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Julia roberts oscar8/2/2023 Lines like "I would rather have 30 minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special" would sound saccharine from anyone else, but Roberts knows exactly where to put the wrinkle in her brow and the wobble in her voice to make them classics.After The Secret in Their Eyes won Argentina and director Juan José Campanella the 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, an American remake emerged with primo screenwriter and director Billy Ray attached. Going toe-to-toe with the divas of the silver screen-Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, and Olympia Dukakis-so early in her career was no joke, but Roberts was more than up to the challenge, proving herself an equal to the seasoned names that bolstered the rest of the movie. Roberts plays Shelby Eatenton, a bride-to-be whose hopes of starting a family with her future husband (Dylan McDermott) are strained by her rare and extreme form of diabetes, providing an anchor around which the cast spins in ever-faster orbits. Roberts had proven to the world a year prior that she was an actress to pay attention to when she stole the show in Mystic Pizza, but her dramatic breakout came 12 months later, when she and the rest of its star-studded cast wrung our tear ducts dry with Steel Magnolias. That she gets to have so much fun going meta in the (still underrated) sequel feels like the reward for having pulled off something so precise, rich, and difficult in the original. It succeeds because Roberts brings a steely elegance and a melancholy core to Tess: When she calls Danny a "liar" and a "thief," the words sting. If that dinner scene between her and Clooney, filmed with a similar sense of sexual tension Soderbergh brought to Out of Sight, doesn't work, then the whole movie doesn't work. More than the money, she's the whole reason for the heist. But it's easy to forget how much the first movie relies on Roberts, playing ex-wife Tess to George Clooney's ex-con Danny Ocean, to sell the central premise and provide a dollop of pathos to the caper narrative. Steven Soderbergh's endearingly glitzy, winningly self-referential Ocean's trilogy cultivates a boys'-club mentality, selling the viewer on a fantasy of male friendship defined by designer suits, sarcastic quips, and elaborate schemes. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert wrote, "I have a feeling that Mystic Pizza may someday become known for the movie stars it showcased back before they became stars." He couldn't have been more right: It was all there in Roberts' captivating presence and cheek-to-cheek smile, comforting and warm as a pizza pie. ![]() ![]() Maybe it's all of the above, since she makes Daisy feel like every ballbuster you wished you were friends with. ![]() It could be when she beats the preps at pool, tells off her date, or pours a barrel of fish into his Porsche. As the effervescent, outspoken Daisy, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where Roberts became America's sweetheart. Not every actor comes by a star-making role as they're launching their career, but Roberts' breakout role in Mystic Pizza is proof that she was always destined to be an A-lister She was among the unknowns (also including Annabeth Gish and Lili Taylor) who led this coming-of-age film about three teenage girls working at a Connecticut pizzeria and learning to navigate class, love, and sex.
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