The reviews could hardly have been more harrowing: "I have never encountered anything as deadly," said one, and he was not talking about an innovative horror film. "Things could get a whole lot worse," ventured another, and she did not mean she was looking forward to the sequel. No, last year was the worst for American movies since the end of the silent era, according to a straw poll of critics in USA Today, the nation's largest-circulation newspaper.
Never mind that some seemed to recall similar judgments being delivered every year about this time and that the public didn't appear to notice the dearth of quality: a new record was set at the box office in 2000 - $7.46 billion, an increase of 2 per cent - but then a new record was set in each 12-month period throughout the past decade.
Two of the movies exempted from this derision, Almost Famous and Wonder Boys, have at least three things in common: they didn't make much money; they, and their stars, are being talked about for Oscars; and, finally, the woman in blue denims recommending the pancakes in a cafe above a supermarket on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Frances McDormand knows all about the opening skirmishes of the movie prize-giving season but will just as readily discuss motherhood, playgrounds and schools, the way chain stores and shopping malls are stifling diversity, and what happens to the neighbourhood when you can't find a launderette. Then there's the mortgage that needs to be paid.
"Guess what?" she asks rhetorically, in the manner favoured by New Yorkers. "I am an ordinary person. And when I fart in a minute, you'll know I am."
She and her husband, Joel, one half of the film-making Coen brothers, threw a party the night before, and she breaks off every so often to exchange small talk or greet a friend passing through the coffee shop. "See you, hon."
But not so many ordinary people have won an Oscar (for her part as the pregnant police chief in the Coens' Fargo) or have been nominated for a Golden Globe (for her part as the mother of the impossibly young rock writer in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous - she was beaten by co-star Kate Hudson).
"It's like all those awards things. It's the movie social season, it's the time when everybody celebrates that they're in the business. It's interesting for us because we don't live there." She means that she and Coen inhabit neither the physical Hollywood, nor its machine.
And no, she does not need awards to fuel her ego or her self-esteem. "I'm really proud of my work, of all the movies that I've made in the last year. It's nice when you make a movie and other people think the same thing and you're not deluding yourself. But it's also the case that I already knew it."
She also knows bullshit when she sees it, and says so - she greets the observation that she once shared an apartment with fellow Oscar-winner Holly Hunter with the inquiry: "What's so amazing about that?"
"Confidence? No, I've just got that perspective. Been doing it for 20 years. I think awards are good for the movie. They can bring a new audience to the movie. I've always claimed that things like that don't get you work. Work gets you work. That's my blue-collar protestant work ethic."
Graduates of Yale University are not usually remarkable for their blue-collar work ethic, protestant or otherwise. "Yale? I was at Yale on a scholarship. I guess it shouldn't be a sensitive subject after all this time, should it?"
"All this time" started 43 years ago, when a preacher and his wife had a baby and they called her Frances. The family lived in Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee before coming to a halt in Pennsylvania when she was eight.
McDormand moved to New York City after finishing at Yale School of Drama, and her second job, in 1984, was a lead role in a low-budget thriller directed by a couple of first-time film-makers: the Coen brothers' Blood Simple. Since then, she has worked in television and theatre, notably A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and, 10 years later, in Dublin. Two years ago, she co-starred with Billy Crudup in an off-Broadway production of Oedipus.
On screen, she is most closely identified with the films made by her husband and his brother, Ethan, even if she has appeared in only three of them, unless you include an uncredited bit part in Miller's Crossing; the other was Raising Arizona.
Other roles include that of a Klansman's wife in Mississippi Burning - another Oscar nomination - a human rights activist in Ken Loach's contentious Northern Ireland drama Hidden Agenda, Tim Robbins's lover in the Robert Altman triumph Short Cuts, and a football-mad divorcee in John Sayles's Lone Star.
It is a hallmark of her work that you tend to come away from it full of admiration for an actress who is an essential part of the fabric without being the movie itself. Rarely do you feel that you have just seen a Frances McDormand movie: she says that, even in Fargo, hers was never intended as the central role.
