Kate Winslet, a possible Oscar for "The Reader"

"With Revolutionary Road I think I enjoyed the concept more than the film itself as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet both offer up conflicting viewpoints and you are able to connect with both of them on one level or another. Kate Winslet’s character looking for a way to restart the marriage while DiCaprio’s character is right in line until a great opportunity at work and other contributing factors throw a kink in their plan to pick up and start their lives over in Paris. The film has some amazing performances and you will see Leonardo DiCaprio jump two spots as he, in my book, is a serious contender for Best Actor. Kate Winslet is good, but I have a feeling expectations may have led me to believe it would be amazing. I personally believe she is much better in The Reader.

Michael Shannon is unfortunately going to come in second to Heath Ledger with a performance that makes the film something special (Josh Brolin and his performance in Milk will suffer the same fate). This isn’t a review of the film, and like I said I like the ideas brought up in the film more than the film itself, which you will notice once you get to the Best Picture charts". Source: www.ropeofsilicon.com

"There is a reason for the unfairness – it takes an hour and a half for Winslet to get through hair and make-up and the production can’t wait; but, in the end, she can’t stand it any longer. She strides off to stand in for her stand-in and delivers every line as if her life depended on it.
Winslet stays in character between them. For about eight minutes she inhabits another life that she has spent weeks imagining in every detail, a life defined by dark secrets, and quite unlike her own. After the second “cut” she exhales and hangs her head. Daldry comes over and massages her shoulders. I scribble in my notebook: “This is what they’re paid for.”

– The Reader is already being talked of as an Oscar contender. In fact, he almost agrees. “She certainly gets paid for going into an emotional state, and, first of all, understanding what the character needs to do,” he says. “In other words she has a huge intellectual facility, but married to a huge emotional facility that is just fearless.”
The reader of the title first appears as a teenager drawn into an affair with an older woman, played by Winslet, who is working as a tram conductor. She then disappears without explanation – at least until the teenager, grown up (and played by Ralph Fiennes), is stunned to see her in the dock at a major postwar Holocaust trial. He is left to wonder how he could have loved her, and whether he has compromised himself in doing so. He is also mystified, almost to the end, by her true motivation. The book has been criticised as too willing to humanise the generation condemned by the historian Daniel Goldhagen as “Hitler’s willing executioners”. But it is also on school and college reading lists from Leipzig to Los Angeles.Schlink also agreed, but Winslet was busy starring in Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes, her husband. So Daldry turned to Nicole Kidman (she had won an Oscar as Virginia Woolf in Daldry’s The Hours). Kidman signed on, but then fell pregnant. Daldry went back to Winslet, who by this time was free. All he needed now was a male lead. He cast Ralph Fiennes.

Thus did the most talked-about German novel in a generation acquire a British producer, director, screenwriter and starring line-up. For good measure, Sydney Pollack and Scott Rudin, Hollywood legends both, joined Minghella as producers. Never let it be said that German nationalism lives on in the movies. Schlink and the German actors cast in The Reader’s smaller roles have – so far – expressed nothing but gratitude for the chance to work alongside an Anglo-Saxon A-team. Their careers all stand to benefit, not least because of the sheer weight of expectation that is about to settle on Kate Winslet’s shoulders: she has been nominated five times for an Oscar, but never won.
Kate Winslet was nominated to Oscar for Best Performance in a Leading role for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" in 2005.

“We’re in a whole new era.” It’s an era in which, just maybe, Daldry will go up against Kate Winslet’s husband for an Oscar, and, with the help of at least one of them, Winslet will finally get one of her own". Source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk