It’s looking more and more like this year’s Best Actress race will come down to Emma Stone in La La Land and Natalie Portman in Jackie. As much as I want to believe that Amy Adams is going to be a contender for Arrival or maybe Nocturnal Animals, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Meaning, I think Amy might get nominated for some stuff, but Emma and Natalie are going to get nominated for everything, and they’ll probably win everything. Natalie covers the latest issue of New York Magazine to promote Jackie. It’s a decent piece – she doesn’t come across as smug, or anti-America or anti-France. She even jokes about feeling at home wherever there’s a mall, so give her the Oscar please. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

She related to Jackie Kennedy’s pre-marriage years in Europe: “It’s thinking back to when you’re a young person, remembering that essential self. That time in Europe totally affected the way she was as a First Lady.”

Jackie was a branding genius: “She was very ahead of her time in having the kind of agency to tell her own story. That’s everyone’s obsession now, presenting this image that they want to show the world. That was relatively forward-thinking of her, and the fact that she coined ‘Camelot’ is crazy.”

Jackie’s weird accent: “It’s not an accent that anyone else has. It’s this mix of mid-Atlantic faux-British that must have been from finishing school and a real kind of Long Island ‘tawk.’ Half of it is people I grew up with, and half is like Katharine Hepburn. But it was great to have it, because it felt like a diagram of her past.”

Understanding the iconography of the state funeral: “Your mourning period is also an identity crisis, is also a crisis of faith, is also a moment when you have to leave your home. And it’s also a moment when even as a member of the nation, not as a private person, everyone was just scared out of their minds.”

What she learned from the disastrous production of ‘Jane Got a Gun’: “I am not a producer. This is not my talent in life.”

She doesn’t know why she has a reputation for being cold: “I actually find that I’m kind of mushy,” and to be a producer, “you have to be very steady and even-keeled about very stressful situations.” The same goes for acting. “Some people open up in the chaos,” she says. “And me, when I’m in a bad situation, I shut down.”

She went trick-or-treating in Pasadena: “It feels like ’50s suburbia. I feel so suburban. Malls are comforting to me — anywhere there’s a mall, I feel like, This is home.”

What her parents taught her: “It was something they instilled in me, that [acting] was not the biggest, best thing to aspire to, or certainly not the center of the world. I think it makes the low points, like when you mess up or get horrible reviews — it just kind of takes all the weight out of it. It’s just a movie.”

She’s nostalgic for a time when actresses had great roles: Films from the ’50s and ’60s “have such strong female roles all the time,” she says, citing Sunset Boulevard and Marnie. “Even if they’ll make the occasional sexist comment, they still have a central woman character who has a personality … Now I feel like movies are all about white men and then you get a couple that happen to be about women.”

[From NY Magazine]

The interview took place just before the election, and Portman was talking excitedly about her hopes for a Hillary Clinton presidency. NY Mag followed up with Portman after the election and she emailed back that she is “very upset about the results” but “extremely energized to get more involved.” As for the rest of it… I think she learned a lot while she and Benjamin lived in Paris. I think she mostly realized that she wanted to move back to America. Perhaps because we have more comforting malls full of nice Americans?

Photos courtesy of WENN, New York Magazine.