|
BEST ACTOR
by JOHN HARKNESS
Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind
Winner - British Academy Awards, Screen Actor's Guild Award
The British Academy Awards, done and over before the American Academy Awards ballots were due, revealed that Russell Crowe isn't just a surly kind of guy, he's an ungracious winner. Yes, it's all about the performance. And Crowe's performance is premium Oscarbation - a real-life character with a horrifying mental illness and an accent!
Crowe is superb in A Beautiful Mind - indeed, he has a more interesting concept of the character than his director and at times seems to be acting in a much better movie than the one he's in.
The Screen Actor's Guild is a remarkable indicator in Best Actor - the only year it missed predicting the Oscar winner in the category was last year, when SAG, like the Toronto Film Critics Association, saw Benicio Del Toro as a lead in Traffic, not supporting. But there's the personality thing, and I suspect the Academy may look elsewhere before handing Crowe his second best actor statuette - Tom Hanks was on back-to-backs, but he's a beloved figure in Hollywood while Crowe's the guy who broke up the Ryan-Quaid marriage then dumped Meg.
Sean Penn, I Am Sam
Sean Penn's nomination for I Am Sam lets us ponder the question, "Is it possible to have a great performance in a dreadful picture?" I'd say no - a great singer singing trash doesn't transform the song into something better than it is.
That said, we can always look at the race as Penn vs. Crowe in the mental health Olympics - Crowe is a Nobel Prize-winning genius who has severe reality problems, Penn is a grown man with the mental age of seven who has a good heart.
Once upon a time, a piece of sludge like I Am Sam would almost guarantee an award. On the other hand, noted screenwriter William Goldman said last year that he refused to vote for actors playing "drunks or retards" on the grounds that it was basically too easy. Penn is, of course, one of the most respected actors in Hollywood - his career as a director, his De Niro-like devotion to research, his intransigent integrity - but giving him the Oscar for this picture would be rather like giving Pacino the Oscar for Scent Of A Woman, an acknowledgement of a great career for the exact wrong picture.
Will Smith, Ali
If the membership plays the race card, Denzel Washington is the likely choice. Smith, despite his remarkable and daring work in this film, has the thankless task of impersonating one of the best-known human beings of the second half of the 20th century, and he lacks the kind of artistic rep that attaches itself to Washington. In other words, Washington has neither starred in a sitcom nor punched out an alien.
Ali as a film has simply lost steam and momentum. It's the sort of project that, if it didn't get a Best Picture nomination, wasn't going to get much.
Denzel Washington, Training Day
"King Kong ain't got shit on me!" In his black-and-silver ensemble, Denzel Washington's rogue cop is like a walking cover for Thug Life Quarterly, and his explosive, funny, psychotic performance radically upends our expectations of Washington as one who portrays resolutely upright characters - which is no more accurate than most cliches but is certainly a popular perception. With the exception of Haley Joel Osment's un-nominated performance in A.I., this is the performance of the year in a mainstream Hollywood movie, so much so that it swept Ethan Hawke up in its wake for a supporting nomination.
Handicapping - well, there is the race card. Washington is someone who can open movies commercially and has the respect of his peers, as demonstrated by his four previous nominations and his win for Glory. On a historical note, this is Washington's first best actor nomination as a fictional character.
Read more on Denzel Washington
Tom Wilkinson, In The Bedroom
The chief benefactor of Miramax's push for In The Bedroom is the respected but little-known English actor Tom Wilkinson, best known to North American moviegoers for his turn as Fennyman, the heartless Elizabethan loan shark who becomes the stage-struck producer of Romeo And Juliet in Shakespeare In Love. As the bereft father of In The Bedroom, Wilkinson is utterly convincing as a New England doctor - which is a neat trick since most foreign actors would either miss the accent or overdo it. Wilkinson, a tower of middle-aged anguish, nails it.
Wilkinson faces an uphill fight, though - his performance is perhaps the least flashy in the category, he's the least known actor in the category and he tends to be dominated in his own film by Sissy Spacek's maelstrom of maternal malevolence. Nice to see him recognized, but I suspect that will be as far as it goes.
|
