The XX Factor: What women really think.

Amor Vincit Omnia, Academy Award-Style

Despite her courage, Jess, though Marisa Tomei performed her heart out as the pole dancer Mickey Rourke courts in The Wrestler, her (OK, let's call her "feminist") character didn't quite sell me—showing more compassion than passion in the film's fleeting love story. It may be a chick flick, but it ain't no romance. Speaking of, while everybody has a different reason why Millionaire will win the best picture statue tonight, for me, Slumdog's happily ever after fade out puts it solidly ahead. The Bollywood ending wins by a mile in a field where the only other love stories are the doomed courtship of Brad and Cate in Benjamin Button and The Reader's bordering-on-child-molestation sexual trysts between Kate and impossibly young actor David Kross. (Parenthetically, I wonder whether Harvey Weinstein—if Wall-E, the other love conquers all narrative in this year's top films, had been nominated in the BP category, as many fans and critics opined it should have—would have run a whisper campaign charging cartoon-robot exploitation?) Meantime, as we wait for confirmation of the Slumdog sweep, in honor of romance classic It Happened One Night's 1935 Academy Award shut-out of The Thin Man, I heartily recommend reading Slate's Nick and Nora of movie-criticism trash talk, the matchless Dana Stevens and Troy Patterson.

A Very Courageous Pole Performance

I find the notion that The Wrestler is a feminist flick intriguing, but ultimately it's problematic. Although Rourke's character is trapped in an endless cycle of bodily abuse and exploitation, the biological women in the film are not particularly shining examples of feminist thinking. Marisa Tomei plays that same old trope, the hooker (or in this case, stripper) with a heart of gold. Since Tomei is such a fine actress, she keeps the role from devolving into that clichéd territory. As our own Dana Stevens put it, "I hope Marisa Tomei won't be overlooked for what I consider the single best female performance of the year, supporting or otherwise. She's smart, earthy, and astonishingly real in a role that could have foundered in cheap sentimentality." But still, Tomei's character is pretty one-dimensional. She lacks flaws either to her earthy personality or her slammin' bod. And what about the other woman in the movie, Rourke's daughter Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood? The wrestler tugs on her vulnerable heart strings, only to let her down as he has throughout her childhood. In a way, every character in The Wrestler is trapped in a larger system beyond his or her control. Mickey Rourke doesn't deserve a special citation for feminist filmmaking for being trapped in this way, but agreed, Hanna: He does deserve that Oscar.

Rourke already won best actor honors at last night's Independent Spirit Awards, and his acceptance speech was definitely 10 times more entertaining than whatever bleeped out pleasantries he'll probably have to offer tonight. Check out the rambling six-minute monologue below. This is what he had to say about Marisa Tomei's work: "I wanna thank, uh, who else? Oh! Melissa? Marisa Tomei. Goddamn she had to do all this with a bare ass, and she brought it. Is she here? Not many girls can climb the pole. You understand what I'm saying? She climbed the pole, and she did it well, and it was a very courageous performance."