anyhow, Mulligan made an exceptional debut with An Education four years ago now and went on to gradually make good on her promise by working on choice projects (Drive), signing on with top directors (Inside Llewyn Davis), and turning out career-best performances (Shame).  She has made what might be perceived as questionable choices (including Gatsby and the Wall Street sequel), which is unfortunate, but it's not like she is trying to sabotage her filmography.  Mulligan auditioned for Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sequel two years ago, but was passed over for Rooney Mara.  Perhaps, she would have been miscast, but I can't help but imagine what she might have done with that role.  Perhaps not as much as Mara, but I'm stubborn.

Gatsby's adaptation will be brought to you by Luhrmann and his screenwriting right-hand man Craig Pearce.  Composer Craig Armstrong won a Golden Globe for Rouge!  Cinematographer Simon Duggan has a questionable CV comprised mostly of empty action films.  Like with Rouge! and Australia, Luhrman's wife Catherine Martin worked on art direction and costumes (she has two Academy Awards to her name).  Martin coproduced along with her husband and a host of others.  There are enough editors to choke a horse, but it's a Luhrman film, so what do you expect?  Those gazillions of bytes of footage aren't going to chop themselves.  The probably snoozer of a film that has already been a boring movie decades ago stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jason Clarke and Joel Edgerton (both from Zero Dark Thirty), Isla Fisher, and, if you're worried about whether or not you'll fall asleep, there's Tobey Maguire as the Human Sleeping Pill.  The movie filmed the latter half of 2011 in New South Wales and will release in the US on the 10th of May.  Set your alarm clocks.