Take 26.
That's the shot that director Darren Aronofsky used of Marisa Tomei in one of "The Wrestler's" pivotal dance sequences, one in which the 44-year-old Academy Award nominee gyrates and prances, flaunts and slinks -- largely in the nude -- across a real New Jersey club called Cheeques.
That combination of Aronofsky's persistence paired with the time constraints of an indie film budget didn't allow for Tomei to have much reluctance about baring all. "It was just fast and furious," she says, "and there was no room for being shy or for niceties. [The character's] comfortability has to become my comfortability. The diving in needed to happen."
Tomei isn't the only Oscar nominee this year who shed her clothes for the part. Kate Winslet's haunting performance as the enigmatic Hanna Schmitz in "The Reader" involved extensive nudity, sparking one critic to fume that her nakedness trivialized the Holocaust.
In fact, Winslet would appear to have no equal among A-list actresses in her fearlessness about displaying her body. Stretching from her career-making role in "Titanic" to "Iris" to 2006's steamy "Little Children" -- for each of which she received an Oscar nomination -- Winslet has bared at least some skin in service to the film's story. The uninhibited, brainy actress has no compunction about doing what's necessary for the part, or as she told People recently, "I'm a pretty ballsy chick."
And when the nudity works so integrally into the film, the academy often takes notice. Consider that Halle Berry and Holly Hunter also won their Oscars in recent years for their naked performances -- both physically and emotionally -- in "Monster's Ball" and "The Piano," respectively. As have other actresses before them.
Ever since films like Louis Malle's tale of adultery, "The Lovers," shocked and scandalized Americans in the Eisenhower '50s, says UCLA film professor Vivian Sobchack, European films and their descendant, American art-house cinema, have had more leeway in terms of audience acceptance of nudity "because of the gravity of the subject matter in many cases." And over time that nudity has grown more explicit. Back then, Sobchack says, "it was things that if you look at today you wouldn't call nudity. It's part of their buttocks. Today, we're really talking about full-frontal nudity most of the time."