"I don't think of myself as a movie star, and I can pretty easily convince other people that I'm not a movie star. I love it, and this happens rarely, but I'm at the grocery store or I'm on the subway and someone says, `What are you doing here?' and I say `I'm going to work', or `I'm buying my groceries, for God's sake. What do you mean what am I doing here?'
"It's partly the way I look, but it's also the characters I play. It's all pretty familiar and it's all pretty acceptable. There's nothing mysterious about any of them or off-putting. I've never played a psycho killer, although I'd love to."
Movies, says McDormand, will never give her the same charge as the theatre, and she has been back at Yale recently talking to drama students, exchanging her experience for their energy and lack of cynicism.
"It's a scary thing going into the workforce with a $50,000 debt, and you've been trained as a classical theatre actor. There's always a depression in the theatre. There's only two givens with choosing acting as a profession: one is you will always be unemployed, always, and it doesn't matter how much money you make, you're still always going to be unemployed; and that you have no power. The only power you have is the word no."
McDormand says that it is a word she uses often and never regrets. "I forget about 'em. No, no, no, no, no. I don't hold on to them. It can't be about regret or I wouldn't have chosen this job."
She wishes, though, that some people would use the power a little more often, not being a great admirer of big stars who chose to slum it for a spell on the stage, giving a grateful public their Hamlet, for instance.
"It's bullshit. Even though I'm an actor, I've gone to productions where there has been someone whose work is known in film and you can't take your eyes off them. It unbalances the production. Whether they're good or not, it doesn't matter."
McDormand is not a creature of the gossip columns, a mainstay of much of the New York press; but Coen brothers films have a long shelf-life and, no matter how elusive her lustre, that Oscar must confer some sort of celebrity. Wrong again. "You know what? Here's what I have at my advantage: I've never been a personality. I've always been a character actor. I think it's also about people not knowing who I am."
SHE is, among other things, someone who appreciates a knowledgeable audience in the theatre. Dublin? "Great. They have a steady exposure to it and it's about education."
New York? "Here it's about being able to say who you saw and what you did, not the experience. I sat behind these two women the other night in the theatre and, granted, it wasn't a great production, but it was an interesting production. And they got up in the middle of the act to go to the bathroom, rustle, rustle, they were looking at their fingernails during the play, they were commenting on the age of one of the actresses on stage. I mean, what are you doing here? It was astounding."
This is not the sort of behaviour one would expect from either of the characters she plays in Wonder Boys (an academic involved in an extra-marital affair) or Almost Famous (a mother who is also an academic). Cameron Crowe's film is based on his time as a juvenile rock writer who goes on the road for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. The McDormand role is the vehicle for some of its funniest and most touching moments.
Naturally, she is concerned for the boy, but even back then, only the absurdly over-protective could have seen Satan in Simon and Garfunkel. "It's really fascinating; it's not about rock 'n' roll, it's about innocence, and it's a lot about journalism. There's nothing controversial about the movie, there's no real hard edges, there's no real deep pits. But, hey, not every movie needs that. It's a good story well told.
"It's not nostalgic, because it's more immediate than that. You know when the kid flips through those albums? I can't tell you how many, and it was great, it's like guys my age were on the verge of tears when Cream comes up and it's `My God! duh, duh . . .' It tells so much. Within the realms of female archetypes - there's the mom, there's the daughter, there's the sister, there's the girlfriend - within that, it was a great role."
But McDormand has her mind set on something beyond the secondary parts in which she has had so much success. "I haven't had that challenge in movies hardly ever, only in the theatre, where the thrust of the story is about the female character. I'd like to try that. But then I have to be available for that, too. It's much easier to play supporting roles because that's what I do in my life: I support my son."
Until then, there is a month's work on a movie directed by Michael Caton-Jones and, later in the year, a stage production of Phaedra with the Soho avant-garde theatre company, the Wooster Group. Right now, though, she must get back to six-year-old Pedro. And, no, McDormand never did follow through on her threat to deploy the effect that would prove just how ordinary she really is.