Jack Palance in City Slickers and Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou leap to mind. It's rare that the Academy recognizes comedy. The two best performances in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role category are, thankfully, funny: Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. But if I were in charge, I'd give the award to Theron her performance in Monster was a true transformation. Giving Keaton the Oscar might inject more enthusiasm into that market, and give rise to a lot of work for other Academy-voting, middle-aged actresses. Keaton, though, has the longest track record, and Hollywood learned from the success of Something's Gotta Give that middle-aged women buy a lot of tickets. They are all wonderful actresses, and aside from Castle-Hughes, deserve an award for past work if not for what they did last year. In between are Samantha Morton (In America), Charlize Theron (Monster) and Naomi Watts (21 Grams). They range in age from 13 (Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider) to 58 (Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give). The Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role nominees span generations this year, suggesting that we're at the turning point in Hollywood's history of ageist treatment of women. That pushes Baldwin and Robbins towards the podium. But this award is often used to placate aging actors who deserve some career recognition. I would love to see Watanabe win his performance as a rebel samurai was the brightest point in Tom Cruise's deeply flawed The Last Samurai. (I wouldn't be surprised if they're all hauled onstage, though, for surprise Oscars all around.) So we're left with a list of good actors in mediocre movies: Alec Baldwin (The Cooler), Benicio Del Toro (21 Grams), Djimon Hounsou (In America), Tim Robbins (Mystic River) and Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai). But he - like the rest of the cast of that film - wasn't nominated for anything. The Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role was given by Sean Astin in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Giving Zellweger an award will shut her up. She was denied an Oscar for Chicago, and when an ambitious young actress feels snubbed, she goes into what I'll politely call campaign mode. What gives? Every one of them is talented, except for Zellweger. This year, however, the nominees are Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog), Patricia Clarkson (Pieces of April), Marcia Gay Harden (Mystic River), Holly Hunter (Thirteen) and Ren & eacute e Zellweger (Cold Mountain). If this has a benefit, it's that we'll finally see awards being given to minorities in more categories than just the previous leader for gratuitous recognition: Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. Look for films that treat these groups like economic subdivisions. Don't look for films that treat ethnic, gender or cultural minorities as rich, individualistic resources.
But really the only thing that's becoming multifaceted and complex is the way that studios can make money. You could look at this and say that Hollywood is diversifying, that audiences like more challenging fare, that film - after a few lightweight decades - is becoming multifaceted and complex again.
This year there is more variety - in terms of gender, race and age - than we usually see. The greatest show on earth suddenly seemed to be growing wings. The next year, a convicted rapist was named "Best Director," the work of a Japanese genius beat Disney's latest manufactured animated classic, and Woody Allen showed up in California. (Remember how the solid-but-dull Dances With Wolves beat out the dazzling Goodfellas for almost every major award in 1990?) I used to be convinced that I would never see a woman, much less a person of color, making an acceptance speech for "Best Director." I was even starting to believe that a black woman would never be named "Best Actress."īut then it happened one night. Great directors like Martin Scorsese are always going to get passed over for directorial morons like Kevin Costner. I smile wryly at the names of the few genuine artists who were nominated along with the usual suspects. I read the list of nominees to see how many truly good films and performances were left off. I look at most of the movies regularly rewarded with those gold statuettes and see commerce masquerading as art. I'm one of those people who is disgusted by the obsessive attention that otherwise ordinary people pay to celebrities.