Cate Blanchett is the surprise hot favourite to win an Oscar for best supporting actress at Sunday's Academy Awards for her highly acclaimed portrayal of folk singer Bob Dylan in the quirky biopic I'm Not There.
Ladbroke's are offering odds of 11-10, putting her way ahead of the other nominees, who are up for their performances in more mainstream films.
Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan
Amy Ryan is 2-1 for Gone Baby Gone, Ruby Dee at 10-3 for American Gangster, Tilda Swinton is 10-1 for Michael Clayton - in spite of her winning a best actress BAFTA this month - and Saoirse Ronan is 16-1 for Atonement.
Cate also has a best actress nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but at 33-1 she is an outsider against the favourite, Julie Christie, whose odds are 4-9 for her role as an Alzheimer's victim in Away From Her.
However, Miss Blanchett wasn't in the star-studded audience at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre when the Oscars were handed out.
Cate Blanchett has praised the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and Timothée Chalamet’s “fantastic” performance in it, for which he received an Oscar nomination - NME
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A Complete Unknown was released earlier this year and tells the story of Dylan’s rise to fame in the 1960s. Chalamet won the Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role trophy at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for his portrayal of the iconic musician as well as a Golden Globe.
In a new interview with NME, Hollywood legend Blanchett – who previously played Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ experimental 2007 biopic I’m Not There – confirmed she has seen A Complete Unknown and said of Chalamet: “I thought he was fantastic. I really loved the whole film.”
“A Complete Unknown is a very different endeavour to Todd Haynes’ film, which was about shape-shifting identity and an artist’s refusal to be pinned down,” she continued.
“I’ve never been more liberated than [when I was] asked to play so wildly against type and gender… Because you knew there was a woman [behind] that iconic silhouette of Dylan when he went electric, you were complicit with the audience in it. There was no way you’d ever be accused of mimicry.”
When asked if she’d go back and change anything about her performance in I’m Not There, which saw six actors play different aspects of Dylan’s personality, Blanchett said: “As time goes by you [realise] cinema is temporal so [if you went back], you’d probably do it entirely differently. But with that film, the character was made up of everyone’s portrayal. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, they all put in remarkable, astonishing performances. I was but a part of it.”
