There are two kinds of people in the world. First, there are the ones who think Cate Blanchett is the greatest actress of her time, capable of anything—not only winning an Oscar for playing Katharine Hepburn but also blowing people away in a turn as… Bob Dylan (in a strange movie called I'm Not There that you should only see if you're pretentious and stupid), among many other lauded performances. Then there are the people who think she is one of the worst actresses who has ever lived—a wildly inauthentic overactor, whose second Oscar performance as a weak Xerox of Blanche DuBois in Woody Allen's horrid Blue Jasmine was wearisome in its emotional excess.
I am in the latter category—and, until recently, I confess I was pretty much the only person in that category.
So I was surprised...