JUDY **

This year the Academy may as well just forget about nominating five actresses to compete for the Best Actress Oscar, (though when you think about it, there isn't much 'competition' involved), and just hand it over now to Renee Zellweger whose performance as Judy Garland in the film "Judy" is, what we tend to call, a shoo-in. Zellweger is simply magnificent in the part; a barn-storming, tour-de-force in an otherwise largely mediocre film. She may not look much like Garland nor does she particularly sound like her, (Zellweger does her own singing), but what she does do is 'act' Garland in a way that is totally transformative. You simply forget you are watching Renee Zellweger; you are really looking at Judy Garland.

Of course, this is not strictly a 'biopic'. It only covers the last few months of her life and the now infamous Talk of the Town concerts with the occasional flashbacks to "The Wizard of Oz" and how Louis B. Mayer and the studios mucked up her life. It's a film that proudly parades before us every cliche in the biopic book, ending with perhaps the cheesiest 'there's a lady on stage' scene in the history of movies but, of course, none of that matters much since Zellweger is seldom off the screen. I just kept wishing she had been given better material to work with, (it's based on the play 'End of the Rainbow' by Peter Quilter), but if anyone out there thinks Renee's hogging the screen and even, God forbid, going overboard, there's always Jesse Buckley who, as Judy's London 'minder', not only manages to hold her own but shows just what a damn fine actress she is in a totally thankless part.

Of course, no Judy Garland picture would be complete without some 'Friends of Dorothy', here reduced to a couple of London fans who go to see the show every night and hang around the stage door, a la "All About Eve". In one of those scenes that absolutely shouldn't work but does, they even manage to take her home for some badly scrambled eggs. Unfortunately they are also at the centre of that truly cheesy ending. Did it really happen like this? I pray to God not or Judy's life really was more like a movie than we could ever imagine.