The Oscar nominations were announced on Thursday, and those of us with amazing taste were treated to a delightful surprise: Kate Hudson was nominated for Best Actress for her performance in Song Sung Blue. Not everyone is as jazzed about this as I am, and if you log onto X, you can find lots of people saying that Hudson “stole” her spot or that she ran some kind of payola scheme in order to get nominated. In reality, Hudson is only guilty of being a generational talent whose skill has gone underappreciated for decades.
My guess is that the people upset with Hudson’s nomination have not seen Song Sung Blue, a safe assumption considering the fact that it opened at No. 8 over its Christmas release weekend and has only made $35.8 million at the domestic box office. If you’ve only seen the trailer, it’s completely understandable to think that Song Sung Blue is just a corny, air-filled movie about two middle-age people (Hudson and Hugh Jackman) starting a Neil Diamond cover band. But at a recent mid-afternoon Tuesday screening, a dozen senior citizens and I found out that Song Sung Blue is not really about how much fun it is to “Sweet Caroline” in a bar. It’s about learning how much pressure you can apply to a relationship until it breaks, and then figuring out how to put it back together.
Jackman and Hudson play real-life couple Mike and Claire Sardina, two singers who start a Neil Diamond tribute called Lightning & Thunder (he’s Lightning, she’s Thunder). Over the course of the movie, both their marriage and their band are tested by addiction, freak accidents, and their own bullshit. While Jackman is doing a serviceable job, it’s Hudson who puts the whole movie on her back.
What I’m about to tell you is an *enormous* Song Sung Blue spoiler, and if there is even the slightest possibility that you’re going to see this movie, you should stop reading now to preserve your ignorance. About halfway through the movie, Claire is hit by a car and has to get half of her leg amputated. In the hands of someone even slightly less talented, this would immediately turn the movie into a 30 Rock cutaway gag. Blessedly, it has Kate Hudson, who deftly navigates her bubbly, sunshine-y performance to the territory of total despair.
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At an appointment after losing her leg, Claire is telling her doctor that Lightning & Thunder was just starting to get some momentum. “I could see it. A way to pay my bills and finally say, ‘Look at me, I’m this now,’” Hudson says in her thick Milwaukee accent with a hopeful smile on her face. In what is probably the moment that she locked up her nomination, Hudson’s smile fades and her eyes well with tears as she tells the doctor, “I was so close.”
Watching that scene, I was reminded of that big moment near the end of Almost Famous, where Hudson’s Penny Lane finds out that the singer she’s hopelessly in love with had sold her off to another band for “50 bucks and a case of beer.” Penny, clearly blown apart, takes a moment before asking, “What kind of beer?” In both cases, Hudson only needs four words and a glance to completely gut the viewer. She got an Oscar nom for Almost Famous, too.
Hudson, whose career highlights are largely romantic comedies, has never really been respected as a Great Actress. That’s what she is, though, and it gets taken for granted not only because of garden-variety sexism, but because she makes that shit look easy. Coincidentally, the archetypal Hudson character is also a beautiful, charismatic woman with a deep well of emotion who is in one way or another being underestimated. Take a look at the last 15 years of rom-coms and you’ll see many a plucky young actress trying and failing to pull off Hudson’s magic trick.
You guys can yell all you want about Hudson nudging out Chase Infiniti or Amanda Seyfried, but the truth is that she earned it. She is genuinely phenomenal in Song Sung Blue, and you, too, will come to this realization once the movie is available on Delta flights. If we want to get serious, Hudson also should have been nominated for her performance in the 2011 rom-com Something Borrowed. We don’t have time to get into all of that, but believe me when I say this is long overdue.
