Julie & Julia (Blu-ray)

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Meryl Streep already leads her peers in the number of Oscar nominations received, and it's a safe bet that the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will hand her Number 16 after watching her performance as Julia Child in "Julie & Julia."

That's usually about as far as voting members go with great performances in lighter films, though. You have to go all the way back to 1987 to find a winner for Best Actress in a film that wasn't "serious drama." That's when Cher won the Oscar for the romantic comedy "Moonstruck," and before that you have to go back another 10 years to find another winner from a comedy: Diane Keaton, in "Annie Hall."

But Streep may break through this year. EVERYBODY does an impersonation of TV's first cooking show host, and not just comedians. I'm guilty myself of occasionally lapsing into falsetto and doing a routine about adding a little more "cooking sherry," and then some more sherry, and some more, and laughing in that high-pitched Julia Child way. Even the talking heads on the Blu-ray bonus features--people who knew Julia Child--end up imitating her when they get around to telling us what she said. It's the natural thing to do. So the real--some might say impossible--challenge with this role was to avoid caricature. Somehow streep does that, but I have to say that her mannerisms, her inflections, her timing, and her dead-on imitation of Child's voice, coupled with Nora Ephron's typically smart dialogue, had me cracking up every time Meryl & Julia opened their collective mouth to speak. Streep is hilarious, but there's something in the eyes and in those almost imperceptible hesitations that convey depth too, whether it's reticence or resistance.

For those who haven't heard about this film, "Julie & Julia" is based on a book by Julie Powell, who blogged about a challenge she gave herself: to cook her way through Julia Child's 1961 now-classic cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." That's 365 days to prepare 524 recipes, culminating in the most difficult one--a de-boned, stuffed, and pastry-wrapped duck. Surprisingly, though, this isn't a food movie in the manner of "Babette's Feast" (1987) or any number of films where the cameras zoom in on the food and capture every orgasmic mouthful as it's eaten with deliberate relish. The focus is on these two women's stories, which Ephron says in the bonus features struck her as being interestingly parallel. And her cinematic technique is to bounce back and forth between Julie and Julia so that we never lose sight of their shared plights and triumphs.

Shot in Paris and New York City, "Julie & Julia" also plays up the contrasts. One minute we see Julia, who went to Rouen and Paris, France in 1949 with her diplomat husband, taking absolute delight in her surroundings and her palatial new home--complete with a servant. And the next minute it's 2002 and we're cutting away to Queens, New York, where instead of the Eiffel there's a seedy, run-down water tower to match the seedy surroundings, and a fixer-upper of an apartment that has a kitchen just small enough for Julie to slump down in and despair. It wasn't lost on Ephron that Julia fell in love with French cooking and became determined to master it by going to the Cordon Bleu, any more that Julie took solace in her cooking after returning from a long commute after a long day. Although hers was a rediscovery, the emotional thrust is still the same, as we see Julie becoming more and more passionate about The Julie/Julia Project, as she titled her blog.

At it's core, "Julie & Julia" is a double love story between two women and cooking, with loving spouses who, nonetheless, really aren't given anything else to do in Ephron's script besides acting supportive. Stanley Tucci has a little more character to work with as Paul Child, the shorter-than-she diplomat who loved good food and drink as much as Julia, and who loved her as much as she loved him . . . and French cooking. We see more of this relationship develop than we do that of Julie and her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), whose relationship is more defined by scenes shot in the kitchen or bedroom.

Julia has more confidence than Julie, but both are a couple of dynamos who, if there were a white whale involved, would have obsessed over it like a couple of less-hoary Ahabs. The Julia scenes are more interesting than the Julie scenes, not because of any shortcomings that Amy Adams has, but because the material and background scenery are just that much more fascinating with the Child narrative. We watch Julia break the language barrier as well as bridge the gender gap as the only woman at the Cordon Bleu. And we watch her beat the odds by actually selling her book to Knopf editor Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), and then becoming the first person to demonstrate cooking on a TV series.

But there are also fewer corny lines in the Julia sections. "She saved me," Julie at one point gushes about her 6'2" cooking guru. "I was drowning, and she pulled me out of the ocean." At such ostentatiously emotional moments we're tempted to think of this as a "chick flick," because, let's face it, guys don't talk like that, and when the women in our lives do, we're just trying to bite our tongues so we don't say the wrong thing. But for the most part, Ephron steers clear of such heart-on-the-sleeve nonsense and gives us the kind of sharp writing we saw in "When Harry Met Sally" (1989) coupled with the tone of "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and the back-and-forth structure of "You've Got Mail." In other words, there's a slick familiarity here that we recognize, in part because of the genre, and in part because of Ephron's own way of working. "Julie & Julia" is a slick romantic comedy in which the romance is cooking, and not necessarily food.