“I LIKE THE NAKED BODY. It’s beautiful. I think the more we try to cover ourselves, the more we lose an essence of ourselves.” From the mouth of Rinko Kikuchi, breakout star of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Oscar nominated film “Babel.” She’s responding of course to questions about her glorious nakedness in the film. Glorious, yes, because she is beautiful, but also because in baring herself physically, she breathes figurative and believable life into her character, Cheiko Wataya—a deaf, Japanese teenager, full of angry sadness over her mother’s suicide and a fearful longing for love, someone to hold onto.

There is an intense and taut scene with an older policeman in her father’s apartment, where she walks out nude and tearfully offers herself to him. And earlier in the movie, in the bathroom of a popular Tokyo hangout with her friend, she ditches her underwear in a trash can, and sets out to unnerve some teenage boys. Wearing a short plaid schoolgirl skirt, she uncrosses her legs, simultaneously revealing her crotch and some pretty essential essence, and managing to both titillate the intended boys and unnerve the audience with a piercingly direct and unwavering gaze.

But does she have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning an Oscar? While history has shown that nominations are often bequeathed upon actresses who reveal their bodies in the name of art, the actual award itself has remained elusive.

Consider Sharon Stone’s turn as the femme fatale Catherine Tramell, and the infamous uncrossing and crossing of her legs, flashing her blond muff as she’s being interrogated in “Basic Instinct” (1992)—she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress, snubbed by the Oscars and won neither. Julianne Moore, proving she was a natural redhead to audiences in Robert Altman’s 1993 “Short Cuts,” delivering a soliloquy in a t-shirt and nothing else, although not nominated for a Golden Globe or an Oscar that year, has garnered many nominations with subsequent naked acting.

In 1998’s “Boogie Nights,” where Moore stars as a coke-addled, maternal adult film star who just can’t seem to do the right thing to regain custody of her son—all the sex and white powder presumably clouding her better judgment, not to mention Burt Reynolds’ influence—she won a Golden Globe nomination and an Oscar nod in the Best Supporting Actress category, ultimately winning neither. Moore followed up that performance with the movie “The End of the Affair” (1999), starring with Ralph Fiennes, where the two sexed it up all over the movie, and nudity was most definitely involved. Once again the nominations rolled in, this time in the Best Actress category, both Golden Globe and Oscar but she left without either of the coveted statuettes.

And could any conversation in this vein be complete without mention of Halle Berry in 2001’s “Monster’s Ball”? Apparently not, according to most everyone I attempted to draw into this conversation. Flash her crotch, Halle did not, but the rest of her body was onscreen, and both the Foreign Press Association and the Academy rewarded her. Berry won both the Oscar and the Golden Globe that year for Best Actress.

2002 was a banner year for entertainment history. Halle Berry won Best Actress and Denzel Washington won Best Actor, the first time two African American actors took away top acting honors at the Awards show. Thus far, only three Asians have ever won Oscars in Best Acting categories: in 1957, Umeshi Omeki, Best Supporting Actress for “Sayonara”; in 1982, Ben Kingsley, Best Actor, in “Gandhi”; and 1984, Haing S. Ngor, Best Supporting Actor, for “The Killing Fields.” So, three Academy Awards in 78 years—not the most auspicious odds for our Rinko.

We wish her luck, but perhaps she doesn’t need it. She’s said, “I was saved by cinema. So, I figured if I could enter the world of cinema, my life would be saved.” •