Halle Berry’s Frankie and Alice role smells like Oscar bait — she plays a stripper (+5 points) with multiple personalities (+10 points) — and Berry has taken pains to present it as such, tossing it into the awards derby at the last minute with 10,000 screeners sent to the Academy, critics groups, and other awards entities. Will it work? The new trailer implies that it’s a modest performance piece (though we are excited to figure out how Berry developed a racist alternate personality because of the influence of her actressy mother, Phylicia Rashad), but in an unusually bruising year for Best Actress candidates, that may not be enough. Still, Berry shot the film a long time ago and probably didn’t want to wait any longer to put it out, and if she’s really looking for an Oscar-friendly angle, maybe she could start with the fact that she still seems to be aging backwards, à la Benjamin Button?
