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Being Nicole Kidman's best friend really agrees with Naomi Watts.
If you believe that Nicole Kidman has any friends, much less a "best" friend, which we kind of don't. Kidman strikes us as the sort of person who doesn't really do anything natural or human unless there's a camera pointed at her; otherwise she just gets dressed and fed and chauffeured to various designers' salons and waxing emporia until she's finally bundled into a pristine bed to sleep, dreamlessly.
But all that aside: 'round about the early '00s, Kidman suddenly really came into her own, as a famous person. And right around that time, we started hearing about this best friend of hers, Naomi Watts, and then she started popping up in bigger and bigger movies, and now she's nominated for an Oscar.
Truly, Watts's rise probably isn't due to Kidman's influence; Kidman probably doesn't really have any influence over the fortunes of anyone but herself (and maybe her ex, and the many dudes with whom she's been romantically linked, accurately or not, since her divorce). It's just kind of a funny coincidence, how famous Naomi Watts has become, in such a short time, for doing so comparatively little.
Unless you (a) live in Australia, or (b) run a fan site devoted to her, you've probably only heard of six movies among her thirty film credits: Tank Girl, Babe: Pig In The City; Mulholland Drive; The Ring; Le Divorce; and finally 21 Grams, the current film for which Watts is now Oscar-nominated.
Six movies, y'all. Six! Granted, that's twice as many as her swain Heath Ledger had racked up when we audited his fame back in 2001, but still -- six laurels don't make a very comfortable nest for resting on, especially when 16.7% of them required her to suit up in a pregnancy pad and mope through France in Kate Hudson's overrated shadow. It certainly struck us as an insufficient CV to merit any part of an Entertainment Weekly cover treating her eventual Oscar nomination as a foregone conclusion.
Don't get us wrong. She's fine at what she does. But other than Mulholland Drive, she has yet to do anything that really impressed us or set her apart from -- much less above -- the other actors in her generation. We'll give her Mulholland Drive, gladly; it's a legitimate starmaking vehicle -- daring and challenging and unique -- and Watts is excellent in her dual role. But the rest? Tank Girl is considered a cult favourite, but it's been largely forgotten by history, and Watts's role in it was pretty meager. We only mentioned Babe: Pig in the City to be polite; Watts is only credited with contributing "Additional Voices" to it. The Ring was a surprisingly well-crafted thriller for a big-budget scary movie, but she didn't really add much to it; any other starlet in her age demo could have done the same job. Le Divorce had her sidekicking for Kate Hudson, which...ouch. And despite the kudos she's getting for it, the only remarkable thing about 21 Grams is how self-consciously "artsy" and Oscar-bait-y it is; if its story progressed in a straight line instead of pretentiously looping back on itself, it would be a by-the-numbers revenge story -- in other words, an Ashley Judd vehicle. And that don't impress us much.
Watts probably didn't get where she was as a result of her dear friend Kidman's behind-the-scenes string-pulling. She definitely didn't get there as a result of her brain-boggling acting skills or extraordinarily thrilling script choices since, with the one aforementioned exception, they've all either been bombs, mediocre, or big-budget monsters the success of which she really did nothing to ensure. How, then, did she do it?
BECAUSE SHE'S PRETTY. That's it. That's the only reason we can come up with. Watts doesn't have the acting chops of a Julianne Moore or a Mary-Louise Parker. Toni Collette would act circles around Watts were they ever to share the screen -- an eventuality Watts's agent should prevent from occurring -- so Watts isn't even the best Australian actress of her generation.
Naomi Watts is just pretty. In every other respect, she's completely blah. And we're sick of having her non-existent "specialness" shoved up our noses -- we don't care who her friends are.
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