The DVD release of Meryl Streep’s Oscar winning The Iron Lady gives us a chance to take a look at how the Best Actress Oscar is bestowed these days. While backstories have traditionally played almost as important a factor in deciding who gets the Oscar, in recent years the backstory seems to have overwhelmed the actual performance, with the Oscar going ever more frequently to someone whose backstory is more compelling than their actual performance.

Streep’s performance in The Iron Lady is technically excellent. Her long time make-up artist and hair stylist, J. Roy Helland, who also won an Oscar for the film, and she, created a flawless replica of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her prime from 1974 to 1990, or from the age of 49 to 65, and then again as she is now in her dotage at 86. It was the latest triumph for the 62-year-old actress who has amassed a career total of 17 Oscar nominations and 3 wins to date and her make-up and hair man, whose nomination and win for this film is his first public acknowledgment of the role he has played in her career.

Long regarded as a master of dialects, much of Streep’s acclaim comes from her ability to get accents right, which has caused her to be dismissed by some critics as a good technician but not an especially good actress. Some have wondered if her career would have been as long lasting had she played in the same era as Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, three actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age whose enduring popularity kept them in the spotlight from the 1930s well into the 1980s.

Indeed, Streep’s best performance of the last few years was undoubtedly as the conflicted nun in 2008’s Doubt. She was considered the front-runner until today’s master showman Harvey Weinstein decided to promote Kate Winslet in The Reader for Best Actress instead of for Best Supporting Actress. Winslet was the female lead in the film but had been gone for so many large chunks of screen time that Weinstein’s initial strategy was to promote her for the supporting award on the theory that she would likely receive a Best Actress nomination for another distributer’s Revolutionary Road, but when that film proved less than popular with critics and audiences alike, Weinstein moved up his game.

31-year-old Winslet, then nominated for the sixth time without having won on any her previous nominations, and with the added visibility of Revolutionary Road, was considered due.

Streep’s supporters, who are legion, had her uncanny portrayal of Julia Child in the featherweight comedy, Julie & Julia to back the following year. Again, she was outplayed by a campaign promoting the popular Sandra Bullock, who finally achieved critical huzzahs at the age of 45 for her 44th film, the surprise box-office hit, The Blind Side.

This year it seemed another performer with a compelling backstory would come between Streep and her third Oscar, but it wasn’t to be.

Viola Davis, a superb character actress, who received her first Oscar nomination in support of Streep in Doubt, gave another compelling performance in the ensemble drama, The Help. Even though the role was part of the ensemble, Davis campaigned hard to be recognized in the lead category and had won numerous awards leading up to the Oscars. In the end, though, it was not enough to keep Streep from that third Oscar. The question on everyone’s minds seemed to be, “if not now, when?”

But here’s the rub: the film is not very good. In an effort to not take sides, the film has no point of view. Streep’s Thatcher is seen as ruthless, but was she ruthless to a fault or ruthless because she had to be to get things done? The scenes of Thatcher talking to her dead husband do nothing for the film other than to show that Streep can act in old age make-up with the best of them. Had Streep won her third Oscar for Doubt as had been expected, would she have won a fourth for The Iron Lady? I doubt it.

Who, then, would have won? Probably Davis among the nominees, but there were even stronger candidates who failed to receive a nomination.

Glenn Close’s interesting, if muted, portrayal of a real life 19th Century Irish woman masquerading as a man in Albert Nobbs was barely worthy of a nomination and probably got the actress there on the strength of her backstory. The actress had struggled for decades to get the project off the ground.

Rooney Mara impressed enough voters to secure a nomination for the title role in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but many who had seen the fiercer work of Noomi Rapace in the Swedish original scoffed at the notion that the shorter, skinnier Mara was convincing in the role.

Indeed, Michelle Williams’ perfectly nuanced portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn was better than any of the nominated performances except perhaps Streep’s. The problem is that the film was slight, but unlike The Iron Lady, it had a point of view.

Other performances that might have had a chance at winning had they been nominated were those of Charlize Theron in Young Adult; Elizabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene; Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin and, perhaps best of all, Jung-Hee Yun in Poetry.

Charlize Theron brings a highly polished sensibility to Young Adult. It’s that rare comedy, in which the leading lady is a bitch from beginning to end, without an eleventh hour redemption. In fact, Theron’s best line is in her cutting dismissal of her only female friend at the film’s end. It’s a far more nuanced performance than the one that won her an Oscar eight years earlier in Monster.

Elizabeth Olsen is a bright new star who had to overcome two obstacles, the first that her film is rather downbeat, the second that she is the sibling of the notorious Olsen twins. If backstories can push someone toward an Oscar, so it seems they can also push someone away.

Olsen brings an understanding of lower middle-class sensibilities seemingly beyond her privileged upbringing as the escapee from an abusive cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. She does a marvelous job of conveying the anxiety of a young woman who has a difficult time distinguishing between reality and her imagination.

Tilda Swinton delivers an emotionally wrought performance as the mother of a monster child in We Need to Talk About Kevin. The subject matter and the presentation may have been too much for the staid Academy, but Swinton’s performance is one of her best.

Winner of numerous international awards, including the 2011 Best Actress award of the Los Angeles Film Critics, and runner-up in the National Society of Film critics balloting, South Korean actress Jung-Hee Yun (AKA Jeung-hie Yun) is a celebrated South Korean actress who has won numerous Asian awards as far back as 1967. She has lived in France since retiring in 1994, but made a comeback as the grandmother in the award-winning South Korean film, Poetry.

Yun plays a still self-sufficient woman in her mid-60s who decides to take a poetry class to combat the encroaching fog of the early stages of Alzheimer’s. One day she discovers the body of a young woman floating in a river and later learns it was the body of a schoolgirl in her grandson’s class who committed suicide after being raped by three boys. When she discovers that one of the boys was her grandson, she is faced with the moral dilemma of paying off the girl’s mother so she won’t file charges or turning the boy in to the police. It’s a wonderful low-keyed, but shattering performance that defies a Hollywood remake even if a Streep or a Close would like to sink her teeth into such a part.

All films discussed have been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD in the U.S. with the exception of Albert Nobbs and We Need to Talk About Kevin, which release in May.

This week’s new DVD releases include Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Shame.