In praise of … Tilda Swinton | Editorial

It's the Oscars this Sunday, and they'll be accompanied by the usual fury about who's won and who wasn't even nominated. Sometimes omissions are so egregious that controversy risks undermining the whole occasion. Tilda Swinton's performance in We Need to Talk about Kevin carried the unvarying intensity and raw courage that has won her an Oscar before. But it was made the more luminous by its importance to a film that treated a brutal school shooting with a searing humanity. Swinton is not only an extraordinary actor, but her passions, like her annual Highlands tour bringing art-house cinema to the further reaches of Scotland, her willingness to take risks (remember her as a living exhibit in the Serpentine Gallery) and her enthusiasm for the most challenging of roles, speak of an integrity that makes her absence from Sunday night's lineup more unflattering to the Oscars committee than it is to her.