Post-Oscars, pt. 2

In part 1, we took a look at this year's Best Actress winner, Kate Winslet. In part 2, we focus on the winner of the Best Supporting Actress award, Penelope Cruz, for her role in Woody Allen's film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.







The lovely Ms. Cruz became the first Spanish actress to win an Oscar. A few year earlier in 2006, she was also the first Spanish actress to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actress category for her performance in the film Volver. She's been a highly acclaimed actress in Spain since the 1990's but that same sort of fame has been somewhat elusive for her here in the United States until recently.

One of the reasons for that--and I believe it was her friend, Salma Hayek, who made this point, although I'm not 100% certain--might be the language. Trying to act while speaking a language that is not your native tongue can't be easy. And even though Penelope speaks four languages, there still has to be a bit of an emotional disconnect when delivering a line in a foreign language, concentrating hard on pronunciation and speaking the line clearly, sometimes having to say the line phonetically--try to do that and stay "in the moment"! It can't be easy.

The beauty--and maybe the genius--of her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that about half of her lines are in Spanish. That had to be a big help in keeping her emotionally connected to her scenes and all her other lines, as well.

That's the theory, at any rate. Of course, I could be wrong. :-)

All of this, of course, now brings us to the fantasy question I asked back in Part 1. We all have our lists of celebrities that we'd like to spank or be spanked by. Is Penelope Cruz on your list? She's certainly climbing higher on mine.




I must just take a moment here to tell you that in writing this post, every time I typed the word, "Spanish", it came out "Spankish". Maybe my own fantasies are trying to tell me something.

Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek did a film together not too long ago called Bandidas, which was a fun romp. I think what would be fun would be a film starring Penelope Cruz, Salma Hayek, and Paz Vega, as well. The joke that would go around, of course, is that you can't understand a word they're saying, but the movie looks beautiful!

And speaking of beautiful....one last photo of Penelope Cruz: