Sunday, March 16, 2003

Performance by an actor in a leading role

Adrien Brody in THE PIANIST
The youngest nominee as well as this year's physical-self-abuse nominee, Brody, who was not at all heavy, dropped 30 pounds to play Polish pianist and Holocaust survivor Wladiyslaw Szpilman. A young veteran who's been acting since he was 12, Brody is a chameleon. From Richie the punk rocker in Summer Of Sam to the laser-focused union organizer in Bread And Roses to the almost languid, aristocratic Szpilman, he's barely recognizable from film to film. That is, he's an actor's actor rather than a movie star.

Given the heavyweight competition and the results of the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards, Brody is a definite dark horse in this category, but given his taste in directors (Spike Lee, Ken Loach, Steven Soderbergh, Barry Levinson, Terrence Malick and Roman Polanski), this will probably not be his last nomination.

Other Awards: National Society of Film Critics, Boston Critics

Nicolas Cage in ADAPTATION
In the wake of the big action pictures that have been his forte since winning the Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, we might remember that Nicolas Cage was once one of the more eccentric and unpredictable talents in Hollywood. Since his Oscar win, he has spent much of his artistic capital renting himself to Jerry Bruckheimer , appearing in The Rock, Con Air and the utterly meretricious Gone In Sixty Seconds, arguably the worst film ever starring three Academy Award-winning actors (Cage, Angelina Jolie and Robert Duvall). He is in a Scorsese oddity (Bringing Out The Dead), John Woo's best and worst American films (Face/Off and Windtalkers), plays the angel in the remake of Wings Of Desire and sports the worst Italian accent imaginable in a piece of dire Oscar-bait, Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Well, he's back, as twins in the year's most eccentrically conceived film, playing both the alter-ego of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin brother, Donald, wrestling with how to adapt an essentially unadaptable book. Gaining weight, wearing truly awful hair, muttering to himself about his own self-hatred, Cage is magnificent and funny in a role that lets him stretch the muscles we'd forgotten he had.

Other Awards: Toronto Critics

Michael Caine in THE QUIET AMERICAN
Two-time winner Michael Caine gets the beloved-veteran slot for his invocation of one of Graham Greene's burnt-out cases, the Vietnam correspondent for the London Times who is whiling away the 50s in Saigon between the departure of the French and the arrival, in force, of the Americans. There's a nightmarish study to be written about Michael Caine's filmography. Has any multiple Oscar winner appeared in as many flat-out bad films as Caine, or been as indifferent to the quality of his work while appearing, often quite cheaply, in smaller films for interesting directors? Who else could have missed an Oscar ceremony because he was acting in Jaws IV, yet played the brutal crime lord in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa?

Caine is, I fear, filling the category &ndash he got a beloved-veteran Oscar a couple of years ago for his bizarre idea of an American accent in The Cider House Rules, and the Academy doesn't usually double up on those.

Daniel Day-Lewis in GANGS OF NEW YORK
The reason Daniel Day-Lewis jumps out of the ensemble of Gangs Of New York is that he &ndash and Brendan Gleeson &ndash are smart enough to realize that they are walking around an overwhelming set. They're not fighting for space with the other actors, but with Dante Ferretti's monumental recreation of lower Manhattan circa 1860. There's nothing wrong with Leonardo DiCaprio's performance per se, except that he doesn't realize that operatic settings demand a certain grandeur of performance.

As Bill the Butcher, Day-Lewis gives a performance so big that it's hard to look at anything else &ndash it's about two degrees off from being a great bad performance, but Day-Lewis, who previously gave the single most emotionally restrained performance in a Scorsese film in The Age Of Innocence, is too smart an actor for that, even after a five-year hiatus And if you're handicapping the race, the SAG Award has been one of the most accurate predictors of the best-actor Oscar over the last nine years. That predictor may have lost a bit of lustre last year when SAG went with Russell Crowe and the Academy chose Denzel Washington.

However, 12 of the last 16 SAG winners have won the Oscar for best actor.

Other Awards: SAG Award, L.A. Critics (tie), NY Film Critics

Jack Nicholson in ABOUT SCHMIDT
Never one to age gracefully, Jack Nicholson's Warren Schmidt has settled into life and fallen into the emptiness of widowhood when he retires from his job. He immediately settles on his hapless daughter (Hope Davis) about to find happiness with mullet-headed waterbed salesman Dermot Mulroney, and Schmidt is none too happy about that.

For all the talk about Nicholson "always playing the same character &ndash himself," there is a remarkable variety in his work. He can be lazy, flaunt his persona and cash the cheque as easily as any star in Hollywood. He's also, after more than 40 years in the business and more than 30 years as a star, capable of surprising the hell out of people who think they've seen him ring every change he can on his persona. Warren Schmidt is a character who uses his inertia as a weapon &ndash and filial guilt as his targeting system. The farther you get from Cannes, the more you become utterly puzzled at some of the jury decisions &ndash the festival jury might have honoured Nicholson or Brody or Ralph Fiennes in Spider, and went with Olivier Gourmet? In the "missing in action" category, how did Schmidt Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor miss a screenwriting nomination? Did the writers' branch think Nicholson made this part up by himself?

Other Awards: L.A. Critics (tie)