I thought right away when I saw Trainwreck that Amy Schumer should be one of the five Best Actress nominees, and I still think that now. With Carol‘s Cate Blanchett, Suffragette‘s Carey Mulligan, Brooklyn‘s Saoirse Ronan and Joy‘s Jennifer Lawrence all but locked in, Schumer could take that fifth slot. Right now I’m figuring it could be her, Mad Max‘s Charlize Theron or Grandma‘s Lily Tomlin. But they’ll all have to campaign for it, and if Amy gets out there on the hustings she’ll probably take it. She deserves a Best Original Screenplay nomination hands down, but her broken-hearted acting got to me more. Like that funeral scene…okay? Melted me right down.
Which is not to say the usual resistance to a comic performance isn’t out there. A journalist friend told me this morning that he hit the roof when he noticed that
I’d included Schumer’s performance on my list of all-time greats. “Even considering putting that Trainwreck performance on a list of the greatest performances of all-time is probably the craziest thing you’ve ever written, he wrote, “and i liked Trainwreck. But I nearly fainted when i saw her name between Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront and Gary Cooper in High Noon. That’s CRAY.”
I reminded him that performances that really touch us aren’t about technique or chops but intimate emotional currents that we recognize as our own. Plus I qualified my list by saying “I hadn’t thought anything through or second-guessed myself. I just spewed it out there and there was Amy. She captured my heart with that performance. It happened. Sue me.”
Then I went into my big riff: “Amy Schumer is a kind of wavering needle on the cultural geiger counter right now. She’s a fresh-energy missile and something else at the same time. She’s a brassy shot of attitude and libido, an exclamation point, a zeitgeist girl…but she also hurts. You can feel it. You can sense her pain the way you could sense it from Judy Holliday, Fanny Brice, Shirley Maclaine and Barbra Streisand in their day.
“Plus she’s the leading symbol of the new schlumpy & dumpy aesthetic (i.e., you don’t have to be conventionally ‘attractive’ to get laid and have a life if you have wit and soul and verve) and a truly wicked satirist. She’s what we’re all living through right now. She’s carrying the angst of our times on her back like a cross. And so she got to me because I’m living through it as much as you or Sharon Waxman or Scott Foundas or anyone else.”
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